It was about a year ago when Samsung announced that it had started mass production of a high-performance, low-powered PCIe-based SSD for laptops. The Samsung SM951 SSD promised support for both PCIe 3.0 and M.2 standards while providing read and write speeds of up to 2.15GB/s and 1.55GB/s respectively. Samsung will be shipping its successor – the SM961 – starting next week. It's the company's first NVMe M.2 1TB SSD.
The SM961 SSD offers significant improvements over the SM951 and the retail 950 Pro SSD. This new OEM-targeted SSD has a new controller which reduces heat production while the Polaris controller increases V-NAND performance up to 3.2GB/s (sequential read). Samsung will ship the SM961 in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacity sizes. Retailers like RamCity will have them in stock by next week with the 1TB SSD priced at $512. It's interesting to note that Samsung's first NVMe M.2 1TB SSD costs almost half of what Intel's SSD 750 1.2TB does.
