Introduction
Never being satisfied with the latest and greatest solid state drives, a wonder component a few years ago, Hardwareslave have been looking for something a little bit special. Step in PCIe SSD drives and for most the price isn’t going to be achievable, but they are probably the ultimate in gaming storage. What else is there?
Well, there is RAID, and we RAID every rig we build, and there is mSATA, but its always going to be bottle necked by the SATA ports. So, it only leaves M.2, a specification that uses PCIe bandwidth to bus your info around without the riser card expense.
An M.2 drive makes perfect sense to us initially as its very small, with what is now becoming suitable capacities and cheap enough to just about justify. Today we are reviewing the Samsung SM951 512GB M.2 drive, something that seems to fit all the qualities we are looking for, and hopefully more.
Specifications
| Samsung SM951 | |
|---|---|
| Form Factor | M.2 2280 (double-sided) |
| Controller | Samsung S4LN058A01 (PCIe 3.0 x4 AHCI) |
| Sequential Read | 2,150MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 1,500MB/s |
| Encryption | N/A |
| NAND | Samsung 19nm 64Gbit MLC |
| Capacity | 128GB/256GB/512GB |
Product Gallery
Small is perfectly formed. It will strike you how small this really is.
It doesn’t look like much but if the specifications are anything to go by, this will pack a small but mighty punch.
Samsung SM951 512GB M.2 Storage Review
Package - 7
Performance - 9
Price - 7.5
Consumer Experience - 7.5
7.8
The Samsung SM951 512GB M.2 has a lot going for it; speed, small physical size and a good storage size. It has one thing that is not going for it, relative speed and perception. We really didn't notice that we had this in the build until we benchmarked it.