Hey, I am Rehousing my gaming rig into a ITX format and would like to migrate to a M.2 boot disk / gaming drive. I dont require storage in this machine and 500GB drive will fill all my requirements. I'm looking to move to a M.2 drive from a standard 2.5" to reduce components in my case and as space is tight. I already have the following motherboard: Asus - H97I-PLUS which comes with the following M.2 support: 1 x M.2 Socket 3, with M Key, type 2260/2280 storage devices support (both SATA & PCIE mode) This is what I understand: I can pick up any M.2 SSD that's M-keyed and it should work. Then I have the option on interface type. A SATA based M.2 drive will be limited to SATA 3 (500 MBps) speeds but is cheaper A PCIE based M.2 drive will be faster (~7-800 MBps) and much more expensive. I'm leaning towards a MX200 or a EVO 850. Anything i am missing / need to consider?
The Samsung 850 EVO 500GB M.2 / 2280 is the way to go (SATA interface over M.2). While the PCI-E variant is a cool prospect, especially considering the Samsung SM951 512GB is hilariously fast at 2.2GB/sec read and 1.5GB/sec write... it is quite a bit more expensive. However, gaming/general use benchmarks have shown repeatedly that the premium for PCI-E is not worth it, as there is no improvement in game load time/performance. The key reason for getting the PCI-E variant is if you expect to be doing unusually heavy workstation I/O work.
Excellent, that's exactly the sort of feedback I'm after. I was heading more for the Crucial as it has the option of double sided (bringing it down to 2260, rather than the 2280) any considerations / concerns for that?
The M.2 sits flush with the PCB of the motherboard so clearance shouldn't be an issue. Also, see this: http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-850-Evo-500GB-vs-Crucial-MX200-500GB/3477vs3504 - I've opt for the Samsung over the Crucial. The benchmarks speak volumes.
Good advise. I have the SM951 in the Impact ITX board, sadly it doesn't support the SATA interface, FORCING me to get the 2.2gb/s 951... Sometimes you have to make these sacrifices.
I can understand that would have been a really hard decision. Is it correct that the 951 isn't seen on the Samsung utility and that Samsung may not honour end user warranty because its an OEM part? Not that it matters to me as I have mine on order but just out of interest?
The Samsung 950 pro will be out soon http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/22/samsung-950-pro-m4-ssd/ It's the consumer version of the SM951
Under that premise, working from memory (so it's not intended to be a complete list of every issue), you'd also need to ignore - intel - d.t. their failure to update f/w to make it trim or GC compatible in 2008/2009, the SSD 320 8MB f/w bug, plus being counting within the 2nd Gen SF issues, Crucial - d.t. the f/w 5200 hour issue in 2011/12 that led to drives becoming unreadable, OCZ & Kingston - d.t. them both having swapping in slower flash in on models at points without telling anyone, plus also being within the 2nd gen SF issues, any company that used the 2nd Gen SF (so that also takes out Corsair, Toshiba, Mushkin, Patriot, OWC, etc - obviously not all brands are still selling SSDs), d.t. all of the initial issues with the gen2 ones... ...&, as we now don't trust SF, any company that uses the third gen (if it's ever released), so that will certainly add Seagate as they now own SF. So, of the decent consumer brands, off the top of my head, that leaves you with what, Plextor... ...& whilst they've certainly made a few pretty good SSD models, they also have tended to be pretty expensive for what they are. Now obviously if you were hit by the slow down with the 840 or 840 Evo then it wasn't ideal, but comparatively this was a minor issue compared to the at least a f/w issue from each of the others - as it didn't lose anyone any data. (that's not suggesting that there isn't a failure rate to all SSDs of course)
I also struggle with this issue too; my boot time's not even long enough to get a glass of water, let alone make a cup of tea. What were they thinking! Maybe they'll fix it in a firmware update...
The price is also very competitive. Definitely worth considering if the UK prices aren't your bog standard price-gouging affair.
I'm referring to the fact that the drives have gone through two updates and the issue still remains: http://techreport.com/review/27727/some-840-evos-still-vulnerable-to-read-speed-slowdowns There is a reason Samsung offers such a good value proposition. Didn't Intel perform extensive validation on the Sandforce 2 controller, finding and implementing exclusive fixes prior to launch?
Ummm... That article's after the first f/w fix - the second one was in April. & although intel claimed to have sorted all of the issues with SF, taking an extra year & a half before releasing any SF SSDs, it took a few f/w revisions after they were actually on sale before things appeared to settle down - though it didn't solve issues for everyone... ...& they also, despite their extensive testing & new f/w, failed to spot that the controller couldn't actually do AES-256 encryption until over 4 months after they'd released the thing - & so had to offer refunds... (this failure to spot obviously applied to all of the companies who used the SF) This, however, is ignoring the other 2 completely different issues that intel failed to do anything about & created respectively... ...& likewise, prior to intel, OCZ went far beyond any of the other companies in working through issues with the 2nd Gen SF & coming up with answers that solved problems for lots of people - though they got slated despite this, so why shouldn't intel also take some blame? Now don't get me wrong, i'm not actually slating intel or any of the other brands, saying that Plextor are inherently worth spending more money on nor stating that any brand will or won't have some issue in the future or might choose to do something underhand. instead it's factually stating that, at some point or other, all of the brands who sold/sell decent (or at least what 'should' have been decent) SSDs have had problems, barring Plextor ttbomk, & to ignore all of the back history to only focus on the latest manufacturer that had an issue simply isn't sensible or reasonable... ...esp to the extent of applying an isolated issue with their first gen TLC nand SSDs to every product that they have released or are going to be releasing.
What do you make of the Samsung 950 512GB m.2 Pocket? That is where my money is going on release. Give the NVMe compatibility on my mobo a workout.
There's provisionally no reason at all why it shouldn't be a great drive; however, along with waiting for Anandtech to review it to make sure that there's nothing odd about any of its performance characteristics... ...it's obviously going to be expensive, at least initially, d.t. both the lack of any major competition in the consumer/pro-sumer space & that, until Q1 2016, it tops out at 512GB & having higher capacity models for those with the cash tend to help prices fall... ...however, the biggest problem with the shift upwards in speeds for most people is that they'll be doing nothing that can make any significant material use of the extra speed & so they're not worth spending noticeably more money on... ...& in this regard SSDs have now become very like processors (where for gaming & lots of other consumer uses there's no point buying an i7 or e processor), ram (where, for example, beyond 2400 CL15 DDR4 there's no gain for most consumer uses) & gfx cards (where it becomes overkill unless you're using a high res or looking at GPU processing in something like Premiere or mining or something). Well, for my own uses, i've been using SATA SSDs in R0 for years as there's a specific batch encoding task that i regularly do where a single 6Gb/s (or previously a pair of 3Gb/s ones) bottlenecks the process - however 2x 6Gb/s ones have thus far removed the bottleneck entirely... (this is based on a 3770K @ 4.8GHz - i'm in the process of shifting to a 5930K build & this 'may' alter things, as the task is very highly sequential & can run independently on every logical core, on but it's hardly a general consumer level processor) ...& the same applies to a significant amount of 4K video editing (depending on the codecs, compression & the CPU/GPU combo to actually drive the processing). [NB completely separately, i could notice a difference in responsiveness going from 1x 3GB/s to 2x 3Gb/s to 4x 3Gb/s or 2x 6Gb/s - however this was very negligible on the last stage so, whilst nvme has lower latency, i expect nothing significant to change in this regard from something like the 950.] Obviously there are other uses, but it's far more likely that a consumer/prosumer would have an odd usage that requires slightly high sequential speeds than 6Gb/s SATA than more iops, hence whilst not everyone will be doing exactly what i am, they're reasonable examples. Now, whilst there's certainly less 'glamour' in it, at least in terms of pointless benchmarks to show off with... ...what would actually benefit most people is to ignore m.2 completely for the moment (unless you can only use it for some reason) & instead buy capacity - which is going to continue to become cheaper per GB with SATA drives in the relatively near future d.t. more competition & greater maturity with layered nand decreasing the NAND cost. So, tbh, what will be more practically useful to far more consumers will be the 4TB 850 Pro & 1TB 850 Evo - not because the 4TB drive in itself will be affordable, but because of the impact it will have on the 512GB & 1TB capacity prices... ...so for a buying group like gamers, where a decent but not OTT SSD would be advantageous, there will be advantages.
Prices have already been announced: $200 for 256GB and $350 for 512GB. That puts it into a very competitive price range and cheaper than the SM951's. Fingers crossed the UK prices aren't silly, but then again, anyone traveling to North America can snag them at the current GBP -> USD conversion on the cheap.
$350 is still ~£230 for the 500GB PRO drive. That's a premium of at least 50% over the same size EVO at UK retail and close to what the SM951 is available for today.
This, combined with the lack of benefit of the increased performance for most people, is exactly the issue atm... ...though i wouldn't have necessarily used the Evo as the comparison point. Well, for the kind of tasks that i've described, as any half decent pair of 6Gb/s in R0 would suffice then there are alt options for sustained sequential r/w speeds that would be cheaper still. Then, since as a consumer/prosumer (unless you had some really unusual task with an alt i/o usage) it's only with tasks like the ones described that you could see a material gain over a single 6Gb/s SSD... ...as capacity is a factor with either my batch encoding of many 100s of GBs of files at a time & 4K video, this cost differential 'could' multiply up (in that you can obviously use pcie adaptor cards for m.2 to use more than one).
