CIE Components in Electronics
Samsung Electronics has begun mass producing the industry”s first PCI-Express (PCIe) solid state drive (SSD) for next-generation ultra-slim notebook PCs. The company started providing the new SSD to major notebook PC makers earlier this quarter. The XP941 lineup consists of 512, 256 and 128GB SSDs.
“With the Samsung XP941, we have become the first to provide the highest performance PCIe SSD to global PC makers so that they can launch leading-edge ultra-slim notebook PCs this year,” said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics. “Samsung plans to continue timely delivery of the most advanced PCIe SSD solutions with higher density and performance, and support global IT companies providing an extremely robust computing environment to consumers.”
The XP941 delivers a significantly better level of performance and surpasses the speed limit of a SATA 6Gb/s interface. It enables a sequential read performance of 1,400MB/s (megabytes per second), which is, according to Samsung, the highest performance available with a PCIe 2.0 interface. This allows the drive to read 500GB of data or 100 HD movies as large as 5GB (gigabytes) in only six minutes, or 10 HD movies at 5GB in 36 seconds. That is approximately seven times faster than a hard disk drive (which would need over 40 minutes for the same task), and more than 2.5 times faster than the fastest SATA SSD.
The XP941 comes in the new M.2 form factor (80mm x 22mm), weighing approximately six grams – about a ninth of the 54 grams of a SATA-based 2.5 inch SSD. Also, the XP941″s volume is about a seventh of that of a 2.5 inch SSD, freeing up more space for the notebook”s battery and therein providing the opportunity for increased mobility that will enhance user convenience.
