Due to what Samsung is citing as a surge in demand for larger capacity SSDs, they have now launched two new models offering up to two terabytes of storage each. In order to drive the extra capacity, they have also launched a new SSD controller in the …
Samsung has always been an early adopter in the SSD space. The company was the first one on the market with a PCIe 2.0 x4 M.2 SSD the (XP941) back in late 2013, and before that it was the first one to adopt TLC NAND in 2012. Earlier this year Samsung’s second generation client PCIe drive, the SM951, made an appearance in a Lenovo laptop, but to everyone’s surprise the drive wasn’t NVMe compatible like Samsung had announced earlier. That turned out to be only temporary as a few months later Ganesh discovered an NVMe-enabled SM951 inside an Intel NUC, which we have now put through our extensive SSD test suite. Can NVMe and the SM951 live up to the hype? Read on and find out!
Samsung has always been an early adopter in the SSD space. The company was the first one on the market with a PCIe 2.0 x4 M.2 SSD the (XP941) back in late 2013, and before that it was the first one to adopt TLC NAND in 2012. Earlier this year Samsung’s second generation client PCIe drive, the SM951, made an appearance in a Lenovo laptop, but to everyone’s surprise the drive wasn’t NVMe compatible like Samsung had announced earlier. That turned out to be only temporary as a few months later Ganesh discovered an NVMe-enabled SM951 inside an Intel NUC, which we have now put through our extensive SSD test suite. Can NVMe and the SM951 live up to the hype? Read on and find out!
The SSD industry has been talking about TLC NAND for over three years now. We published our first post, Understanding TLC NAND, back in early 2012, but in three years we have actually seen very little TLC NAND making it to the SSD market. Samsung was an early adopter back in 2012, but aside from it and SanDisk we’ve yet to see any TLC drives enter the market. Silicon Motion’s SM2256 is set to change that because it’s the first commercially available controller and firmware combo with TLC support, which will enable companies like Kingston, ADATA and the like to use TLC NAND in their SSDs. We got an early reference design sample from Silicon Motion in for testing to see how the SM2256 stacks up with the competition, so read on to see our preliminary thoughts on the new controller.
The SSD industry has been talking about TLC NAND for over three years now. We published our first post, Understanding TLC NAND, back in early 2012, but in three years we have actually seen very little TLC NAND making it to the SSD market. Samsung was an early adopter back in 2012, but aside from it and SanDisk we’ve yet to see any TLC drives enter the market. Silicon Motion’s SM2256 is set to change that because it’s the first commercially available controller and firmware combo with TLC support, which will enable companies like Kingston, ADATA and the like to use TLC NAND in their SSDs. We got an early reference design sample from Silicon Motion in for testing to see how the SM2256 stacks up with the competition, so read on to see our preliminary thoughts on the new controller.