14 DAY TRIAL // It's about time you all saw just what M.2 solid-state drives looked like, so it's a good thing that Samsung is already selling such things, even though the real “debut” of the technology is still a few weeks off.
M.2 is a new solid-state drive form factor and connectivity technology that has gained a certain amount of fame thanks to the 9-Series motherboards from Intel and its partners.
It uses the PCI Express technology, though it doesn't actually use normal slots, and can be connected via SATA Express as well, if we're reading this right.
They do have their own pin array though. They have to, in order to find their place in PCs in spite of their size and shape.
And by that we mean that they are smaller than even low-profile DDR3 SO-DIMM memory slots. Kind of like a pair of memory cards side by side, only a bit stretched.
The performance of the M.2 SSDs is what makes them stand out the most though. In the case of the Samsung XP941, it's of up to 1,170 MB/s.
Theoretically, the bandwidth is of 1,000 MB's per direction, and the M.2 uses PCI Express 2.0 x2 technology, so it might attain 2 GB/s eventually.
For now, though, the M.2 drives can manage 1,170 MB/s when reading and 930 MB/s when writing, which is more than double compared to what the best SATA SandForce SSDs can pull off.
And yes, SATA III 6.0 Gbps solid-state drives based on SandForce controller chips from LSI are the fastest of their kind out there.
Indeed, only PCI Express solid-state drives, add-in boards as it were, match M.2 from what we can see, and while they do come in up to one or more TB, they take up a lot more room too.
Moving on, the 4K random read performance is of 122,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second), while the write performance is of 72,000 IOPS.
Sadly, for now, only one 9-Series motherboard is shipping with an M.2 slot fast enough to use all these resources, the ASRock Z97 Extreme6. PCI Express 2.0 x4 add-on cards can be used to just plug the things in the PCIe slots though. There doesn't seem to be one shipped with the Samsung drive. Understandable, since the XP941 is expensive enough as it is, at $780 / €568.
We'll be seeing more M.2 SSDs (lots more) at Computex 2014, a trade show that will take place in Taipei, Taiwan between June 3 and 7.
