Is anyone actually running a U.2 drive(s)?

dvsman

dvsman

2[H]4U
Joined
Dec 2, 2009
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I was just reading some forum posts here on [H] about M.2 mobo slots possibly being slower than an M.2 on a PCIE card and started poking around on my mobo and remembered I had these U.2 sockets on there.

U.2 was supposed to be the new hotness but I don't see anyone ever mention these things and wonder if this tech just never went anywhere or is it more of a future proofing thing that hasn't come down yet?

Any thoughts?
 
Yeah I'm curious to know. I don't have any U.2 and to be honest I can't tell the difference between a good SATA SSD and my NVMe pushing 3400MBps for day to day stuff.

It's always typical you get a industry standard of port that 'just works' for over 10 years and is very successful then the industry just forgets all that and we then have 5-6 different ports and slots and the industry wonders why so many just fail.

I can see all the current ones being dropped and a new 10 year+ standard emerging.
 
I'm right there with you. I've had single sata / msata, 2x sata RAID0 all the way up to 5x sata RAID0 and the only real difference has been in benchmarks and maybe some game loading screens. I've finally settled on 1x large NVME M.2 and calling it a day. Small form factor (good for case airflow) and makes setting up a new rig easy as cake.

My current PC will be my last with multiple drives and that was just because the case was huge and I happened to have the drives on hand to put in. If not for my NEED for good video cards, I'd go full on SFF but as it is the NCASE is pretty good compromise.
 
I have an M.2 to U.2 adapter on my X99 board and an Intel 750. Pretty much there's very little market share as the only consumer product is the aforementioned one. If you want a beefy workstation with something that won't have thermal throttling, it's the way to go (or AIC, which is arguably more popular).

As for speed, that all lies on how things are connected. U.2 can experience the same slowdowns if it goes through DMI instead of being directly connected to the CPU like M.2. HEDT of course has many more PCIe lanes and therefore generally doesn't have that issue. I think there's only a single consumer motherboard that has U.2 that isn't part of the HEDT line (Asus ITX one as far as I remember).
 
Currently using an Intel 750 U.2 in a SuperMicro Server. Like a user above said, it's good for being able to pop the drive in and out from the front of the server.
 
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