PCIe SSDs slowly replacing SATA3 SSD
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TheDeeGee
They just need to drop in price.
Rather have a few cables than pay 50 bucks extra for speeds youre not going to notice in normal day use.
cryohellinc
This. For an average user, Nvme adds nothing of value + it costs more.
You will never see a similar performance gain as when you upgrade from HDD to SSD.
mbk1969
Don`t ruin implants in consumers` heads - true enthusiast should use only newest hardware.
Kaarme
Considering how old sata 3 is already, it's weird there's no sata 4. I guess nobody is developing one? Most people haven't got too many M.2 slots. PCIe addon cards with an M.2 slot or two of them must be numerous, though I never look at them.
Evildead666
The problem is that the add-on cards require PCIe bifurcation.
Not all intel boards support that, and some AMD boards do.
I'd like to see the M2 connector go vertical, rather than laying flat on the motherboard. It takes up so much space!!!
They should be inserted like Dimms really, space wise.
Sata is basically dead I think for now. They tried to double up the bandwidth with SATA-Express, which was just terrible in terms of connector size, and space taken on the mobo also.
U2 isn't much better.
We probably need a 4-in-1 cable that has one connector on the Mobo, and breaks out to four M2 connectors, or more.
We could also do with seeing some more M2 backplanes for PC's, stuff that either fits in the 3.5in bays, or 5.25in bays, or both.
Richard Nutman
I have an M2 for OS drive, it's nice.
One thing though, how do you migrate an M2 drive to another M2 drive when your old one is dying?
Kaleid
Apparently not
StorageReview
We've been told by people in the working group that SATA will not be developed further.
Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/storage/comments/aaqgr9/will_there_be_a_sata_iv/
BLEH!
SAS 12 Gb/s has been a thing for years, can't they readily port this over to SATA?
Inquisitor
M2 is nice to have but definitely not essential and day to day t's very hard to notice any difference compared to a normal SSD and for the average user, they will not notice any difference.
Unless we really start going the micro PC route for the majority of PCs sold where space is really at a premium, I can't see why manufactures would change from SSD to M2 until it's cheaper for them to do so and at the moment M2 are much more expensive than SSD
cryohellinc
Good point! My bad. 😉
Dragam1337
My issue with NVMe ssd's is that with consumer cpu's that only have 16 pcie lanes, you use up 4 up those lanes on the NVMe, meaning your gpu will only be running with 8 pcie lanes. Now this might not make a huge difference performance wise with a single gpu, but it can still affect performance, especially at 4k, and i personally wouldn't ever sacrifice potential performance for slightly faster loading times.
Corbus
Yesterday i cancelled my order of a 2 tb 660p from intel.
At first i got excited of how cheap it is but then i read how it's speed gets crippled once it gets half full. QLC is cheap for a reason.
nicugoalkeper
@Fox2232 good point, but in time new CPU's will change this and the cost will go down so
"slowly replacing" is the right word.
Evildead666
yeah, It reads like I was meaning vertical, like a chewing gum stick on its end, but i was meaning on its side, like memory slots, yes 🙂
Evildead666
MLC and TLC also have this problem.
Its due to the number of memory channels iirc.
There are generally 8 memory channels per ssd, and when you fill up half the drive, you basically lose half of the controllers, because those chips are full.
edit : Its actually because when near full, you have partially filled sectors in the flash chips, and to fill that flash up, it has to copy the actual data, add the new data, and write back. A lot more than just writing.
The problem is only with writes iirc, although I could be wrong.
Reads should be just fine, no matter how much the drive is full.
edit : https://www.howtogeek.com/165542/why-solid-state-drives-slow-down-as-you-fill-them-up/
Link to explanation of why ssd's get slower as you fill them up.
zig11727
I use SATA SSD's in a caddy system on my PC this way I have separate SATA ssd's with different builds of Windows. This wouldn't be possible with M2 SSDs
Luc
Now, I don't need another M.2 NVMe, mine is fast and big enough, but my other storage needs are based on reliability, density and price, as my 3 HDD, and none of them saturates a Sata 3 connection, nor a dvd reader does.
So, if we are planning on gaming or working on budget, I don't get why we need so many NVMe. If the answer is yes we need it, then there exist HEDT platforms with many M.2 slots, where to throw the money.
For me the balance is having an ultra fast drive for the OS, programs and on course workloads, and many other many TB big storage discs for data that will last the more the better, and save enough money for the rest of HW, SW, taxes, food, etc.
My case and opinion.
PS: AM4 platform always keeps 4x lanes for M.2 from the CPU reserved.
schmidtbag
Well, that sure is a bit elitist...
You can be a hardware enthusiast without buying into "latest and greatest".
I agree with all of this. We're reaching a point where there's only 2 reasons to want multiple drives:
1. More capacity than what a single drive is capable of storing.
2. Redundancy.
For the vast majority of M.2 users, a single drive is (or at least can be) sufficient. IMO, RAID1 is a waste of money for NVMe drives in general (regular compressed backups are a more sensible choice). RAID0 will overall hurt everything that gives M.2 a superior performance advantage over SATA, so if all you care about is large capacities with good sequential read/write performance, might as well go with SATA.
So all that being said, since M.2 drives aren't hot-swappable or quick+easy to remove, I really don't understand what the point is of having many of them. You could argue "one could be used for a cache drive" but at that point why don't you just use one big cache drive and then use all SATA storage? The end result will be mostly the same at that point.
I find a NAS is a great way to store everything that doesn't demand high performance, like media and documents.
Luc
Shure, I will get one in another place, maybe at home, to backup important data in different places to avoid disasters 😱
schmidtbag
Actually I meant for just everyday use, not just backups. You can mount network drives to be treated/recognized as another hard drive. But yes, they're great for backups too.
