Aibohphobia
The MSI X99S Gaming 7 has a 3.0 x4 slot but I'm only getting 1400-1500. Is there maybe a newer revision that is faster?

I don't know. With your setup have you verified that the motherboard has it running at PCIe 3.0 speed? Only the slots piped directly into the CPU will use PCIe 3, the X99 chipset is stuck at PCIe 2.0. If you are using a 5820K with the decreased number of PCIe lanes, I have no idea how the routing would be handled either.  
 
Looking at the manual for your board, the M.2 slot has a switch that links it to both the chipset and the CPU slot so I'm not entirely sure how that is supposed to connect and what decides where it switches to. I don't know how it can route to the chipset and remain PCIe 3.0 capable, basically you'd need to find out how that switch works exactly. 
 
Edit: Found a PCIe Bandwidth table later in the manual. Did you enable or disable the "M.2 PCH strap" in your BIOS? Looks like it limits the M.2 to PCIe 2.0 if you have it enabled. With that off and only 1 or 2 GPUs installed then the M.2 slot is supposed to be PCIe 3.0. Installing 3 GPUs will force it to run off the PCH instead. Can't have any drives installed in the SATA 5 or SATA 6 port either.

Wow so in just one day you test and a day later you sell it?
 
I'd be willing to bet the M.2 to PCIe x4 adapter was 2.0
 
Press release states 2150 / 1550 so I doubt it isn't capable of close to those speeds.
 
Here's an article. http://techgage.com/news/samsung-unveils-first-pcie-3-0-x4-based-m-2-ssd-delivering-speeds-of-over-2gbs/
 

Well, regardless of if it was your system or a possible PCIe 2.0 "variant", going by your performance data it looks pretty clearly to be bottlenecked by the interface. 
 
The drives only just began mass production, earlier samples probably have a pre-production firmware on them regardless, that also could be limiting it to PCIe 2.0.

Well I got my SM951 in on Friday and it is amazingly fast. I think windows 8 installed in around 6-7 minutes.

pakiefarkas
Well I got my SM951 in on Friday and it is amazingly fast. I think windows 8 installed in around 6-7 minutes.

That's about what I got too.
 
What motherboard are you using and is it in a M.2 slot or a PCIe adapter?

Win 8.1 has native support for nvme firmware. So win 8.1 install on sm951 through uefi should give its full potential...


Edit:
OS has support for nvme with stornvme.sys driver but motherboard uefi maybe not. So you will have to ask your motherboard manufacture does it support nvme boot.

Can't post links yet but AnandTech just posted an article today about the SM951 and apparently the SM951 does NOT support NVMe!
 
Edit: Asked Sean Webster on OCN and a product engineer at CES told him there would be a 951 with NVMe 

AlphaNerd
When do these officially release?

Probably never officially since they're OEM drives but RamCity should have them in stock in a few months.

Apparently things were a bit fuzzy at CES: http://www.overclock.net/...a/140_20#post_23410841
 
I think Kristian at AnandTech got clarification afterwards about NVMe support on the SM951: http://forums.anandtech.c...070110&postcount=8
 
Edit: Sweet, I can post links now.

Scarlet-Tech
I ordered the xp941 from Ram City in Australia. While trying to register it, I couldn't find the drive on Samsungs website. For RMA procedures, I have to go through Ram city, because Samsung isn't selling them. Beware that if they are taking them out of laptops and reselling them, you may not get a warranty, so verify that and purchase at your own risk. Also, I wonder what legal issues there will be when a buyer gets a laptop and the drive isn't correct... I wouldn't be someone if sues the company here very soon.

Hey all - just wanted to chime in here to clarify the warranty question and also talk about general availability of the SM951.
 
Firstly, we purchase all of our XP941 / SM951 product from authorised Samsung OEM distributors.  There are only a few distributors in the world who are officially authorised to sell Samsung OEM products, and even fewer resellers who can purchase via this sales channel due to strict Samsung vetting and minimum order quantities.    
 
The 'catch' with OEM products is that any warranty issue is not handled by Samsung.  For that, you need to come back to us and we'll liaise with Samsung on your behalf.   What this means in the real world is that if your drive ends up being faulty (rare), you just return it to us and we ship you a new one straight out of our own stock.  We then accumulate any returns over time, then return them to Samsung for replacement.  Samsung provide us with a 3 year warranty on the drives, the same as we provide to the end consumer.    This kind of warranty may not be available from an eBay seller.
 
If you buy from our Amazon store, then it's even easier.  Amazon have very generous return policies and they handle it all for you if the item is still under warranty.  
 
Now, regarding availability of the SM951....  
 
At this stage we are looking at mid-March 2015 for samples and if we are lucky we'll have the first batch of stock at the end of March and we'll have them available for sale from our website at ramcity.com.au and our Amazon US store as soon as we can.  The warranty with the drive will be the same as that with the XP941.  As far as pricing goes it's likely that will be 10-15% higher than the XP941 initially until supply settles down.
 
I'm sure most of you have read Anandtech's latest update on the SM951, and indeed it will not support NVMe and is still AHCI compliant, just like the XP941.  The good thing about this is that all the systems that we know that work with the XP941 should also work with the SM951.  And, if you have a machine with a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 socket, then you can expect to see some really impressive performance on the SM951 compared to the XP941. If your slot is just PCIE 2.0 x4, then don't expect any better numbers from the SM951 than you see from the XP941.  Of course, the other alternative is to use a M.2 to standard PCIe 3.0 adapter like the Lycom DT-120 which some folks report they can still boot from in X99-based systems.
 
Needless to say, all of us here at RamCity get a real kick out of talking about these products to folks all around the world, and especially you enthusiasts on the forums!
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rod Bland - Vendor Rep for ramcity.com.au 

Holy cow, the last time I checked this thread was December! I didn't think anyone had posted in it. It certainly got busy while I was gone. I decided that I didn't want to take the risks with compatibility issues, so I bought XP941 instead. I'm perfectly fine though, with getting the SM951 later when it becomes available. Those speeds are IN-SANE.... I'm really loving this XP941 though I have to say, I'm certainly not complaining about my 1100mbps read/write speeds. I'm on a ASRock X99 Extreme6/AC motherboard, so I think I'll wait for the compatibility to mature on boards for a little bit before I make my purchase, and then I'll get mine through Ram City so I can rest easy with that warranty behind me :)

I'm super glad Samsung is beginning to produce them, and glad that this thread finally took traction. I think it will help a lot of people as more and more begin to make the adoption of M.2 SSDs. Lets keep it going!  Also, if anyone does happen to have the link to that guy selling the sm951s on ebay, lets get it posted. That would be nice for those of us who want to make the jump now.

Link for the lazy: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6951/samsung-sm951-512gb-2-pcie-ssd-review/index.html
 
So that confirms my suspicions that the Lenovo versions don't perform at the full potential of the drive.

Quote from  Tweaktown review:
"Using SiSoft Sandra 2015, we verified our SM951 was running on a PCIe 3.0 x4 (8Gbps) bus on an ASRock Z97 Extreme 6 motherboard. On this system, we only managed to achieve 1680 MB/s sequential read. This caused us some concern and we changed our test to mimic Samsung's test with a 128KB workload with a queue depth of 32. No matter what settings we changed, 1700ish was the maximum we managed to pull of the Lenovo X1 Carbon drive.
 
It's because of that we want to make it clear that our test today may not represent the full performance of the SM951 purchased from RamCity in the future. OEMs like Lenovo are able to order products in large volumes and at specific specifications. It is entirely possible that Lenovo limited the drive to reduce power consumption. Lenovo does have a slightly different part number, MZHPV512HDGL-000L1. The last section shows this is a Lenovo part. Units coming from RamCity will have 00000 or 000003 or 000001."

20x 512GB and 15x 256GB items available right now...they re-stocked...

Hi again.
Regarding the above, I have discovered the problem after a long process of trying every kind of configuration, benchmarking and observation. The answer was staring at me all the time in the System Profiler.
 
The SM951's on chip controller cannot negotiate a full speed link in a Mac Pro's x16 slot. It can do so in the x4 slot. The XP941 however can negotiate a full speed link in any slot. So until a firmware upgrade ever comes out you cannot create a full speed raid with two SM951s. The best you can get right now is 1500 MB/s read and write.

To make a faster RAID you can either configure a RAID from two XP941s, stripe an XP941 and SM951 together (for some reason slower than the first option), or the best option I had was to stripe an XP941 with two SM951s for 2300 MB/s read / 2100 MB/s write.