Samsung Launches SM951 M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD for OEMs/SIs

Back at Samsung SSD Global Summit in July, Samsung showed off the SM951 for the first time. The drive has then created a lot of interest because the Z97 and X99 chipsets finally brought proper boot support for the XP941 and many have decided to hold off their purchase and wait for the upcoming SM951. 

Similar to the XP941, the SM951 will come in M.2 2280 form factor with capacities ranging from 128GB to 512GB. In terms of the interface the SM951 moves to PCIe 3.0 x4, which doubles the available bandwidth from the XP941, and Samsung is claiming read speeds of up to 2,150MB/s with writes coming in at 1,550MB/s. Random performance isn’t as impressive but the SM951 is still capable of up to 130K random read and 85K random write IOPS.

In addition to increased performance, the SM951 also brings power savings. The drive includes support for L1.2 low power standby mode and according to Samsung the idle power consumption is under 2mW (i.e. within the DevSleep spec). The XP941, in turn, uses about 50mW as per Samsung’s data sheet, so it’s a fairly significant increase in power efficiency.

But now the bad news: the drive does not support NVMe nor does it come with 3D V-NAND. Back in July Samsung’s own presentation mentioned that the SM951 would be the world’s first client SSD with NVMe support, but those plans has then changed. Currently Samsung has no plans to bring NVMe to the SM951, which leads me to believe that the hardware is not NVMe compatible in the first place. Why that is the case, I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that the current Haswell/Broadwell platforms aren’t really designed for PCIe/NVMe SSDs, which is why everyone is looking forward to Skylake before releasing their drives to the market. There are workarounds to get PCIe/NVMe SSDs to work on existing systems, but apparently Samsung decided to stay with AHCI for one more generation for increased compatibility (it’s an OEM drive after all, so I’m sure the PC OEMs have had their say about NVMe). 

As for the NAND, the SM951 uses 128Gbit 19nm MLC. That’s planar NAND, unfortunately, even though Samsung has been adopting V-NAND to nearly all of its other SSDs. I suspect that the reason behind the choice of planar NAND is PC OEMs and their unwillingness to pay the premium for V-NAND because the truth is that V-NAND is still not as cost efficient as modern planar NAND. Another reason might be the newness of 3D NAND as PC OEMs tend to prefer proven technologies to maximize reliability. 

Since the SM951 is an OEM drive, it won’t be available through the usual retail channels, but at least RamCity (the first XP941 retailer) will be carrying the drive. Stock should arrive around March time and I’ve also heard that there will be a TLC based version called the PM951. All in all, while the SM951 didn’t exactly meet my expectations on the specification frontier, I’m eagerly waiting for a review sample to see how the transition to PCIe 3.0 increases performance. We will be getting our review sample as soon as RamCity receives the first units, so look back for the review in about two months.

Mushkin Releases New Striker SSD, Displays an Upcoming M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD

Mushkin had a couple of new and upcoming products in its suite during CES. The first one is a new Striker SSD, which uses Phison’s S10 controller coupled with Micron’s 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. We already took a look at the Phison S10 controller in Corsair’s Neutron XT and while it didn’t set any new records, it was a decent middle-class controller. My biggest criticism about the Neutron XT was the price, but I’m confident that Mushkin’s Striker will be more competitive thanks to more cost efficient NAND and typically Mushkin has been one of the value players. 

Availability will be in Q1’15, so expect to find the Striker on the shelves in the next two months or so. Pricing is to be announced.

Mushkin also had the 1TB Reactor on display. It’s an SM2246EN based drive with Micron’s 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND and what makes it truly interesting is its $360 price tag (that’s $0.36 per GB!). I got a sample right before the holidays and have been testing it since I got back from CES, so stay tuned for an in-depth review within the next couple of weeks.

Moving on to very interesting upcoming products, Mushkin showed off the Hyperion PCIe SSD. It’s based on Phison’s E7 controller, which is a PCIe 3.0 x4 design with NVMe support. Performance is up to 2.8GB/s for reads and 1.2GB/s for writes and random performance is also very competitive at over 300K IOPS. The controller is still in development and so far there hasn’t even been a live demo yet, but I was told that the Hyperion should hit the market during the first half of this year. 

For current generation PCIe, Mushkin was showing the XC PCIe drive. Like the most PCIe drives on the market today, the XC is simply four SandForce SF-2281 controller in RAID 0 and as you can see, the drive consists of two modules with each having two daughterboards (i.e. one PCB per controller).

Mushkin also has a version with four SM2246EN controllers in development. The Silicon Motion controller will enable consistent performance with all data types and in addition it supports up to 1TB per controller, hence upping the maximum capacity to 4TB.

And like everyone else, Mushkin had an SF3700 prototype on display. Mushkin will be ready to release a drive as soon as Seagate/SandForce is ready with the controller and firmware, which should be in early Q3’15 from what I have heard.

And no lineup is complete without some DDR4. The DIMMs Mushkin had on display were DDR4-2133 and DDR4-2400, which to be honest is nothing exciting but Mushkin has always been more of a value brand instead of being the first choice of overclockers.

ADATA CES Suite Tour: PCIe & TLC SSDs, Power-Loss Protection Demo, 256GB SD Cards, USB 3.1 And More

I stopped by ADATA’s suite last week to see what the company has been up to in the past six months. While ADATA didn’t release or announce anything new at the show, there were plenty of upcoming products on display in the suite.

The SP320 will be ADATA’s first TLC NAND based SSD and will be available sometime in the first half of 2015. It’s based on Silicon Motion’s new SM2256 controller, which supports LDPC error correction that increases the endurance (basically, LDPC can deal with a lot higher error rate compared to traditional BCH error correction). Capacities will range from 120GB to all the way to up to 960GB, but the exact specifications are unknown at this point.

Moving on to PCIe, ADATA was showcasing industrial SSDs based on JMicron’s JMF811 and JMF810 controllers. The JMF811 is the full-fledged version with four PCIe 2.0 lanes, whereas the JMF810 is capped to two lanes. Capacities go up to 1TB in M.2 2280 form factor and I was told that the drive is already shipping to ADATA’s industrial partners. Obviously, the drive is not a retail version (hence the awkward name), but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a client version with the same controller showing up later.

Similar to Computex, ADATA was also demoing the SandForce SF3700 based SR1020. To be honest, I don’t really have anything new to share on the SF3700. The live demo ADATA was showing in the suite was just sequential writes, which we have already seen before for a few times. Timing wise Seagate/SandForce is now aiming for Computex 2015, so expect to see a ton of new SSD announcements and releases around June time.

In addition to products, ADATA was showing a neat power-loss protection test platform. The platform consists of a custom PCB that plugs into a USB port along with a special software that interrupts power delivery. The purpose of the demo was to show off ADATA’s enterprise SR1010 SSD with full power-loss protection, but ADATA also promised to send us the test platform for use in future reviews.

ADATA was also showcasing a couple of USB 3.0 drives with unique security features. The first one was the UE720, which is otherwise a typical USB 3.0 drive but features a fingerprint scanner to provide an extra layer of security.

The other one was the UC520, which uses Bluetooth 4.0 for security. I’m not sure how exactly the encryption works with Bluetooth, but I assume the drive needs to create a Bluetooth connection with a known computer/tablet/smartphone before the contents can be accessed.

For SD cards ADATA has a new UHS-II type XPG SDXC card with capacity of up to 256GB. The card offers read speeds of up to 150MB/s and is capable of 4K2K recording. 

ADATA was also displaying a USB 3.1 compatible SE700 external drive with dual SSDs inside. Sequential performance goes above 800MB/s and the drive will be ready to ship once USB 3.1 platforms are available later this year.

ADATA was one of Intel’s original DDR4 launch partners and since the launch ADATA has been able to up the speeds to DDR4-3333.