M.2 NGFF vs msata? (and crucial m500 and asus maximus impact)

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darckhart

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 15, 2013
Messages
238
hi all,

long time lurker, but starting new build, so finally ready to ask some questions! wasn't sure if this would go in mobo or storage since it's sort of a combo question, so i picked this category. mods, please move if more appropriate.

I do some browsing on google and wikipedia trying to find out the differences between M.2 and msata, but they seem the same to me? except for length of the pcb, where it appears M.2 allows for longer so that more chips can be added on. Is that the only difference?

and a more general question, are these ssd bootable? seeing as how it talks on SATA I would assume so?

so, i'm looking at getting the asus maximus impact and I notice it has support for M.2 NGFF ssd. but i'm leaning toward a crucial m500... which currently only has msata version. but i'm wondering if it would still be compatible?

thanks for any help!
 
It should be bootable, but it looks like it's on the PCIe bus, probably through the DMI bus, so I wouldn't put an SSD on that.
 
thanks for the replies!

i'm not totally familiar with all the lingo, but supposing i was more interested in the fact that i get to save some sata ports, and that it's space saving, do your guys' recommendations change? m.2 or msata purely for performance is not my main priority. being SSDs, i imagine they'd perform as such, regardless of the interface?

actually the asrock was my 2nd choice board. i may revisit its specs...
 
It'll be slower then both mSATA and regular SATA because of Asus's implementation. It only gets worse if you're also using a wireless card in the mPCIe Combo II card, 5Gb/s is all that combo card gets to work with.

The Asrock Z77E-ITX board had the mSATA slot routed to a sata II (3Gb/s) port, but since Z87 has all sata III (6Gb/s) ports, that's what you get.
 
oh i see. so it could be a rather large penalty due to both the connection and the sharing. well, that's not good!

haha well that makes the asrock implementation a LOT better in this regard. looking at some photos of the board now though has the wireless chip in an odd spot requiring some wries to reach out to the back i/o.
 
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