On Wednesday, the Samsung Tomorrow blog was updated with news that Samsung Electronics is now mass producing an NVMe PCIe solid state drive with a M.2 form factor. The company’s report also indicated that Samsung is the first in the industry to ship a NVMe SSD, which will be received by OEMs for use in PC solutions such as ultra-thin laptops. This new SSD follows the AHCI-based PCIe 3.0 version, which began shipping back at the beginning of January.
Samsung’s report stated that the NVMe-based SM951 SSD has sequential read speeds of up to 2,260 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 1,600 MB/s. This is accomplished by utilizing four 8 Gbps lanes on the PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 slot that flow simultaneously, thus data can transfer at 32 Gbps and a max throughput of 4 GB/s can be achieved. The drive can even process at 300,000 IOPS, which is twice as fast as the older AHCI-based model.
The blog also stated that the SM951-NVMe is smaller and lighter than your standard 2.5 inch SSD, measuring no greater than 4mm thick and weighing a mere 7 grams. On the capacity front, Samsung will offer 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB models. All three will utilize the L1.2 low-power standby mode, which will reduce power consumption to under 2mW. That’s far lower than the 50mW power consumption used by the more commonly-used L1 state.
NVMe is short for non-volatile memory express. According to the NVM Express Working Group site, it’s a “scalable host controller interface designed to address the needs of Enterprise, Data Center and Client systems that utilize PCI Express (PCIe) based solid state drives.” In other words, NVMe was designed from the ground up to handle drives connecting to a PCIe slot whereas AHCI, which is short for Advanced Host Controller Interface, is more focused on solutions such as mechanical hard disk drives.
“The new SM951-NVMe features the industry’s most advanced performance figures, exceptionally low power use in standby mode and the most compact size of any NVMe SSD,” the company stated in the blog.
The company also said that later on it plans to integrate its 3D V-NAND technology into its NVMe SSD solutions. This move is expected to yield better performance and larger storage capacities.
