Samsung SM951 NVMe SSD to be released soon

During Samsung SSD Global Summit, 850 Pro was not the only SSD being presented, but also the upcoming SM951.
This drive are the first Samsung SSD to support NVMe through PCIe, superior to AHCI currently used with SATA3 drives.

SATA3 SSDs today have a cap of 600MB/s because of the SATA limitation.
PCIe SSDs however, with the 9 series chipset from Intel, have a cap of 2000MB/s.
The new SM951 M2 SSD from Samsung comes with a blazing speed of 1600/1000 MB/s Sequential Read/Write and Random Read/Write is 130K/100K.
The SM951 is a NVMe SSD, which means bandwidth is greatly increased while latency is only 1/3 of current SATA drives.
Not only that, but they have 80% lower idle power consumption than traditional SATA3 SSDs.

The drive will come with Samsung`s new 3D V-NAND for greater endurance and capacity over current standard NAND.

No date was given about the release date of Samsung SM951 M2 SSD but soon.





Source: Samsung: Mit 3D V-NAND und NVMe in die Terabyte-Ära - ComputerBase

 

This is my upcoming drive for my new notebook. Just what I was waiting for :thumbsup:

 

I`m very surprised by the lack of interest in this forum regarding new technology thats right around the corner.

Samsung 840 Pro


VS

Samsung SM950 NVME SSD








Samsung SM953. About the same as SM951

 

I'm very interested, once I can actually buy it and have a motherboard that supports it.

 

Notebooks with HM97/QM97 motherboards are shipping today I think. Desktop already got their Z97 and X99
But you need a notebook with M2 slots thats connected to the PCIe lanes.
And of course the SM951 SSD itself.

Notebooks with the PCIe M2 slots are right around the corner, so is this SM951. And a growing number of NVMe SSDs from other brands.

Future is bright

 

The SSD is actually shipping to OEMs today!
But according to Anandtech its an OEM drive only, meaning OEMs will include it in their systems (like perhaps Alienware).
So currently it is not available as a Samsung drive.

That said, Anandtech said that resellers might be able to sell the drive in the future. Plus Anandtech is trying to get hands on the drive to test it out. Cant wait and see what this baby can do

AnandTech | Samsung SSD Global Summit 2014: 845 DC Pro with V-NAND, SM951 with NVMe Support

 

I'd expect these to be available for consumer purchase when more systems support them. Perhaps next year when Broadwell & Skylake architectures have been released...

 

PCI-e 3,0 x4 interface has 4GB/sec of speed not 2GB/sec. The previous xp 941 used a pci-e 2.0 x4 interface which was 2GB/sec limited (500MB/sec per lane in pci-e 2.0 and 1GB/sec per lane in pci-e 3.0). So I think you are incorrect about the interface being limited to 2GB/sec. There are just no consumer ssd's that break the 2GB/sec barrier yet. The nand is the bottleneck not the interface for a change.

How can you not love this ssd drive? It is quite literally the fastest consumer ssd in the world and not just by a small margin either. Because of samsungs complete vertical integration of their ssd's they are the most agile company on being able to jump onto newer better faster standards. They are still the only company with viable TLC nand. Samsung controls the nand flash design and manufacture, DRAM cache design and manufacture, SSD controller design and manufacture (one of the very best controllers available the triple core MEX controller clocked at 400Mhz based on 3 arm cortex r4 cpu's and on the sm951 I think it's clocked in at 450mhz) and the firmware design that ties it all together. Since these design teams are all under the same company they can work together during each stage of development to optimize each part to work together as seamlessly and reliably as possible. They also don't have to worry about their parts working with a variety of different parts from other companies like say a sandforce controller would. When you can concentrate on a part specifically working as highest performing as possible with 1 other part you end up with amazing performance.

The price of this drive is most likely going to make me sad. This still will be an SSD marketed towards OEMs. It will not be widely available like most other ssd's that are actually marketed to consumers. It's pricetag is going to look like it's an enterprise grade ssd; On sale you can find a 1TB samsung 840 evo for 400 dollars which is how much I paid for mine. But a higher end enthusiast ssd can be more. I feel like mainstream drives like the 840 evo should be 40 cents per GB and enthusiast consumer ssd's should be 60 cents per GB or 400/600 for 1TB drives. The problem is the xp941 at only 512GB was sold at or above 1 dollar per GB 500-600 dollars for a 512GB drive. The successor will most likely be priced at the same ridiculous price. And if the 1TB drive is 1000 dollars i will be iffy on the drive. We are regressing 3 years in prices because of samsung making limited supply of these drives and only selling them to oems.

Even so, I will be buying the m18x r4 with extreme edition broadwell and flagship maxwell in sli. Not so much for the 14nm shrink and 20nm shrink + architecture change of the main components. The main thing I want is a m2 slot. The problem though is it's almost a for sure guarantee it will be a 2.0 x2 slot because the m18x uses dual gpu's the dual gpus each get an 8x 3.0 chunk from the cpu so 16 direct cpu lanes are instantly gone and the other 4 lanes go to other things like usb 3.0 and ethernet, leaving just the 2.0 pch lanes to be used. This is a disappointment but it's still a nice speed boost compared to sata 3. Plus this add's a very easy 4th place to put an additional storage drive in the m18x 2x 2.5" 9.5mm hdd bays 1x 2.5 inch optical bay converted for storage and the m2 slot, that ups the maximum internal storage of the m18x to 7TB 3x 2TB Samsung spinpoint m9t HDD's (have to get that brand it's the only 2TB 9.5mm 3 platter hdd in existence) and 1x 1TB sm951 drive Intel said they will add 4 more lanes of pci-e raising from 20 lanes to 24 lanes on mainstream cpu line for skylake but skylake isn't until q1-q2 2016. This is a slick move on intel's part. They add just enough pci-e lanes to add the popular pci-e 3.0 x4 m2 slot without having to make hard sacrifices on the board like you currently have to but they don't add enough to interfere with their top end enthusiast cpu's with 40 lanes of pci-e which is the only way you can get the lowest latency very best performing dual graphics in x16/x16 directly connected to cpu. There is no technical or physical limitation stopping intel from putting 40 lanes on all their cpu's. They do this to force people who need 40 lanes of pci-e from the cpu cause they run a quad sli gpu setup that requires 32 lanes of pci-e and cpu pci-e has much lower latency giving better performance than other options to force up the extra money.

That's desktop you get a choice. There are 0 mobile chips with a 40 lane pci-e interface like the enthusiast desktop the lga 2011 v3 socket, But this is a whole other tangent. I will continue to wish our mobile cpu's (or at least the 55 watt extreme edition cpu's) make room for 40 pci-e lanes. I'm sure a 40 lane interface uses more power so keep it confined to the 55 watt extreme edition or even make a second extreme edition that's 60 or 65 watt if necessary. With 40 lanes from the cpu you could run dual gpu in x16/x16 with super low latency, x4 lanes for m2 slot, 4x x1 lanes for ethernet/usb 3.0 etc and the pch lanes for the rest. That's a pretty clean and fast interface i'm sure many of us would be happy with. But intel will never let its precious 40 pci-e lanes anywhere but their top 2 most expensive chips on the X x9 chipsets.

 

What's the difference between the SM951 and SM953?

 

SM953 is optimized for data centers.

It also uses a 22110 (22mm x 110mm) format which is too long for most notebooks.

John

 

Thanks for clarifying that, John. SM951 sounds like an exciting product. The OP said it's coming soon. I wonder how soon are we talking here.

 

Right, most laptops will likely have the 80mm length, but also curious what the 1TB costs? Likely $1000 at launch, possibly more.

 

Yeah Like I said the 512GB one was 1 dollar per MB the new one is likely to keep that pricing structure and they can get away with it for now. Not a single other player in the SSD game has a pci-e 3.0 x4 interface in m2 form factor. So Samung can basically charge super premiums for it due to the fact you have nowhere else to go for the same specs.

 

What's the approx release date?

 

I would love to slap this in a gx500. Asus capped out their storage options at 512gb for the gx500. I need at least 1tb for virtualization lab purposes. The gx500 has two m.2 slots (one 2280 and one 2260), but if you use one as a pcie x4 slot the other is disabled. Alternatively, you can use both as sata m.2 slots :/.

I am also keeping an eye on the adata sr1020 m.2 2280 drive using the sf3739 controller (supports nvme as well). According to adata this will come in up to 2tb capacities.

Kingston was supposed to make a sf3739 based m.2 drive as well, but details have been sparse.

 

I think the missing piece, HM97 chipset, is releasing along with Haswell update in September.
After that, new notebooks should be available with a motherboard with HM97/QM97 which finally will allow us to use PCIe SSDs like SM951 as bootable drives.

 

I am wondering how fast boot time you can achieve with SSDs such as SM951 once it will become standard?

 

Should be massive better overall in real world than old and slow SATA3 drives. Not sure about boot time though. There are only a few reviews of the only NVME SSD available, Intel P3700, but it should give you a tiny glimpse of what to come.

Mind, that all the drives tested here are PCIe SSDs (without NVME) as well so they again should be a step above current SATA SSDs we use in our notebooks.

Intel DC P3700 800GB NVMe SSD Review - Page 10

 

Would be pretty cool to have a laptop boot in less than a second.

 

While that would be cool, we're not there yet. NVMe is roughly 4 times faster than current SSDs. In order to get sub-second boot times, you'd need something on the order of 10x or more faster for the slowest types of files in addition to special BIOS/UEFI support to make it happen.

 

x4 faster you say. So that'd be roughly what, 3-5 sec?

 

We're already at ~5 second boot times... (even with eMMC SSD's - the tweaks are needed in the BIOS, not (just) the storage subsystem).

 

I agree that changes need to be made to BIOS in addition to storage. Still, I haven't heard of systems with cold boots from power button to usable Windows under 10 seconds. As a personal example, my Thinkpad W530 with a Samsung 830 SSD takes 24 seconds to cold boot into Windows 7, with 5 of those seconds needed for POST and other BIOS functions. Now, I understand that there are faster SSDs and Windows 8.1 boots faster, but even then, real world boot times that I've heard are rarely less than 15-20 seconds.

 

Perhaps the upcoming Win 9 will sort that out...or not.

 

djembe,

well... if you put 'usable' into the equation now.

My T100TA Win8.1 Update 1 64GB eMMC x32bit system boots up in ~5 seconds - (Win7 is ancient...), but it doesn't have the full/normal complement of programs I usually put on my notebooks either.

A TP E530 i7 QC boots in about the same time (Win8.1x64 Update 1 1TB Evo), but I agree that if left alone for a few seconds after the desktop is displayed it performs much better than trying to use it 'cold'.

 

That's pretty impressive, tiller! I've looked at a number of supposedly "5 second" boot videos on Youtube, and they're all at least 10-15 seconds from power on to desktop. They get their claim by starting the count sometime after they hit the power button, and typically after POST has completed. I haven't yet seen a system that boots in 5 seconds from a practical definition of power button to desktop, and am curious how you got your systems to do so.