World's Fastest Consumer SSD - Samsung 950 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD 256GB/512GB available for pre-order now, arriving Oct. 30

Posted by Paul Braren on Oct 22 2015 (updated on Nov 4 2015) in

Nov 03 2015 12:00pm EST - After a few days of delay, my qty of the 512GB version just arrived from Amazon via USPS, details below.

Original article below:

You may remember the announcement article last month that explains why this long-awaited drive is so widely anticipated. No more hunting for the OEM-only Samsung SM951 NVMe edition. I returned my recently tested SM951 AHCI version. This Samsung 950 PRO M.2 is expected to be faster, enjoy wide distribution and popularity, and is the final missing piece in my home lab storage strategy.

B01639694M — Click to place your order on Amazon.

As of today, it's available for pre-order at Amazon and Newegg, in either the 256GB and 512GB sizes. Note, the 512GB size is considerably faster, seen here.

Strangely, it was also available for pre-order for about 15 minutes back on October 19th, only to have Amazon link removed. Today, the wait to order is over!

Expected to ship from Amazon on October 29th, with mine expected to arrive on October 30th. Newegg is currently showing a release date of Dec 01 2015.

If you have a motherboard that doesn't have M.2, then your BIOS can't support booting from M.2. But what if you don't care about bootability? If you have a spare PCIe slot, then this $27 adapter https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MYCQP38?tag=tinkertryamzn-20(which I haven't yet tested) fixes that problem, allowing you incredible speeds at reasonable prices for your secondary storage needs. Such as your VMware and Hyper-V VMs. Don't miss the PC Perspective full review with Allyn's amazing charts, and their video embedded below.

Of course, TinkerTry will be testing this very promising little speed demon with VMware vSphere 6.0 / ESXi 6.0 Update 1 on my SuperServer. NVMe driver support should be interesting, given what I recently learned about the speeds of the hypervisor's built-in NVMe driver here. Stay tuned. It should be a Happy Halloween, with tricks, treats, and more tweets.

PC Perspective Podcast - Samsung 950 PRO 256GB and 512GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD Review

PC Perspective Podcast #373 - Samsung 950 Pro, ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q, Steam Link and more! Jump to 05:19 for the 950 discussion.

Source: Intel

@xenappblog @Easi123 ThxTrond! Just back-ordered qty 2 /w ur affiliate link (Estimated delivery: not yet available) https://t.co/0tln5v4yQG
— Paul Braren (@paulbraren) October 19, 2015