About to buy first SSD. A little confused about options (SATA vs M2)


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So I have this motherboard (Amazon link, no referral) and I'm looking at this port (Imgur link, zoom of picture from Amazon site) and wondering if M.2 is right for me. And if it is... do I just kinda shove it in like a stick of RAM with about as much force behind my motherboard and bam, it's detected as a hard drive (or volume, whatever)? I've got this SSD (Amazon link, no referral) in my cart. I was looking at the Samsung EVO 850, but that's like $300-something and only SATA 3GB/s, so I'm wondering why I should pay ~$60-odd more for it (speeds are comparable). I've always trusted WD for my hard drives (and I know a WD SSD is basically a SanDisk SSD since WD bought SD and I'm fine with that) and I'm pretty sure WD is offering M.2 as well as the 2.5" SATA thing. Here's the M.2 version (Amazon link, no referral).

 

However, I'm looking at the motherboard (consult the motherboard Amazon link or the port Imgur link) and I'm looking at the port in this picture (Imgur link) and I do not see a place where I can stick this in the motherboard. I figured M.2 being PCIe based, would just go into a PCIe 1x slot because it's about the same width... however, the port has three things and the PCIe 1x only has two. So... what do I need in addition to plug this SSD in? Or is that SSD is only meant for laptops? Kind of confused as I was led to believe (various sources) that M.2 was for desktop and laptop/_____book. Not to mention it's noted on the mobo itself.

 

I speak the language and I'm upgrading the third rig I've built (well, second, but since I ripped the mobo out of the second — not literally, a friend has it — and replaced it along with the CPU, it's technically my third rig), but I lack the experience of more seasoned builders who have been building longer (than 2004) and more frequently. Thanks.

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I'm still not convinced about the end-user difference between M2 and SSD. From what I've gathered, even the fastest SSDs at the moment are not able to saturate SATA3. Maybe because M2 uses a different connector/bus, this means it can inherently achieve higher speeds? I'm not sure.

 

In terms of manufacturers, Samsung are often revered as the leading brand for consumer SSDs.

 

I've never used an M2 SSD before, though I believe they can be slotted into a longer PCI-e slot, such as PCI-e x16 or x8. As per these pictures: https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboard-Accessory/HYPER_M2_X4_MINI_CARD/websites/global/products/ZhGCZ74sTiXfEhlH/img/flexibility.jpg and http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/09/hyperx-predator-pcie-ssd_hyperx-predator-ssd-m2-pcie-installed_01_07_2015-11_21-100613929-orig.jpg (not to be used as reference images - still unsure whether this is legit, but it's just something lingering in the back of my head)

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I was looking at the Samsung EVO 850, but that's like $300-something

 

$300?

 

don't get the monster sized SSD drives as it's best to get the 250GB one (or maybe even the 500GB version at the most) and then a regular hard drive for general larger file storage. if you look around you can find brand new 2TB hard drives for $44.95 online (with free ship), if you know where to look, which is hard to top in terms of $ per TB of data. only catch with that is it's got a 1 year warranty instead of the more typical 3 years but i think it's worth the risk personally for the solid discounted price.

 

just some suggestions ;)

 

p.s. i have a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB and it's got a 5 year warranty and is rated for about 75TB of writes which means unless you write A LOT of data to it on a regular basis you won't wear it out as the warranty will be well over with by the time you write 75TB of data and not only that the drives will likely go well beyond that before actual failure happens from writing data. or look at i this way... if you wrote 40GB every single day that drive will last AT LEAST 5 years+ easy (or say 20GB a day doubles that lifespan to at least 10years+) and i doubt even power users would do that especially on a smaller 250GB SSD drive. so in other words you can pretty much use your drive and don't worry about wearing it out as i can't see someone consistently writing 40GB every single day for 5+ years straight which means you will likely get an easy 10+ years out of it if we are strictly assuming it only fails from wearing out from writing data and nothing else happens to go wrong with it out of no where.

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If you look at the picture on amazon, where it says M.2 Support. Look to the right of that, there is a horizontally situated connector. That is the M.2 slot.

 

Also, there are several versions of M.2, the connectors for it, the size of the cards, etc so make sure you get the right version for your motherboard.

LinusTechTips has a good video on it.

 

As a correction, the Samsung 850 EVO is not a 3GBs Sata II drive. Its a 6GBs sata III capable of around 550MBs with 600MBs being the theoretical max for SATA III.

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As mentioned...that WD m.2 would go into the slot above the top PCIe slot. 

 

However, unless you are doing this for a small enclosure or have limited space for 2.5 drives... I wouldn't get this particular drive. It'll be running at SATA6 like your regular ol' 2.5 drive. I would get a M.2 NVMe drive...which the mobo supports. It'll be more expensive but much faster. I wouldn't waste the slot on a SATA m.2 drive...NVMe or bust. :)

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The board supports PCI-E M.2 SSD's so yes get one of those, they are faster then a SATA based drive (like 2000+MBps read)

SATA 3 tops out at 6 Gbps which is 750 MBps (note Gigabits, vs MegaBytes)

Whereas PCI-e 3.0 x4 tops out at 3.9GBps so 3900MBps

i.e. up to 5 times faster, the memory chips aren't that fast yet, but they are faster than SATA is capable of.

 

As mentioned it'll go into the slot right and slightly up of the PCI-E x1 slot below where it says AI Suite 3 (a PCI-E M.2 uses the PCI-E bus for faster transfer speeds, it does not use a traditional PCI-E port).

 

Hope that helps to make sense of things.

 

Also M.2's are still quite pricey so I would recommend only getting like a 256GB M.2, then if you need more SSD storage get a larger capacity standard 2.5" SSD as well.

Depends how must stuff you have that needs SSD access speeds.

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M2 is a connector, not an interface.

 

M2 drives can be SATA or PCIe.  A M2 SATA drive is no different from a 2.5 SATA drive, except obviously the form factor.

 

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1 minute ago, Fahim S. said:

M2 is a connector, not an interface.

 

M2 drives can be SATA or PCIe.  A M2 SATA drive is no different from a 2.5 SATA drive, except obviously the form factor.

 

youre right. i have an MSI laptop that was released just a bit too early for NVMe. it has an M.2 SATA drive.

 

as far as im concerned, there's no reason NOT to get an NVMe M.2 drive these days. the performance blows SATA out of the water.

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Go with whatever fits your budget and desired capacity.

 

The real-world performance differences between the M.2 drives and SATA3 SSD (latest gen) are negligible.  If you're just going to be using the system for Gaming/day-to-day get the best price.  Yes, the numbers look amazing (2000Mb/s R 1500Mb/s W vs 550/550 SSD), but it's just like the old Gigahertz race....  at some point it becomes meaningless.  The difference in loading a game for instance on an M.2 vs an SSD is 2 seconds, hardly nightly and day.

 

Another thing to keep in mind is that typically when you connect an M.2 drive it will disable 2 of the onboard SATA ports, so your 1 drive now requires 2 spots.  Not an issue for most people, but I myself have 6 drives in my main machine.

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13 minutes ago, Jason S. said:

youre right. i have an MSI laptop that was released just a bit too early for NVMe. it has an M.2 SATA drive.

 

as far as im concerned, there's no reason NOT to get an NVMe M.2 drive these days. the performance blows SATA out of the water.

Agree, if you can afford it then it's a no brainer... unless you are unfortunate enough to have a system that can't boot from it.

 

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30 minutes ago, CougarDan said:

The real-world performance differences between the M.2 drives and SATA3 SSD (latest gen) are negligible.  If you're just going to be using the system for Gaming/day-to-day get the best price.  Yes, the numbers look amazing (2000Mb/s R 1500Mb/s W vs 550/550 SSD), but it's just like the old Gigahertz race....  at some point it becomes meaningless.  The difference in loading a game for instance on an M.2 vs an SSD is 2 seconds, hardly nightly and day.

 

Nope.

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2 hours ago, CougarDan said:

Yes, the numbers look amazing (2000Mb/s R 1500Mb/s W vs 550/550 SSD), but it's just like the old Gigahertz race....  at some point it becomes meaningless.

Huh?  While if your using the time it takes to load an app or a game as your benchmark.. Ok The game is loaded before I can even get my finger off the mouse button.  But there is WAY MORE too it than the loading of 1 specific application or game..

 

With your logic if what I do with the system is listen to my music CD's then I don't need anything more than a 1x Cdrom drive and an old pent 486 and ata66 drive interface would be all I needed ;)

 

If your system supports it there really would be zero reason to not go with a NVMe M.2

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M.2 is a form factor. 2.5" is another form factor.

 

M.2 can be either SATA or PCIe.

 

In the motherboard you posted above, the M.2 slot is right next to the upper PCIe 1x slot. It's right where the motherboard has "M.2 Support" written on it.

 

Anyway, PCIe SSDs are very expensive and I am not entirely convince that having PCIe SSDs would helpful to most users (outside of very specific scenarios)

 

Also, the Samsung 850 EVO is horribly overpriced.

 

I would suggest you get the Crucial MX300 instead.

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I have a M.2  NVMe Samsung 960 EVO. 256GB and is PCI-e also.

 

Am I noticing any speed jumps from my 850 PRO 256GB SSD? Not really, I just wanted the peace of mind. No SATA cords, no power plugs. Just attach it, put 1 screw to secure it, done.

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2 hours ago, xendrome said:

Nope.

lol, worthwhile response.  Just straight denial with nothing to back it up.  I'll come back to that.

 

17 minutes ago, BudMan said:

With your logic if what I do with the system is listen to my music CD's then I don't need anything more than a 1x Cdrom drive and an old pent 486 and ata66 drive interface would be all I needed ;)

 

If your system supports it there really would be zero reason to not go with a NVMe M.2

How is that in anyway using my logic?  I specifically stated that the difference was negligible, not that it would simply work. 

 

If your system supports it, you have the budget (my initial qualification), and you don't mind losing an additional SATA port for the connection.

 

Here are some numbers for those of you who wish to look at the information:

 

https://hardforum.com/threads/nvme-m-2-ram-drive-raid-sata-iii-ssd-game-load-time-comparisons.1911914/

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/samsung-ssd-950-pro-review/

 

http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/

 

Excerpt:

 



We used a stopwatch to measure the time it took from clicking the icon on the desktop to the main menu appearing, and again timed how long it took from selecting the ‘Start Game’ option in the menu until the ‘Go to the guard’ message appears on the screen during the first scene of the game.

It’s not a completely scientific test, and these sequences have loading screens and fixed-speed animation, so the overall time depends on more than just the SSD’s performance.

But it seems these loading times were just about the same on the 950 Pro as they were on the 850 Pro. In two of the tests, there’s no real difference between the drives at all, and in the other two, when loading the main game itself, there’s a difference of around a second. Although with the 512GB models, it’s the 850 Pro, not the 950 Pro, that works out to be faster. But with less than 2 seconds difference, it’s still within the margin of error, and the real conclusion to be had is that the massive difference in sequential read and write speeds between SATA and PCI-Express SSDs does not mean a massive difference in real-world performance.

This slightly changes how we feel about the 950 Pro. Having those raw performance figures from a storage device that’s smaller than the average human finger is technically astounding, but it won’t really change much about how you use your computer or play games. Windows doesn’t boot particularly faster, and games don’t load much quicker. From what we’ve seen, frame rates are unaffected.

 



Though those prices are far lower than what PCIe storage has commanded in the past, it's still hard to recommend these fancy NVMe drives to the average enthusiast. SATA drives perform just as well in everyday productivity and gaming scenarios, despite their theoretical AHCI handicap. Good SATA SSDs also sell for just 30 to 40 cents per gigabyte, so buying drives that cost twice that amount just isn't worth it for most ordinary workloads. Those folks dealing with heavily storage-bound use cases are really the only ones who'll see a good return on the higher investment.

 

Without a doubt M.2 drives are faster, but for average users there's not really much benefit for the added cost.  Now if cost isn't an issue, yes, pull the trigger get any M.2 drive you want.

 

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1 hour ago, BudMan said:

If your system supports it there really would be zero reason to not go with a NVMe M.2

So what you are saying is that cost doesn't matter.

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4 minutes ago, Mockingbird said:

So what you are saying is that cost doesn't matter.

To some, yes...

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no cost would be a factor..  But the performance difference is HUGE!!! Pretty sure if you had a motherboard that supports it - that would be the way to go..  Was my point.

 

But sure budget and cost will always be a very valid factor in what you get.  For some of us atleast that have to run such purchases through the budget committee (wife) ;)  But they do not have to know about the lower cost options - they just need to approval the total cost ;)

 

 

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1 minute ago, BudMan said:

But the performance difference is HUGE!!!

Not according to CougarDan

The real-world performance differences between the M.2 drives and SATA3 SSD (latest gen) are negligible.

 

And I can tell you going from a 2x Samsung 950 RAID Mirror (SATA3) to a M2 NVMe 960 EVO he has no idea what he is even talking about.

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Yeah clearly he is only doing a benchmark on how fast his app loads.. Which was the flawed analogy I was trying to point out - but seems he didn't think it was correct.

 

I agree with if how your benchmarking something is how fast a app/game loads after you click the button then now you can not see much difference between what to the user is instant.. Like I said I open stuff up on my system and they are open before I even take my finger off the mouse button.

 

That has really zero to do with the HUGE difference 500MBps vs 2500MBps disk IO could make in your overall system performance..   Your prob not going to see any difference in moving a file across your network either if you have 500MBps SSDs on both ends when you have a 100mbps or even 1Ge connection.  Do the same test with 10ge then yeah your going to be able to see a HUGE difference in moving files across that network.

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8 hours ago, Mockingbird said:

Also, the Samsung 850 EVO is horribly overpriced.

 

I would suggest you get the Crucial MX300 instead.

 

they are priced about the same currently (within $3-5 or so of each other on Amazon so price is not really a issue) for the Samsung 850 EVO 250GB vs Crucial MX300 275GB. with that said... the Samsung is faster and has a 5 year warranty instead of just 3 years. but you get another 25GB of storage with the MX300 AND the MX300 has power loss protection which is something i wished the Samsung 850 EVO had (i talk more about it below).

 

but one thing that makes me like the Crucial MX300 is it supposedly has power loss protection which Samsung does not have as i think it was around May 2016, which i had the drive right around a year at this time, we had a power outage and it corrupted the drives Windows installation (basically computer would not boot etc) so i basically had to wipe everything on it and reinstall Windows from scratch. i never had that happen before from a power outage (although i used regular hard drives in the past).  this is where that MX300 should do better than the Samsung i think...

 

in a review i have seen on the MX300 a moment ago, here is a quote...

 

Quote

Note the strips of capacitors between the controller and flash. They're supposed to keep the flash running long enough to save data in lower pages if power is lost. Most of us don't appreciate this until we need it, and we wish more SSD vendors would go to as much trouble to keep your information protected.

 

that's one area that the MX300 is ahead of the 850 EVO and after my power outage issue with the Samsung it does make me wish i had that feature. but who knows, i might have been unlucky with the timing of my power outage with my 850 EVO as that issue might not happen to be again, but then again it might.

 

so basically... with the MX300 your getting a shorter warranty with less performance, but on the flip side... your getting 25GB more storage and power outage protection as after my incident i don't really trust the Samsung to store important data on (i did not really lose anything as my more important files where on regular hard drives etc) as i got more confidence in my regular hard drives. but i guess if i had to buy these drives all over again (i had my Samsung 850 EVO 250GB since i think it was May 2015) i might go with the Crucial MX300 because of it's power outage protection so data does not get corrupted and has a extra 25GB of storage space for similar price even though sacrifices a little performance but then again i on my system it's not likely to be noticeable since i got a SATA2 connection and the drives performance exceeds the SATA2 connection speed. but chances are those Crucial drives i would assume would comfortably make it beyond the 3 year warranty i would imagine so i don't think the warranty would be too much of a issue. but still, Samsung's 5 year warranty sure is nice.

 

p.s. it appears they say 220TB of writes on the MX300 but i think it's only for the 750GB+ models(?) where as i know the 250GB Samsung 850 EVO is right around 75GB of writes but actually goes beyond that before actual failure occurs. i am not sure what the write endurance of the 275GB MX300 is but i would assume it's at least Samsung level or more.

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1 hour ago, Luc2k said:

The most important performance stat for a SSD is 4K random reads, and while those big numbers are useful in certain scenarios, they're used to draw in the uninformed. A NVMe 960 Pro is just 15% faster than a SATA 850 EVO for double the price.

 

The WD drive is quite a bit slower than the 850 EVO.

Just 15% faster in some scenarios. Try copying some isos  to disk. It won't be a mere 15%. 

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10 hours ago, xendrome said:

Not according to CougarDan

 

 

And I can tell you going from a 2x Samsung 950 RAID Mirror (SATA3) to a M2 NVMe 960 EVO he has no idea what he is even talking about.

To me and the independent resources that I provided...... but yeah, go ahead and ignore those to your benefit.  ;)

 

"And I can tell you"....  so your 'proof' is to be an anecdotal remark?

 

10 hours ago, BudMan said:

Yeah clearly he is only doing a benchmark on how fast his app loads.. Which was the flawed analogy I was trying to point out - but seems he didn't think it was correct.

 

Yep, just me and again not those resources that I provided with hard data.

 

18 minutes ago, adrynalyne said:

Just 15% faster in some scenarios. Try copying some isos  to disk. It won't be a mere 15%. 

That's a pretty cherry picked scenario.  Moving large files you'll of course get very nearly max throughput (M.2 ~+1500MB/s vs SATA 550MB/s), but small file operations slow down considerably.  Also, your example is somewhat flawed as in order to get the full benefit you'd have to be transferring between two M.2 drives, if either drive is a slower drive it becomes a bottleneck.

 

I also went from a SSDx2 RAID0 to an M.2 drive.  Didn't really notice any amazing difference.  Does it benchmark better?  Yes, definitely.  Have I notice a great speed increase?  Nope.  The latest SSDs simply aren't throttling performance.  You can see that in real-world examples.  The average user won't see a great difference other than the hit to the wallet for a good M.2 (there are cheap ones out there that overall are slower than SSDs).

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