In addition to releasing new consumer SSDs, Samsung introduces the XS1715 SSD which is designed for “Enterprise” applications, which means that it is cutting-edge and expensive (from a consumer’s perspective). Since cost is a secondary concern, the performance has to be brilliant, and the numbers are indeed quite impressive: with a capacity of 1.6TB the XS1715 is capable of a theoretical 3000MB/sec sequential read speed, which would be great to move huge data files for example. Samsung points out that this is fast enough to copy one hundred 1080p movies in a few minutes. Relative to Samsung’s previous enterprise offering, this is 6X faster.
The random read speed if also very impressive with 740,000 IOPS. Random reads are what makes SSD devices so great because classic mechanical hard drives heads take a relatively long time to move from one section of the disk to another, where SSDs can access any storage cell within an almost constant time.
To take advantage of the performance, the SATA protocol has abandoned in favor of NVMe which is a contraction of Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification. This allows the Samsung XS1715 to connect via a PCI express interface (that also supports high-speed interfaces like graphics cards) without requiring a proprietary storage driver.
In any case, I doubt that many of us will get to play with one, but we would be curious to see what kind of improvements such a storage device would yield on a “consumer” PC, just for the kick of it. By the way, the XS1715 also comes in 400GB and 800GB variant that may be more “affordable”.