Best performing and price/performance new M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 SSD?

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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There's a bunch of new ones showing up on Newegg's ebay site. Looks like some competition in the performance M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 space.

Saw some 600p 128GB units, sold by a private seller, supposedly new, on ebay for $45. Almost went for them. Newegg doesn't seem to carry the 128GB 600p units any more, at least on their ebay site. Maybe they weren't big sellers.

On sale, you can get the 256GB 600p units for $80 or slightly less, which would seem to be a better deal overall.

Anyways, my use case, is in an ASRock DeskMini, which is a mini-PC with a PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 slot (PCI-E only, for the M.2 slot), and two 2.5" SATA6G ports, one of which requires removing the entire mobo from the chassis in order to screw in the drive. Such a hassle, so I'm only using the other 2.5" bay. I've got a PNY 240GB CS1111 drive (BX100 clone) in it, with Win10 Pro on there.

Was looking to maybe get a M.2 PCI-E drive, to use for a Linux dual-boot. (Prefer using separate drives, for Linux dual-boots, when possible. It just makes things cleaner, somewhat. Getting the BIOS to boot one or the other, in UEFI mode, is tricky.)

I could just get the cheapo 600p-series drives, and call it a day. Though, I would like something with maybe a little bit more performance, or MLC NAND, but *only* if it doesn't carry a huge price premium on it.

Edit: Here's a front-page article on a PNY MLC M.2 PCI-E SSD, with a Phison controller:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10943/pny-launches-cs2030-ssds-phison-ps5007e7-mlc-nand-28-gbs
 
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UsandThem

Elite Member
May 4, 2000
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BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
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Just browsing threads and feeling chatty.

I think this all depends on what you want your M.2 SSD for. Even if I wanted to put my dual-boot OS volumes on one, my primary objective first and foremost was use of a reasonably fast M.2 as a drive with caching volumes for each OS. I didn't want to shell out $620 for a 1TB Pro; nor the $400+ tag on a 1TB EVO. The 512GB models in both Pro and EVO could become cramped with two OS volumes and two caching volumes.

I finally just decided to order a $130 EVO 255GB to "test the water." In fact, I've finally decided not to configure the EVO to the motherboard M.2 slot, because it will share bandwidth with half my SATA ports. So I bought a Lycom PCI-E x4 card for the EVO, to use in my x4 slot.

200 Mhz difference in sequential reads between Pro and EVO isn't worth purchasing the 512GB pro, and I want to wait on either of the larger sizes to see what they'll cost in a year's time --- IF I can get this little EVO to work for me. It would be great if the caching will just double the speed of the SATA SSDs, and certainly the HDDs will show some amazing benchmarks if all goes well. I actually think it will prove out better than that, but we shall see.

I also suspect that I won't need to use the PrimoCache RAM-caching feature, or the amount of memory needed will be small.

If anyone is interested, I'll post the results once I have it all working and provided they're "viable." Heck -- I'll probably post them anyway . . . .

Hmm. . . . those PNYs in Larry's link look like they may be worthy. And I see there are also PCI_E adapters for two M.2's. Some maybe with two B and two M sockets. The adapters seem cheap, all in a range of maybe $15 to $25. It must be a simple circuit board, and not so easy for a manufucturer to fack up.
 
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bbhaag

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Jul 2, 2011
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Tomshardware likes the MyDigitalSSD BPX a lot for the value segment. MLC, 5 year warranty or 349 TBW. 240 GB for $108. Also available on Amazon for a few more bucks.

I wouldn't spend the money on a 600p as it's performance drops below SATA drives in some tests. Overall just a disappointing product.

http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/my...x4-nvme-ssd-mdnvme80-bpx-0256/#specifications

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mydigitalssd-bpx-nvme-ssd,4780.html

I've been looking real hard at the 480gb version of these for my new build. They get favorable reviews and the price is right. $187 right now if you buy off their site. That's an incredible price IMO for the specs/size they offer.
 

UsandThem

Elite Member
May 4, 2000
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I've been looking real hard at the 480gb version of these for my new build. They get favorable reviews and the price is right. $187 right now if you buy off their site. That's an incredible price IMO for the specs/size they offer.

I'm in the same boat. The Samsung 960 EVO is faster without a doubt in all the synthetic benchmarks. However, it is also $63 more and has a shorter warranty and there is no "real life" differences in most typical desktop uses (games, programs, load times, etc). However, Samsung has some perks the BPX drive doesn't have......they are the 800 pound gorilla in the NAND market, and provide a Samsung NVME specific driver, and has its Magician utility (which some people hate, but I actually like it, especially the new 5.0 version).

I think if the BPX drops to $175 range with all the new NVME drives soon coming out, I'll probably pull the trigger on it. I even checked their BBB rating, and they have an A+ rating........the same can't be said about Samsung in that department ;)
 

BonzaiDuck

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Jun 30, 2004
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I'm in the same boat. The Samsung 960 EVO is faster without a doubt in all the synthetic benchmarks. However, it is also $63 more and has a shorter warranty and there is no "real life" differences in most typical desktop uses (games, programs, load times, etc). However, Samsung has some perks the BPX drive doesn't have......they are the 800 pound gorilla in the NAND market, and provide a Samsung NVME specific driver, and has its Magician utility (which some people hate, but I actually like it, especially the new 5.0 version).

I think if the BPX drops to $175 range with all the new NVME drives soon coming out, I'll probably pull the trigger on it. I even checked their BBB rating, and they have an A+ rating........the same can't be said about Samsung in that department ;)

I could give an eye to the 600P and other lower-performing M.2 NVMe drives if I had more PCI-E slots and didn't plan on integrating SATA drives from the board controller.

After spending much of the last three months thinking to use the onboard M.2 slot of my Sabertooth Z170, I looked more carefully at those SATA needs and my plans for later -- maybe -- adding a second GTX 1070 to the system. I can run my third PCI-E "long" slot as x4 if I disable SATA ports 5 and 6 on the board. That's fine: I need a port for the boot drive*(!), a port for a cache/accelerated HDD, a port for an uncached media HDD, and a port for my ODD. Perfect.

Then I can stick in the cheap (by comparison) 960 EVO 255GB using a PCIE adapter, and have better assurance it will perform to its 3,200/1,900 spec than might happen with the M.2 motherboard slot (sharing bandwidth with port1+port2 SATA_Express_1 bus.

But with the trouble I've gone to before the drive or adapter has even been delivered, I can see how I might have spent more for a 1TB model, and freed up another SATA port, which I could connect to my second 2.5" hot-swap bay or front-panel eSATA.

*(!) I'm going to leave the dual-boot OS's on the SATA SSD and simply cache them and the HDDs to the M.2. Peformance benchies should show the "performance" of these cached drives closer to the M.2 spec than their own.