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.

For anyone who might have missed it - Tweaktown.com published a review of the SM951 on their site.
 
Edit: doh - looks like I can't post links yet.  Google 'tweaktown sm951' to find it.
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Rod Bland - vendor rep for ramcity.com.au

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.

Aibohphobia
Link for the lazy: 
 
So that confirms my suspicions that the Lenovo versions don't perform at the full potential of the drive.

Unfortunately, now we will have to wait RamCity ...
 
I really hope near 2GB on reading on the oem "final" version. 
 

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."

 
Just got one Samsung SM951 512GB :D
look at flexxmemory.co.uk
theres 6 of them left...

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

Hi all,

Thanks for letting me know FlexxMemory had them in stock. I ordered two 256GB cards along with the adapters to install in a Mac Pro. I shoot 14 bit images with my Nikon D800E and need fast disk performance when Photoshopping 16 bit TIFFs so that I don't have to wait 10-20 seconds every time I open and save files.

Here are my results and a problem that I'm seeing.

As a single drive I'm getting around 1500 MB/s read and 1200 MB/s write. This is more or less what I expected in PCIE 2.0 slots and is in line with the benchmarks at Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, etc.

After that I configured the two cards as a striped RAID 0 with the cards installed in Slot 2 and Slot 3. This is the same configuration that Anandtech, SSD Review, Create.Pro and Barefeats used with the XP941 to see almost double the read/write performance.

With this set up I should be seeing around 3000 MB/s read and 2000 MB/s write speeds with the SM951 drives. I tested with Blackmagic and AJA, but was surprised to see only 1500 MB/s read and write performance, indicating that something is going wrong somewhere. It appears the RAID is saturating just one x4 lane instead of two. So I tried changing to slots 2 and 4. No difference.

I've emailed a couple of people about this but don't expect any replies until Monday at least. If anyone can figure this out I would be very grateful, as would anyone else trying this configuration. Thank you.

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.

sorry but someone who has purchased these early samsung sm 951 managed to enable nvme on motherboards that support this because it seems to me that the first versions of these ssd are nvme but only ahci and for this reason they can not get to 2000 mb / s?