New Samsung SSD allows laptops to sleep for months

Sipping power is what this SSD does all day.
Sipping power is what this SSD does all day.

Samsung has announced that it has started mass producing a "high-performance, low-powered" PCIe solid state drive that seems destined to go in laptops that will be running on the new Intel Broadwell-U chip launched at CES this week.

The SM951 is also likely to be found in the next generation MacBook Air and MacBook Pro that Apple will launch later this year - which could include the rumoured Retina MacBook Air.

At least one vendor, Lenovo, is a confirmed customer given that the stock picture used by Samsung carries a big logo from the laptop maker on it.

The new PCIe SSD drive, which will be available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB models, is the first to sport the new L1.2 low power standby mode that slashes the power consume in sleep or hibernate mode by 97%.

Although that sounds a lot, it's a mere 48mW saving, several orders of magnitude less than what a laptop, as a whole consume. What it would allow though is for a laptop to stay in hibernation mode longer, possibly for months.

Samsung also said that it will "work on the timely introduction" of PCIe SSDs that support NVMe (Non-Volative Memory Express) interface.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.