Samsung today announced that it will start mass producing PCI Express SSDs targeted for Ultrabooks. The XP941 SSDs should be much faster than SSDs using the SATA interface and will be available in capacities of 128, 256 and 512 GB.
The XP941 SSDs use a PCIe interface and are therefore not limited by the SATA interface. The maximum sequential read speed is 1400 MB/s, write and IOPS are yet unknown.
The new SSDs are intended to end up in Ultrabooks which can also be concluded from its compact measurements. The XP941 SSDS are 80 x 22 milimeter which makes it suitable to be used in Ultrabooks that use the M.2 / Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF) which is considered the successor to mSATA. The drive is also not adding up to the weight of an Ultrabook, it's only 6 grams. A factor 9 lighter than traditional 2.5" SATA drives around 54 grams, claims Samsung.
Besides being secretive about the IOPS and write speeds, Samsung also doesn't reveal what kind of NAND the SSDs will use. The company only mentions that the drives will use high performance 10 nanometer class NAND memory and other than that, nothing. Discuss this in our SSD Forum.
