14 DAY TRIAL // Forget 2.5-inch solid state drives, or even 1.8-inch storage drives. M.2 SSDs are the future, and it's products like Samsung's SM951 that prove this beyond any doubt.
True, SATA drives won't be going anywhere any time soon, and portable / external devices will always have an important place.
But for internal storage, both in desktops and in laptops, the M.2 interface and form factor will rock things up. Hard not to when you best every SATA SSDs in every way.
And the SM951 definitely wins in all ways. Capacities are of 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB, but more importantly the transfer speeds are positively ludicrous.
When your laptop's or desktop's M.2 slot is wired through the PCI Express interface, the read speed can be as much as 2,150 MB/s, while the write speed is of up to 1,550- 1,600 MB/s. That's four times as good as SATA units.
Even if the interface is wired through PCI Express 2.0, the write speed should still reach 1,350 MB/s.
130,000 and 85,000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) are the random read and write speeds.
Add to that the Samsung SM951's ability to enter an L1.2 low power standby mode and the power draw can be of 2 mW, 97% less than in the normal L1 idle state (all high-speed circuits are turned off when a PC goes into sleep or hibernate).
Unfortunately, we don't have an ETA (estimated time of arrival) or a price range for these products.