Samsung XP941 Native PCIe M.2 SSD (512GB) Review – 1GB/s Transfer Speeds Set The Bar

REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

The Samsung XP941 is nothing short of outstanding. It is hard to put into words how incredible the SSD is, hence why we let our benchmarks do most of the talking. It really is unfortunate that the availability of this drive is so limited, especially when you are consistently seeing results that are 800 MB/s and higher.  Rest assured though that Rod Bland and RAMCity can get one in your hands within a few days though.

SAMSUNG XP941 COMPONENTS SIDE

If you happened to have purchased a Sony VAIO Pro 13 laptop, or a 2013 Apple Macbook Air, then you will most definitely notice that increased drive performance of your system, as both just may be equipped with the Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD (or variation thereof for Apple). You can check out extensive reports of these drives and their systems over at our sister website, The SSD Review.

By all means, if you have the opportunity to add this solid state drive to your system, don’t pas up such a great opportunity. To be fair, you will be paying a bit more per gigabyte, but this drive will be worth every dollar you spend, and it will not disappoint you in the slightest. The Samsung XP941 is hands-down one the of the best SSDs Technology X has ever had the privilege of testing, and with this being said we  award it as our Editor’s Choice.

Tech X Editors Choice Opt

Questions or Comments? View This Thread In Our Forums!

Watch For The Samsung XP941 SSD On Amazon!

 

As we have previously mentioned in our review of the Plextor M6M solid state drive, it is important to remember that SSD's can come in different shapes and sizes. Not all drives are going to be the 2.5" form factor and fit perfectly into your ultra book or desktop. We spoke briefly about the mSATA form factor and that you will find it most often in a laptop, but as laptops and ultra books become slimmer, the demand for smaller, yet faster, drives increases. Bring in the native PCIe M.2 form factor. The PCIe M.2 SSD eliminates the SATA 3 bottleneck,…

Review Overview

SSD Build
Features
Performance
Pricing
Availability

Unbelievable Performance!

The Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe solid state drive is a phenomenal drive that flaunts its 1GB/s performance and is worth every dollar for your next upgrade, that is if you can find one.

User Rating: 2.51 ( 7 votes)

6 comments

  1. This drive is sensationally fast! My iMac has a 256GB variation of the XP941.

    Hey Les, a quick question: I have my SSD partitioned into one 180GB partition for OS X and 70GB for Win 8.1. I keep the 180GB partition half empty at all times, while the Windows partition is 70% full. Is it possible that I reduced the performance of the SSD? I cannot seem to get above 700MB/s reads and 600MB/s writes. I think I remember slightly higher speeds (around +100MB/s reads) when the SSD was one partition only. TRIM is working on both OS X and Windows. I checked.

    I read that SSD’s don’t “care” about being partitioned as opposed to hard drives, but I want to hear from the SSD man himself. 😉

    Thanks!

    • Thats a tough one and I wonder if yo partitioned it lower if performance might drop further, similar to lower capacity SSD performance??

      The performance shouldnt drop because of the formatting, at least that hasnt occurred in our testing.

      What were the original speeds?

      • I want to say I remember them being approx. 100MB/s faster on reads and maybe 50 on the writes.

        Like I said, I’ve been wondering about this partitioning SSDs and the possibility of performance degradation. I read an interesting post from one seemingly knowledgeable person who opined that SSDs do not handle data in a way that would reduce performance as a result of partitions being in place. That would be good news.

        Who knows. What I do know is that I’ll wipe out the BootCamp partition in the next few days and we shall see what’s what. I also know that I won’t tolerate any type of significant performance drop on account of Windows being installed natively. I don’t want to be without Windows either, though, so I may just re-install in a virtual machine.

        I’ll also do some tests as far as formatting to lower and lower sized partitions, so we can see if the size of the partitions matters. (it does on hard drives)

        • So you have it in a BootCamp configuration… I ended up getting rid of that, but wish I had same now as i could have tested. I originally had the 256GB MBA drive partitioned evenly for OSX/Win.

          • Yea, same here, except I gave OS X 180GB and 70GB to Win 8.1 Pro. I imported the BootCamp partition into a virtual machine and wiped it out. (Btw, you can still get the BootCamp partition back by using the utility, can’t you? If you wanted it back, that is)

            Read speeds are about the same, but the writes have improved by 40MB/s. My 256GB SSD has 140GB free, so it’s got plenty of room, too. I’m probably going to re-install the BootCamp partition, though. (I love operating systems and tinkering with them. ha ha)

  2. Creative suggestions ! BTW , people are looking for a IRS 941-X , my boss found a blank form here https://goo.gl/7OefXe

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