Best of the best SSD (SATA, M.2, PCI)

[LateralusArt]

I am looking for the best SSDs for my new workstations. I divided it by interface:

SATA: Samsung 850 Pro
M.2: Samsung XP941
PCI: ? (Plextor M6E, OCZ RevoDrive 350, Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe, OWC Mercury Accelsior)
SATA EXPRESS: none

My WS is based on latest Intel Haswell-E CPU. I working in arch-viz industry (AutoCAD, 3ds Max, Vray, Photoshop)

I don't know which to choose and if it is worth it to go with SATA in RAID 0.


What are Your advices?

 

[LurchFrinky]

Just so you know, M.2 is more of a form-factor. It comes in SATA and PCIE interfaces. If you have a workstation motherboard with an M.2 slot built-in, then it is likely PCIE. Laptops, netbooks, chromebooks, etc. use M.2 SATA SSDs. The XP941 is PCIE and can be installed on an M.2 to PCIE adapter card if your mobo doesn't have a built-in M.2 slot.

I'm looking to make my next build with PCIE SSD for neatness and speed (in that order).

But for you, the big questions are how much capacity, how much money, and will this be your only drive?

 

[razel]

Talk amongst your arch-wiz peers. They'd know best by real-world experience. We can only categorize the available bandwidth for you. Generally since you mention Haswell E you will obviously max your RAM then definitely go with a solid state for daily work.

Latency between the SSDs will be minimal unless you go PCIe. Even then current pro-sumer drives are still new and only hint at the capability. Keep in mind that even the Intel PCIe SSDs deliver SOOOOOO much data that certain benchmarks began to overwhelm the CPU as noticed by pcper. Meaning that software the benchmarking software needs to be rewritten.

 

[nk215]

For the stuffs that I didn't care so much about, I use SSDs from (plextor, samsung - not the EVO, Intel etc). I do have ~20 SSD in my various computers. For the stuffs that put food on my table, I only use Intel enterprise SSDs. From the old X-25E SLC to the newer 730 series.

Recently, the power supply on one of my main work computers went out and the computer shut down. This computer hosts patient database. No data corruption.

Having said that, the chance of loosing data due to power interruption is small with HDD in general but that's the chance I don't want to take. UPS only protect me up stream from the power supply, there's nothing between the power supply and my data but the capacitors in the intel 730.

 

[LateralusArt]

I need about 256/512 GB SSD, for files i have WD black 4 TB, the price it isn't so important but quality and speed yes.

Thanks

 

[Cerb]

An S3500 300-480GB would be good, if the price isn't a bug problem. It has power loss protection for in-flight data, and nobody validates their stuff like Intel.

Your workload is one where having an SSD makes a big difference, but you need more RAM if you can tell any differences between most current-gen SSDs (Sandisk Ultra Plus, Phison-based, and SMI-based models being possible exceptions).

RAID 0: you won't need it for IOPS. The main benefit would be to be able to transfer data within a volume at faster speeds than with a single drive. If you're backing your SSD with a HDD and/or NAS, it'll do no good at all.

Latency between the SSDs will be minimal unless you go PCIe.

This isn't the whole truth, though. Latency only goes down significantly when ditching ATA, for which there are only a few out there, ATM. Most PCIe SSDs are still just SATA SSDs.