We have been stating it since the launch of Z97 reviews, M.2. PCIe based SSDs are gonna be hot as they are freed of the 6 Gbps SATA3 bottleneck. Right now though 10 Gbps is the limit. However Samsung will be releasing the XP941 and it has hit the stores. How do read speeds of up to 1,170 MB/s, and up to 930 MB/s maximum writes sound ?

What's nice about this M.2 drive is that is uses a draft specification that implies a PCI-Express 2.0 x4 interface. When that happens you get x4 PCIe Lane wiring and then the SSD can reach sequential read speeds of up to 1,170 MB/s, and up to 930 MB/s maximum writes. The XP941 manages 4K random read performance of up to 122,000 IOPS, and 4K random write performance of up to 72,000 IOPS. Now as cool as the x4 wiring is, the problem right now is that the only 9-series motherboard allowing that is the Z97 Extreme6 from ASRock, of course. On the regular M.2. slot you'd still be looking at 700/800 MB/sec with this unit.

Samsung XP941 PCIe M.2 SSD Does 1170 MB/sec