Are M.2 SSD worth it?

Nebell

Nebell

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I've had my 950 Pro 512gb for over a year now. And honestly I don't notice any speed difference between a normal SSD and these M.2. I don't really do much but play games and download files. No big transfers etc.
However, I'm loving the fact that I don't have to deal with cables and SSD brackets.
But they do steal PCI-E lanes. So yay or nay?
 
You could get a SATA M.2 drive like a Crucial MX300. That way you have the benefit of no cables but without the additional cost of a nvme drive.
 
I love my M2 based 960 Pro 512Gb. 3100mbs read speeds? Yowza! Yeah, that can HAVE some PCI-E lanes if it wants them, that's a fair trade off!
 
Day-to-day use, you're probably not going to see a lot of difference. Benchmarks? Huge difference.

They're nice to avoid cables and mounting issues. They're faster in theory. They're more expensive in most cases, but that's variable. PCIe lanes aren't being used for anything else usually, unless you're going SLI or CF.

I'd see them replacing SATA drives in the long run, just due to the lower manufacturing cost and ease of mounting.
 
The way I see it:

1. M.2's advantages lie in its form factor, but it's also its greatest weakness. M.2 is best used for drives that you are NEVER going to need to recover data from (IE OS), since compared to a Sata drive, MB mounted M.2 is somewhere between PITA and RPITA to get to physically, depending on form factor. However, there are definitely cases (no pun intended) where having 1 less SATA drive to mount is a boon, EG HTPC ITX cases, where every cubic centimetre counts.

2. M.2 is fine if it doesn't compete for other motherboard resources. For example, Z270 chipsets usually have at least 1 M.2 slot that don't compete against other mobo resources, but on Z97 the M.2 would disable a couple of SATA ports. In most cases, they are not detrimental unless you specifically have uses with resources it conflicts. EG SLI or SATA devices.

I use Z97, and thus I decided to not use M.2 at all. I am close to running out of SATA ports on my Mobo, and would have run out completely had I used an M.2 Drive, and the drive is underneath my primary GPU slot, so I would essentially have to disassemble the GPU everytime I need to get to the M.2, and risking a $600 part for a $100 part seem unwise to say the least (I have already run into situation where I'd have to do that at least twice). I would have much preferred to use PCI-E M.2 add in card instead rather than using an actual M.2 Drive.

I considered getting M.2 for my (now canceled) HTPC project, but one major kicker is that the M.2 on ITX boards is placed in the worst position possible: on the backside of the Mobo, so if it goes TU, I'd essentially have to disassemble the entire rig to get to the drive.

For normal sized motherboards, the above issues with position should be lessened, as some have at least 1 M.2 slot positioned between the secondary PCI-E lanes, so unless you have cards that goes into those slots, that M.2 is much easier to get to.
 
Most m.2 implementations I've seen just steal pci-e lanes from the x16 slots, which you don't really need anyway.

You can run your x16 GPU on x8 or even x4 electrical and only see 1-2 fps difference between that and x16.
 
acquacow said:
Most m.2 implementations I've seen just steal pci-e lanes from the x16 slots, which you don't really need anyway.

You can run your x16 GPU on x8 or even x4 electrical and only see 1-2 fps difference between that and x16.
Click to expand...
That was my problem, I was running SLI on a 16 lane chipset, means I couldn't use anything that would compete lanes

And Z97 didn't have the "steal PCI-E lanes" implementation back then either, at least mine didn't, it was the "steal SATA ports", and it stole 2 for the performance of 1, which is ridiculously expensive.

Now, yes, there are such implementations, but the ones I have seen, I remember them only ever steal from the southbridge lanes, not the northbridge ones, means GPU lanes won't be affected.
 
My 960 Evo is really sweet. When I copied files off of my 850, it was insane seeing the speed being limited by the SATA bus from the old drive. The most noticeable day-to-day enhancement over the old drive is going into and resuming from hibernate - I have a lot of RAM and that's a lot to swap back and forth from storage.

The M.2 SSD is totally worth it for me, but I had the money aside to do it. That having been said, I could easily live with a SATA SSD as well, it just wouldn't be as nice. As an aside, my girlfriend's laptop has a mechanical drive, and having gotten very used to SSDs over the past several years, helping her out with the occasional computer issue makes me want to chuck the damn thing out the window. Rust storage is only good for large video files, disc images, etc. and if SSD gets any cheaper, I'm going to ditch the spinners entirely.
 
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TrailRunner said:
My 960 Evo is really sweet. When I copied files off of my 850, it was insane seeing the speed being limited by the SATA bus from the old drive. The most noticeable day-to-day enhancement over the old drive is going into and resuming from hibernate - I have a lot of RAM and that's a lot to swap back and forth from storage.

The M.2 SSD is totally worth it for me, but I had the money aside to do it. That having been said, I could easily live with a SATA SSD as well, it just wouldn't be as nice. As an aside, my girlfriend's laptop has a mechanical drive, and having gotten very used to SSDs over the past several years, helping her out with the occasional computer issue makes me want to chuck the damn thing out the window. Rust storage is only good for large video files, disc images, etc. and if SSD gets any cheaper, I'm going to ditch the spinners entirely.
Click to expand...
Why are you hibernating with a desktop? Makes your main point kinda moot.
 
I hibernate with nvme as my boot drive on my desktop as well. I do it nightly to save power. Don't need the 150W of idle power draw all night long when I'm not there.
 
acquacow said:
Most m.2 implementations I've seen just steal pci-e lanes from the x16 slots, which you don't really need anyway.

You can run your x16 GPU on x8 or even x4 electrical and only see 1-2 fps difference between that and x16.
Click to expand...

Just curious which ones do that with their more recent motherboards?
By doing that they break Intels RST but then not everyone uses it.
Thanks
 
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CSI_PC said:
Just curious which ones do that with their more recent motherboards?
By doing that they break Intels RST but then not everyone uses it.
Thanks
Click to expand...
Dunno about the most recent stuff, but my X99 boards take their x4 for the M.2 off of a pci-e slot.
 
acquacow said:
Dunno about the most recent stuff, but my X99 boards take their x4 for the M.2 off of a pci-e slot.
Click to expand...

They don't really "take them off". Most X99 boards have a slew of 16x, 8x, 4x and 1x slots. They have far more slots than you have PCIe lanes, even with a 40-lane CPU. Every X99 board distributes those lanes differently, so on some the lanes for the m.2 are reserved, some they're shared between an m.2 and a u.2 slot, and others they're shared between a 4x slot, or a 16x slot.
 
acquacow said:
Dunno about the most recent stuff, but my X99 boards take their x4 for the M.2 off of a pci-e slot.
Click to expand...
Yeah that is HEDT, and one benefit of it as it has masses of PCIe direct to CPU, also great if you want to use multiple NVMe storage products/Optane SSD/etc and not just for multiple GPUs.

x99-chipset-block-diagram-16x9.png


Mainstream consumer is very different as the storage including M.2 goes through the PCH/'Southbridge' instead.
Here is consumer setup as an example:

Proc_Schematic-700x511.jpg


Cheers
 
funkydmunky said:
Why are you hibernating with a desktop? Makes your main point kinda moot.
Click to expand...
I don't want to waste power running a computer for the 20 hours a day I'm at work / asleep / spending time with the family and not using it, but don't want to close my browser tabs, IDE, and anything else I'm working on.

Don't see how that makes moot my point that M.2 is awesome ;)
 
I picked an adata 512gb xpg m.2 and I am pretty happy with it.

I had the same concern as you, I do some editing and whatnot but not really alot. On the other hand I needed a larger SSD and wanted to utilize the m.2 should I get another ssd.

The Adata was a good trade of better performance and a decent price.
 
TrailRunner said:
The most noticeable day-to-day enhancement over the old drive is going into and resuming from hibernate
Click to expand...

acquacow said:
I hibernate with nvme as my boot drive on my desktop as well. I do it nightly to save power.
Click to expand...

Hibernate or sleep? I usually disable hibernate and hyrbid-sleep on desktops, especially ones with SSDs. Sleep accomplishes the same goal and resume is instant.

Just seems like a waste of writes to the SSD, drive space, and why wait for the reading it back to memory?

Laptops are a different story though...
 
Track Drew said:
Hibernate or sleep? I usually disable hibernate and hyrbid-sleep on desktops, especially ones with SSDs. Sleep accomplishes the same goal and resume is instant.

Just seems like a waste of writes to the SSD, drive space, and why wait for the reading it back to memory?

Laptops are a different story though...
Click to expand...
Well, it's a mix of both. In current versions of windows, if you want to use fast boot, you have to have hibernate enabled. Windows puts all of the loaded kernel and driver bits into the hiberfil.sys so that it can quickly re-load them into memory on boot.

When I'm not using my PC, I put it to sleep. My laptops, I hibernate when I shut them off.
 
acquacow said:
In current versions of windows, if you want to use fast boot, you have to have hibernate enabled.
Click to expand...

Well, today I learned... makes sense. Windows 10 boots so fast from an SSD already, I'll probably have to test.

Although, I really don't ever boot from a cold-shutdown. I either reboot, or resume from sleep which it appears fast-boot does nothing for?
 
TrailRunner said:
I don't want to waste power running a computer for the 20 hours a day I'm at work / asleep / spending time with the family and not using it, but don't want to close my browser tabs, IDE, and anything else I'm working on.

Don't see how that makes moot my point that M.2 is awesome ;)
Click to expand...
Sleep mode?
 
I never use hibernation. Pointless if you have AC power. Sleep, yes, that saves 20-60W depending on your PC.
 
I just had to switch to hibernation since a recent (probably a month ago) win10 insider preview has wrecked sleep on my skylake laptop. What I mean by that is when it wakes up from sleep the display no longer works (flashes a few times with garbled video but does not work).
 
Gabe3 said:
the intel 600p is faster than any sata ssd and costs the same price. $170 for 512gb. theres not really a reason to buy a sata ssd at the moment.
Click to expand...

Hate to burst your bubble, but it's not for game load times or Windows boot times. Hell man, even a 3200MHz RAM drive isn't faster for game load times than either a NVME or a good quality SATA III drive.

For raw benchmarks, fuck yeah it's faster. For database work, again fuck yeah. Even for video editing, fuck yes.

For game loading times? Fuck no. Modern computers are hampered by the NTFS file system as well as the very small (typically 1 or 2) queue depths that games employ.

And I can think of a reason why not to go with a NVME drive - thermal throttling. They need passive heatsinks or very good airflow to prevent this during sustained reads and writes.

In the end, to each their own. All I'm trying to do is help people make an informed decision - whatever is decided.
 
arestavo said:
Hate to burst your bubble, but it's not for game load times or Windows boot times. Hell man, even a 3200MHz RAM drive isn't faster for game load times than either a NVME or a good quality SATA III drive.

For raw benchmarks, fuck yeah it's faster. For database work, again fuck yeah. Even for video editing, fuck yes.

For game loading times? Fuck no. Modern computers are hampered by the NTFS file system as well as the very small (typically 1 or 2) queue depths that games employ.

And I can think of a reason why not to go with a NVME drive - thermal throttling. They need passive heatsinks or very good airflow to prevent this during sustained reads and writes.
Click to expand...
I havn't seen any reviews complain about heat slowing it down. although I know its a possibility. when I said its faster I didn't mean for gaming. its just faster in general than any sata ssd. same speed i guess for loading games.
 
Gabe3 said:
I havn't seen any reviews complain about heat slowing it down. although I know its a possibility. when I said its faster I didn't mean for gaming. its just faster in general than any sata ssd. same speed i guess for loading games.
Click to expand...

That is meant to be one benefit of Optane, much less thermal constraints and unfortunately the heat is a consideration for traditional NVMe in M.2 setup along with idle power that seems higher unless one messes around with NVMe/PCIe idle states; one of the better ones as an example is the 960 Evo at 1.16W idle but the 850 Evo uses just 0..03W at idle.
For more real world consumer loading to see improvements one really needs Optane or some kind of 3D Xpoint solution from Micron, and the price to performance gains are only worth it for those that are enthusiasts where price (new tech) does not matter much unless one uses the 16/32GB 'memory cache' version with a SATA boot drive (only works on boot drive for now).


Cheers
 
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Here is one of the few real world comparisons that has SATA, NVMe, and Optane.
NVMe can provide benefits in a well setup consumer environment and also can be faster depending upon game for loading (this one is a good example of a game benefitting from NVMe and one that does not).

timed-1.png



timed-3.png


https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Stora...Lightning/Installation-Timed-Tests-and-Observ

The NVMe was a 960 Evo, unfortunately I could not find a solid reference to what the SATA was and that can be important..
Optane memory was not used with NVMe SSD due to potential overheads and bottleneck that would be encountered with the DMI x4 as both go over that.
Cheers
 
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CSI_PC said:
Here is one of the few real world comparisons that has SATA, NVMe, and Optane.
NVMe can provide benefits in a well setup consumer environment and also can be faster depending upon game for loading (this one is a good example of a game benefitting from NVMe and one that does not).

timed-1.png



timed-3.png


https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Stora...Lightning/Installation-Timed-Tests-and-Observ

The NVMe was a 960 Evo, unfortunately I could not find a solid reference to what the SATA was and that can be important..
Optane memory was not used with NVMe SSD due to potential overheads and bottleneck that would be encountered with the DMI x4 as both go over that.
Cheers
Click to expand...


I'm sorry but those numbers are DEAD WRONG. 47 seconds to boot? I haven't had a noticable boot time beyond the bios splash screen with NVME. Literally it feels instantaneous. I'm not sure what this reviewer was doing wrong but that just throws off every other number in this review in a LARGE way.

I use word and Excel on my home systems... and again these numbers are just... wrong. My launches when office 365 isn't doing some stupid update are moments.. rarely noticeable.

I just... I don't see how these numbers were derived for the NVME speed. They are abhorrently wrong.
 
Grimlaking said:
I'm sorry but those numbers are DEAD WRONG. 47 seconds to boot? I haven't had a noticable boot time beyond the bios splash screen with NVME. Literally it feels instantaneous. I'm not sure what this reviewer was doing wrong but that just throws off every other number in this review in a LARGE way.

I use word and Excel on my home systems... and again these numbers are just... wrong. My launches when office 365 isn't doing some stupid update are moments.. rarely noticeable.

I just... I don't see how these numbers were derived for the NVME speed. They are abhorrently wrong.
Click to expand...
I think you're getting the HDD and nvme colors confused. they shouldn't have used two blues on those charts. thats the #1 rule in charts, dont use similar colors lol.
 
arestavo said:
Hate to burst your bubble, but it's not for game load times or Windows boot times. Hell man, even a 3200MHz RAM drive isn't faster for game load times than either a NVME or a good quality SATA III drive.

For raw benchmarks, fuck yeah it's faster. For database work, again fuck yeah. Even for video editing, fuck yes.

For game loading times? Fuck no. Modern computers are hampered by the NTFS file system as well as the very small (typically 1 or 2) queue depths that games employ.

And I can think of a reason why not to go with a NVME drive - thermal throttling. They need passive heatsinks or very good airflow to prevent this during sustained reads and writes.

In the end, to each their own. All I'm trying to do is help people make an informed decision - whatever is decided.
Click to expand...

Thermal throttling is really only a problem during benchmarks. None of the mainstream NVME drives will throttle under any workload except benchmarking, or HUGE sustained read/write operations. (like >30% of the drive capacity sized transfers). And even if they throttle, their throttled speed is STILL faster than a SATA SSD.

NVME are superior to SATA SSD in almost every way. The real question is how noticeable that is in day-to-day operations. Will games load faster? Probably, but if it loads in 29sec vs 30sec, does it really matter?

Cost is really the only reason to go with SATA over NVME at this point. And perhaps if you need more than 1 drive, since most of the time you're limited by available PCIe lanes to only one or two drives.
 
Gabe3 said:
I think you're getting the HDD and nvme colors confused. they shouldn't have used two blues on those charts. thats the #1 rule in charts, dont use similar colors lol.
Click to expand...

Yeah if one takes time it is pretty obvious what the HDD is :)
But yeah does not help the colours are close, although he has a lot of variables on there, still they are not exactly alike blues.
Cheers
 
Grimlaking said:
I'm sorry but those numbers are DEAD WRONG. 47 seconds to boot? I haven't had a noticable boot time beyond the bios splash screen with NVME. Literally it feels instantaneous. I'm not sure what this reviewer was doing wrong but that just throws off every other number in this review in a LARGE way.

I use word and Excel on my home systems... and again these numbers are just... wrong. My launches when office 365 isn't doing some stupid update are moments.. rarely noticeable.

I just... I don't see how these numbers were derived for the NVME speed. They are abhorrently wrong.
Click to expand...
As others mentioned.
Allyn is also testing an HDD without/with Optane that is the light blue and hence the long duration for that colour :)
Cheers
 
the question is what drive do I put in my new system, lol. every other part is ordered. I could go with the crucial sata mx300 525gb for $135 or the intel 600p m.2 525gb for $176. or something else but i dont want to spend over 200.

mobo is a ASRock Z270 KILLER SLI/AC and i7 7700k cpu. system is for gaming.
 
CSI_PC said:
As others mentioned.
Allyn is also testing an HDD without/with Optane that is the light blue and hence the long duration for that colour :)
Cheers
Click to expand...

they are all still absolutely wrong specially the HDD numbers.. I have machines with HDD only and not the faster and betters one and Windows 10 post to desktop take less than 8 with fast boot and without fast boot about ~15 up to 18 secs. 75secs to launch a game?. damn.. that have to be a 5400RPM from the 2000 with half the sectors bad..
 
Gabe3

Look at the Toshiba XG3, its the OEM version of the OCZ RD400. I got my 512gb drive off Ebay for 180.00.
 
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Araxie said:
they are all still absolutely wrong specially the HDD numbers.. I have machines with HDD only and not the faster and betters one and Windows 10 post to desktop take less than 8 with fast boot and without fast boot about ~15 up to 18 secs. 75secs to launch a game?. damn.. that have to be a 5400RPM from the 2000 with half the sectors bad..
Click to expand...
You did notice it takes 17s even with a SSD to launch AoTS?
That is a fair amount of time as well.

If you have a HDD that boots from post in 15-18 seconds without fast boot that would match some Sata SSD drives, I know others that have a minute to boot a HDD.
To say they are wrong is going too far considering you do not know the extent they went to make it a challenge for the test and that it probably is total boot time with essential standard services-apps loaded.
BTW you sure you were not using a Hybrid HD (SSHD) rather than a true HDD?

There are good reasons still for traditional HD that aren't say Raptor 10k spinners (Raptors still slower than hybrid HD in consumer related tests) and not fully replaced by SSHD, and if going hybrid route might as well go true SSD or take it to the next step and interface with Optane memory as a 'hybrid' type scenario if happy and only using a boot drive - shame they have this limitation currently with Optane).

CHeers
 
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Well.. look made a fast video with my phone



~16 secs boot time no fast boot.. this is nothing extraordinary as the HDD (WD Blue wd10ezex) as shown in the video it's just a normal average one, Sequential 190mb/s read 185mb/s write.. I just use a non-bloated Windows 10 in all my machines, with very few apps that launch with windows start, and this is by far I think the slowest of the machines without SSD at home, is the gaming machine of one of my sons, he doesn't even care about SSD to launch games, machine is plenty fast for him.
 
Ugh, vertical video of a horizontal screen, displayed in a horizontal player window on a horizontal screen.
 
Araxie said:
Well.. look made a fast video with my phone



~16 secs boot time no fast boot.. this is nothing extraordinary as the HDD (WD Blue wd10ezex) as shown in the video it's just a normal average one, Sequential 190mb/s read 185mb/s write.. I just use a non-bloated Windows 10 in all my machines, with very few apps that launch with windows start, and this is by far I think the slowest of the machines without SSD at home, is the gaming machine of one of my sons, he doesn't even care about SSD to launch games, machine is plenty fast for him.
Click to expand...


Fair enough still seems fast for accelerated boot disabled in UEFI and Win10 and without any tweaks (some mess around with hibernate that is associated to fast boot or sleep), but I can show you vids online where they take 45-65 seconds though.
Just curious which virus/firewall product that using?
The video is not clear (or my eyes lol) but is that video from the time you pressed power on or after the initial POST/BIOS-UEFI?

But that still does not take away from PCPer because you do not know how much they are stressing the environment, nor do most have a minimal Win10 environment.
Cheers
 
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