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!
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Rod Bland - Vendor Rep for ramcity.com.au