is there a way to get a 256GB XP941 in the States now?

[cby508]

Newegg has been out of stock for a long time.

[parsec]

Re: is there a way to get a 256GB XP941 in the States now?

I'm surprised Newegg even had them, they have been kept out of the USA retail market. You can see the packaging shown at Newegg is not retail packaging, so who knows where they got them.

These drives have a compatibility problem with the majority of mother boards available, that cause them to not be bootable as an OS drive. The fix is not really that exotic, the board's UEFI/BIOS must have a UEFI compatible SATA Option ROM, but that requires an update from mother board manufactures. Some older boards don't have the appropriate CMOS BIOS chip to accommodate that, not to mention the required M.2 slot.

Samsung can control this when selling these drives to laptop manufactures, but the market for these drives given the limited amount of compatible PC mother boards is very limited compared to standard SATA SSDs. New Haswell-E/X99 boards may be compatible, but that market segment is still small. I can only imagine the number of people that would blindly buy them only to find they cannot use them at all. Samsung wants to avoid that situation for good reason.

The reality is, these M.2 SSDs are not plug and play with the vast majority of existing PC mother boards. A successor to this model may be available at some point, but who knows when. Even then, you must have a board with an x4 M.2 slot if they have any chance of being used at full specification even as a storage drive.

[cby508]

Re: is there a way to get a 256GB XP941 in the States now?

Thank you.
I'm using ASUS Rampage V has M.2 x4, which actually requires the SSD to run at native PCIE mode. I believe it should work.

I guess I'm getting it from Ramcity tho.

[chrisram]

Re: is there a way to get a 256GB XP941 in the States now?

RamCity is where I'm sending everyone to. It only takes a few days to get here from Australia and the drives are packed well.

https://www.ramcity.com.au/buy/samsung-xp941-256gb-m.2-pcie-x4-80mm-ssd/MZHPU256HCGL-00000

Just send them a message and ask what the total price would be. You can't just go off of the AU price because Australian's have to pay VAT.