The SM951 we are testing today uses the AHCI command set as Samsung pushed the release of the NVMe version likely due to spotty compatibility for NVMe. NVMe support is the key feature of Intel's SSD 750 Series and it's something Samsung initially said the SM951 would have, later dropped, and just recently announced would ship as a separate revision of this drive with the same name. The SSD 750 Series proved to be fast, but also expensive at $1.02 per gigabyte for the 400GB model. We recently reviewed Intel's new SSD 750 Series 1.2TB, a PCI Express SSD that supports the NVMe protocol. That seems reasonable for such a fast M.2 device.
The new SM951 PCIe SSD is currently available through Australian company RamCity, and although the drive is listed in Australian dollars on the company's website, it's selling to US customers via Amazon for $460. Nonetheless, the drive has been popular among enthusiasts - popular enough for Samsung to announce a successor last January - though again as an OEM product. To date, no other M.2 device has challenged the XP941, however as attractive as the Samsung XP941 may be, it was meant as an OEM-only product. It wasn't long after the Z97's arrival that Samsung moved to capitalize on the chipset's M.2 support by announcing the XP941, a PCIe 2.0 x4 SSD with top speeds of 1170MB/s reads and 930MB/s writes.
That's a big deal in the storage world and we were especially interested in M.2 (formerly 'Next Generation Form Factor' or NGFF). Last year's Intel Haswell refresh wasn't particularly exciting because of the CPU improvements but because of the new Z97 chipset which brought SATA Express and the M.2 interface to mainstream computing.
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