Samsung SSD On a Tiny M.2 Stick Is Capable of Read Speeds Over 2GB/sec

MojoKid writes: Samsung has just announced its new SM951-NVMe SSD, the industry's first NVMe SSD to employ an M.2 form-factor. Samsung says the new gumstick style drive is capable of sequential read and write speeds of 2,260 MB/sec and 1,600 MB/sec respectively. Comparable SATA-based M.2 SSDs typically can only push read/write speeds of 540 MB/sec and 500 MB/sec, while most standard PCIe versions muster just north of 1GB/sec. The Samsung SM951-NVMe's performance is actually very comparable to the Intel SSD 750 Series PCIe x4 card but should help kick notebook performance up a notch in this common platform configuration.

Comments

Re:Faster than DDR

[gweihir]

Actually, it is not in any sane measurement. This is linear-speed only. For random access, even the original DDR RAM will trash even these disks by a large margin.

Not sure that TFA is comparing apples to apples

[j-turkey]

...is capable of sequential read and write speeds of 2,260 MB/sec and 1,600 MB/sec respectively. Comparable SATA-based M.2 SSDs typically can only push read/write speeds of 540 MB/sec and 500 MB/sec,

Non-SATA M.2 drives are already on the market. Comparing the newest drive to SATA-based M.2 drives does not help much, I'd rather see it compared to what it supersedes. In this case, I'm more interested in a comparison with a PCIe 3.0 4-lane M.2 SSD drive that doesn't support NVMe. The drive specification for the earlier non-NVMe SM951 is not that far off of that of the new drive. The earlier drive is rated at sequential read and write speeds of 2,150 MB/sec 1,500 MB/sec respectively. Again, not all that far off.

That being said...I'm curious to see the difference that NVMe makes in real-world benchmarks, and where the difference is...especially because I just built a new system with a non-NVMe SM951 SSD. :)