Hardware Plextor M6e Black Edition Review (512GB)

NVMe is getting closer and closer to in stock consumer products which will render all non NVMe premium ssds worthless...

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/samsung-goes-to-volume-production-with-really-fast-sm951-nvme.html

 

Whilst I am staggered by the rate of SSD development at the moment I do question how much this is necessary it the 'non-datacentre' environment (i.e. home users). Whilst faster is always better it seems like diminishing returns currently as, whilst I don't move large volumes of data, my Samsung 840 evo moves things pretty sharpish!

I would personally welcome a capacity increase / price reduction per GB rather than 2x or 3x the transfer speed.

 

I imagine that at the moment developers are rather stumped on how to produced larger memory modules or being able to produce more while also bringing the costs down and so while they work on this issue, they are advancing other areas rather than letting the overall development stagnate.

I think the same happened with HDD development as in speeds increased and then levelled off long before we saw massive advancements in storage capacities which are still increasing to this day.

 

I could be wrong, but I think that storage is the bottleneck for responsiveness in high end builds.
I have not had the change to try suck a drive but I would hope this is the case.
Looking at this tech I expect it to go much further in the next 1-2 years.
The 750 have excellant read/right speeds but I think it can be pushed further in other metrics.
With GTA V I feel the urge to upgrade from my Samsung 830 256GB to something larger but I also want a noticable increase in performance, not only size.

 

If you look at the Intel 750 NVME coverage on the techreport.com. You can see things like loading times were not affected even though they were using the fastest consumer flash storage on the planet. So unless you have a specific and suitable workload in mind (4k editing for example) I don't think you will notice much improvement with new SSDs

 

That is true. These super high speed solid state drives aren't really going to be useful yet to most people in the consumer tier. Especially not when they have such a huge price premium. For people that want more speed, there is still of course always the option to raid0 2 or more consumer tier sata ssd for similar speed at a likely lower price point with a good backup scheme in place in case of failure.
Though... I did just go for one of the Kingston HyperX Predator PCIe myself, but the cheaper 240GB model (which was on sale for a better price than the Plextor M6e 240GB) and I will use my current Seagate 600 as secondary. While I like the idea of nvme and would have preferred to get one with... I was not 100% that I would be able to boot from one on my x79 platform since not all of them have onboard boot orom and it's not often readily available in the specs which do and don't.

I too am more than ready for ssd to hit the price equivalent of HDD for drives in the 2,3,4,5TB sizes. At this point I would be more than happy with ssd that size with gen2 or so performance as long as they were cheap and reliable. I've had a far better track record with ssd not failing in the same time period with only 1 ssd vs 5 hdd. Plus even with 'slow' write ssd it's still better than hdd. I would love not to have such a terrible write penalty in parity scenario while potentially being able to ditch the journaling ssd I have employed now for a less 'exotic' set up.

 

All that being said, there is room for these new super SSDs in the consumer space. One possibility is high definition texture streaming in games, rather than block loading them into memory. The problem is there needs to be enough of a subset of gamers with NVME SSDs to warrant implementing the technology plus game publishers that actually want developers to implement cutting edge tech like this rather than sloppily port console stuff. Doesn't seem like it would happen any time soon.

 

They should do, PCI-e is flexible like that.

 

Right, pcie is really flexible, if it fits in the slot it should work. Any smaller card will work fine in a larger slot properly as long as cards are same gen or lower than the slot. Larger cards in smaller slots (if open backed), or in lower gen slots should work but in a reduced capacity.
Like I have a 4x msata drive 8x card in 16x slot, and it works fine of course... but putting a 16x video card in a 4x open back slot like I have on one of my server motherboards, well it works but pretty crappy. Putting gen3 card in gen1 slot works, but greatly reduced performance.

Like I said, yet... Just like a lot of improvements in tech software developers often won't take the time to implement it's use until it has a certain adoption rate. Or they simply can't be bothered because they are lazy/cheap and don't want to take the extra effort over minimal work console ports and etc. Like how long it took for software to make actual good use of multiple cores/threads or x64... way longer than it should have really. I think it will be similar with making good use of nvme in the desktop space, it will probably take some years.
Not to say there is no reason to buy now if you can afford it, as the more system that have a particular tech the more likely it is to be pushed to good use but... right now it's probably not going to do a lot in average real world desktop use. I'm sure in 5 years it might be the norm and useful, but it's not 5 years from now.