M.2 is complicated, and simple SM951 , XP941 and Plextor M6e are the only PCI-E based M.2 drives (in order of speeds from best to worst). Everything else on market are SATA drives.
Not currently using one, but when skylake hits the shops, I'll be buying. The most important bit is how many PCIe lanes and what revision they are; 2x 2.0 is a bit lackluster, but 4x 2.0/3.0/4.0(skylake) all hold the promise of multi GB/s transfer rates, numbers that just 15 years ago would have been considered outstanding for RAM, nevermind a disk subsystem.
Im using a Samsung XP941 and i can throw you a little insight on my experience with it: I bought it to use with the Asus Ranger Z97 board which is M.2 compatible having read some great reviews about the drive. I had originally planned to use the new 850 evo, but i quickly moved that to the wifes build It came and to physically fit it was very straight forward, installing it however wasn't quite so simple. The drive has to be installed in UEFI mode and requires the newer windows variants for this to be possible (not sure if W7 is support please correct if I'm wrong ). Initially everything went according to plan as per a new windows install until after the first reboot, it just wouldn't recognise the os and nor could I get it to recognise the drive again. Once I googled M.2 installation from my laptop i found a few guides and then realised about the UEFI. Once this was corrected and i made all the various bios changes everything went well. Once it was all installed it felt pretty quick coming from an OCZ Agility 3 and I decided to run a Hard drive speed test to see how fast it was in comparison to the review item. Here i came across my second over sight, the review drive was hitting 1080 mb/s read/write (approx) where as mine seemed to be capped at around 870 mb/s, not slow at all but i felt a little short changed. It was then i found about the Z97 m.2 limitations ... Basically the m.2 is limited to 2x PCIE lanes which causes a bandwidth cap on the drive. I believe there are now a few z97 boards available (Asrock Z97 Extreme 6) which support full 4x PCIE lanes on the M.2 adapter and i'm pretty sure all X99 boards have full support. This is issue was quickly addressed by buying a PCIE M.2 adapter which gave me full 1080mb/s speeds This is the adapter: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/lyco...m)-to-pcie-x4-host-adapter-board-pc-mac-linux
thanks for sharing your story and I'm glad it worked out for you in the end. Seems that M.2 will be ready for mainstream with Skylake.
Basically its shaping up real nice, but if it were me with a X99 system is either go XP951 (if you can find one) or wait until all the players are involved which should shake the prices up a little
I know this thread is a little old, but I am looking to get a Samsung SM951 when it is released and I found this nice blog which explains all things M.2. http://www.flexxmemory.co.uk/blog/s...st-pciexpress-ssd-for-ultraslim-notebook-pcs/
They were selling it already, right now they are out of stock : http://www.flexxmemory.co.uk/solid-...olid-state-drive-ssd-2280-mzhpv256hdgl-00000/ http://www.flexxmemory.co.uk/solid-...olid-state-drive-ssd-2280-mzhpv512hdgl-00000/
Using a Plextor 250GB M.2 in my HTPC. Installation was a doddle - didn't even have to turn on anything in the BIOS! Excellent so far - fastest boot times I've ever seen and (not that I've tested it) supposed to do 700MB/s read/write.
