M.2 NVMe 4x PCI 3.0 4 GB/s SSD interface - is it here to stay?

[Fjodor2001]

Hi,

Obviously there is a need for a new interface beyond SATA to make use of upcoming higher SSD speeds.

However it all seems to be in a flux at the moment. SATA Express, mSATA, M.2 and so on. So what do you think will become the next standard on desktop PCs that will be commonly used and stick for awhile? I.e. the successor to SATA?

I'm thinking M.2 NVMe 4x PCI 3.0 might be it. It's capable of up to 4 GB/s. So far that bandwidth is not maxed out yet either. Any chance it be soon?

Also, are there any other competing standards on the horizon? And is there anything blocking this one from becoming it? Possibly the mess with different M.2 key fittings, physical sizes, AHCI vs NVMe, and so on might confuse people. But maybe this will all settle down and there will be a single key, and limited physical sizes in the end, reducing the confusion and making it more standardized?

Please let me know what you think.

 

[Fernando 1]

Recently I have tested and compared the performance of the following SSDs with my ASRock Z97 Extreme6:

• 512 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD (Intel SATA3 connected)
• 2x256 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSDs as RAID0 (Intel SATA3 connected)
• 512 GB Samsung XP941 AHCI SSD (M.2 connected)
• 256 GB Samsung SM951 AHCI SSD (M.2 connected)
• 256 GB Samsung SM951 NVMe SSD (M.2 connected)
• 256 GB Samsung 950 Pro NVMe SSD (M.2 connected)
• 400 GB Intel 750 NVMe SSD (PCIe connected)

You can find the benchmark results here: http://www.win-raid.com/t977f34-Benchmarks-Comparison-of-the-currently-fastest-consumer-SSDs.html

 

[Carfax83]

I'd like to know the answer to this as well. Although to be honest, I have yet to see how these blazing fast I/O speeds help day to day computing, or even gaming. Unless you routinely transfer and copy large files, then it almost doesn't seem worth it to invest in one of these cutting edge storage technologies.

 

[frowertr]

I don't see how M.2 or U.2 can lose. No cables to deal with at all and the devices are tiny. I'd be all for buying a MB with four or six M.2 sockets as opposed to the same in SATA ports. Oh and it's 8 Gbit/s for each lane on PCIe 3.0. So on a 4 lane M.2 NVMe that's a whoopping 32Gbps transfer rate.

As far as SATA Express, I'm thinking it is dead before it even got a start. Those giant ass plugs remind me of older IDE/SCSI cables from the 90's.

 

[BSim500]

However it all seems to be in a flux at the moment. SATA Express, mSATA, M.2 and so on. So what do you think will become the next standard on desktop PCs that will be commonly used and stick for awhile? I.e. the successor to SATA?

I honestly couldn't say. I don't doubt SATA will be superseded eventually but how much of the "SATA bottleneck" is number chasing geeks arguing in tech forums over the usual wildly unrealistic synthetic benchmarks vs any actual "OMG, 850 PRO's are unbearably slow [sobs]. It's like copying one 1.44MB floppy disk to another all over again [weeps]" TechReport are one of the few sites that can actually be bothered to do some down to earth testing, and their 950 PRO review was quite an eye opener as far as premium NVMe vs budget SATA SSD "depreciating gain" is concerned:-

^ The M.2 NVMe Samsung 950 PRO costs more than double the SATA "bottlenecked" MX200 & 850 EVO it somehow manages to lose to in half the real-life tests. Go figure... Last time I looked there weren't even any 1TB M2 NVM's available at any price and most ordinary people are generally more interested in SSD capacities going up and prices coming down, not respectively shrinking and doubling because of a new socket's theoretical benefits. You only have to look at SATA SSD vs RAMDisk load-time benchmarks for games to see that outside of the usual "fake use" synthetics, SATA isn't that bottlenecked in practise even vs 5-10GB/s "storage". Unless you get paid to edit video's 8hrs per day (and even that doesn't involve continuous non-stop writes) I wouldn't even bother looking at M2 NVM drives at current prices.

My advice is don't bother holding out for a new standard to become mainstream. Buy what you need when you need it, and when you do, base it on realistic personal usage scenario's you're actually likely to use, not silly "Destroyer" benchmarks involving writing 1TB in one go in a "typical consumer day", or "time accelerated trace tests" that squeeze 6 months of work into an afternoon (whilst "garbage collection" runs at normal speed) or 30mins of 4k Q32 writes continuously without any breaks, which would require the average person to have a 2 Gigabit/s net connection and constant page loads without actually reading anything they open to "simulate" a 'typical' web browser cache...

I think M2/NVMe will be the "winner" long-term, but at $350 for 512GB of storage (950 PRO), whilst most PC's & laptop's are still sold without any SSD at all and everyone else is buying $150 drives, and even most M2 drives sold are SATA variants of 850 EVO's, etc, I think M2 is going to be one of those "pseudo-standards" that arrives with a decade long drawn out whimper rather than a "must upgrade now" bang.

 

[Fjodor2001]

I The M.2 NVMe Samsung 950 PRO costs more than double the SATA "bottlenecked" MX200 & 850 EVO

Yes, at the moment I also don't think the M.2 NVMe Samsung 950 PRO is worth the extra cost. But it'll most likely come down in price if/when M.2 becomes more mainstream. After all it's mostly the flash memory chips that cost money, regardless if used in SATA or M.2 SSDs.

 

[ShintaiDK]

SATA Express and mSATA is dead. SATA Express was stillborn

M.2 and U.2 is the future. Until memory and storage will become the same thing.

 

[shabby]

I honestly couldn't say. I don't doubt SATA will be superseded eventually but how much of the "SATA bottleneck" is number chasing geeks arguing in tech forums over the usual wildly unrealistic synthetic benchmarks vs any actual "OMG, 850 PRO's are unbearably slow [sobs]. It's like copying one 1.44MB floppy disk to another all over again [weeps]" TechReport are one of the few sites that can actually be bothered to do some down to earth testing, and their 950 PRO review was quite an eye opener as far as premium NVMe vs budget SATA SSD "depreciating gain" is concerned:-

So where's the bottleneck when it comes to load times? Is it the cpu, chipset or? If you use a ramdisk are the load times similar?

 

[BSim500]

So where's the bottleneck when it comes to load times? Is it the cpu, chipset or? If you use a ramdisk are the load times similar?

For games there are multiple other bottlenecks during startup besides raw I/O throughput. First of all, games don't just "read" data like SSD synthetic benchmarks do, they typically uncompress compressed / packed data. It'll read some then uncompress it. Then read some more then uncompress that. That's why the HDD LED "flickers" in many games instead of being always on. Then it goes through all sorts of video / audio / input initialization routines. Then you've got unskippable startup logo's, epilepsy warnings, etc, where literally nothing is going on. From above DIMMDrive review:-

^ The 1st darkest blue bar is a HDD on a USB caddy. The 2nd medium blue bar is same HDD on SATA. The 3rd lightest blue is an SSD on SATA 3. And the 4th green is a RAMDrive that's typically 5x faster than the fastest "peak" M.2 / NVMe drive Samsung 950 PRO drive and up to 20x theoretically faster than the 3rd light blue bar's peak SATA 3 sequential read speed. So an M2 / NVMe drive will be somewhere between the 3rd & 4th bars. With only one or two exceptions, there's literally no perceivable gain for most games and above 500MB/s is well into the realms of depreciating gains.

It replicates my personal findings of testing RAM Drives for gaming and how most games simply aren't bottlenecked by SATA3 SSD's even during "intense" loading. An 80% load time reduction from say 75s (5,400rpm HDD) to 15s (SATA3 SSD) feels huge. But a further 2% reduction from 15s (SSD) to 14.7s (RAMDisk) isn't even noticeable if you're not timing it, especially when 12.5s of both involves 3-7 unskippable intro movies then another 1-2s delay for those silly "Press ENTER to start game" messages, etc.

Ironically it's some of the smaller "easier to load" games that are the worst behaving. I had one game that took 32s to start on a HDD. An SSD improved that to 27s. A RAMDisk was the same 27s. Why? 5x unskippable intro logo's + 2x epilepsy warnings with no apparent way to disable them. And the game itself only has a total install size of 1.6GB. Meanwhile Bioshock Infinite has an install size of 40GB (inc DLC) and yet loads in 11s. There was no real consistent measurable improvement of 10-20x greater than SATA 3 bandwidth vs SATA 3 bottleneck SSD vs cached to RAM speed and resulting load time (or even game install size vs load time) in over 150 games I tested. Needless to say I don't bother with RAMDrive's, and recently upgraded from an MX100 512GB to a MX200 1TB SSD (purely for the capacity) without the slightest regret it wasn't NMV or hit 2000MB/s in synthetic CrystalDiskMark sequential's.

 

[Deders]

Asus are putting their money on U.2 as the future, with M.2 just as a stopgap. This is why their motherboards favour U.2 over M.2 if they have to make a choice between the 2.

 

[bradly1101]

I honestly couldn't say. I don't doubt SATA will be superseded eventually but how much of the "SATA bottleneck" is number chasing geeks arguing in tech forums over the usual wildly unrealistic synthetic benchmarks vs any actual "OMG, 850 PRO's are unbearably slow [sobs]. It's like copying one 1.44MB floppy disk to another all over again [weeps]" TechReport are one of the few sites that can actually be bothered to do some down to earth testing, and their 950 PRO review was quite an eye opener as far as premium NVMe vs budget SATA SSD "depreciating gain" is concerned:-

^ The M.2 NVMe Samsung 950 PRO costs more than double the SATA "bottlenecked" MX200 & 850 EVO it somehow manages to lose to in half the real-life tests. Go figure... Last time I looked there weren't even any 1TB M2 NVM's available at any price and most ordinary people are generally more interested in SSD capacities going up and prices coming down, not respectively shrinking and doubling because of a new socket's theoretical benefits. You only have to look at SATA SSD vs RAMDisk load-time benchmarks for games to see that outside of the usual "fake use" synthetics, SATA isn't that bottlenecked in practise even vs 5-10GB/s "storage". Unless you get paid to edit video's 8hrs per day (and even that doesn't involve continuous non-stop writes) I wouldn't even bother looking at M2 NVM drives at current prices.

My advice is don't bother holding out for a new standard to become mainstream. Buy what you need when you need it, and when you do, base it on realistic personal usage scenario's you're actually likely to use, not silly "Destroyer" benchmarks involving writing 1TB in one go in a "typical consumer day", or "time accelerated trace tests" that squeeze 6 months of work into an afternoon (whilst "garbage collection" runs at normal speed) or 30mins of 4k Q32 writes continuously without any breaks, which would require the average person to have a 2 Gigabit/s net connection and constant page loads without actually reading anything they open to "simulate" a 'typical' web browser cache...

I think M2/NVMe will be the "winner" long-term, but at $350 for 512GB of storage (950 PRO), whilst most PC's & laptop's are still sold without any SSD at all and everyone else is buying $150 drives, and even most M2 drives sold are SATA variants of 850 EVO's, etc, I think M2 is going to be one of those "pseudo-standards" that arrives with a decade long drawn out whimper rather than a "must upgrade now" bang.

You are 100% correct if all you do is load games (which is more of a CPU/memory test I believe).

 

[frowertr]

I'm among those that are not buying any more HDs that aren't M.2/U.2. I just built a Skylake system for my living room and used the Samsung 850 EVO M.2 in that build. I'll never go back to traditional 2.5/3.5" HDDs after using that little guy. Just can't wait till they pack more M/U.2 connectors on MBs.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Just can't wait till they pack more M/U.2 connectors on MBs.

I am eager to see a board layout with say, 6-12 M.2/U.2 ports

 

[ShintaiDK]

I am eager to see a board layout with say, 6-12 M.2/U.2 ports

That would require 12-48 PCIe lanes. I think we may end up see boards with support for 4 M.2/U.2 slots.

 

[Magic Carpet]

That would require 12-48 PCIe lanes.

Yeah, I reckon it will take some time before we get there. I like the speed and all of that, but cables are more flexible. For legacy reasons, SATA ports are likely to remain with us for a long time.

 

[shabby]

And the game itself only has a total install size of 1.6GB. Meanwhile Bioshock Infinite has an install size of 40GB (inc DLC) and yet loads in 11s.

Seems like bioshock had uncompressed data while the other one was heavily compressed. A quick loading 40gb game or a slow loading 2gb game.

That would require 12-48 PCIe lanes. I think we may end up see boards with support for 4 M.2/U.2 slots.

Time for intel to stop skimping on the pcie lanes, its like they're artificially limiting them.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Time for intel to stop skimping on the pcie lanes, its like they're artificially limiting them.

Wutt?

AM4 platform will have very few to compare. Less than AM3. 16(3)+2(3)+8(2) if Zen. 8(3)+8(2) if APU. ()=Version.

 

[Cerb]

Outside of servers and workstations, PCIe NVMe should be plenty, at 1x, 2x, or 4x. Even with 1x, Samsung and Intel already have beasts, when it comes to IOPS. For servers, cards with M.2, and then also using U.2, should suffice. PCIe 3.0 or newer at 1x is full duplex at close to 1GBps (almost 2GBps for 4.0), so don't be counting it out too quickly, except on high-end platforms. To and from the same volume, that can allow for 3-4x SATA speeds.

For games there are multiple other bottlenecks during startup besides raw I/O throughput. First of all, games don't just "read" data like SSD synthetic benchmarks do, they typically uncompress compressed / packed data. It'll read some then uncompress it. Then read some more then uncompress that. That's why the HDD LED "flickers" in many games instead of being always on. Then it goes through all sorts of video / audio / input initialization routines. Then you've got unskippable startup logo's, epilepsy warnings, etc, where literally nothing is going on. From above DIMMDrive review:-

SSDs in DIMMs seem neat at first glance, but they seem to be being made for to solve a density problem than anything else. IE, you don't want to sell a server board with too few DIMM slots, since many users will want to fill them up. But, many won't. However, DIMMs take up a lot less space than 2.5" bays. So, with pizza boxes, and smaller, they can allow decent amounts of local storage, using less total space. Not an issue for one PC, but it can provide benefits for a whole rack, or proprietary many-U system. For a small number of physical systems, M.2, U.2, and PCIe cards make a lot more sense.

Time for intel to stop skimping on the pcie lanes, its like they're artificially limiting them.

Like with USB 3.x, they probably have an idea of when they'll really need to get the job, done, and not do it sooner than absolutely necessary. Why would they spend more money on the CPUs than they have to, after all? Even $1 per unit is a lot, when they are selling millions.

 

[frowertr]

Yeah, I reckon it will take some time before we get there. I like the speed and all of that, but cables are more flexible. For legacy reasons, SATA ports are likely to remain with us for a long time.

Yeah I agree. ISA stuck around forever and you can even today buy boards with PCI slots in them.

But I do think those .2 slots are the future. For the consumer space, once they begin cramming more than one .2 connector on the MB, I don't see the need to use SATA ports any longer unless you are sitting on a pile of old drives and want to put them to use. Especially once the .2 drive capacity goes in excess of 1TB.

 

[Cerb]

Yeah I agree. ISA stuck around forever and you can even today buy boards with PCI slots in them.

But I do think those .2 slots are the future. For the consumer space, once they begin cramming more than one .2 connector on the MB, I don't see the need to use SATA ports any longer unless you are sitting on a pile of old drives and want to put them to use. Especially once the .2 drive capacity goes in excess of 1TB.

SATA will stick around for HDDs. HDDs aren't going anywhere any time soon. However, I do think that at the same time, the key issues with M.2 will be gone in a couple years, as SATA on it is mainly a transitional feature.

 

[=Wendy=]

Personally I hope U.2 becomes the standard for desktop PC's.
M.2 is to small, with problems with drive capacity, heat issues, and I don't see the manufacturers fitting a heat sink on M.2, as they still have to be compatible with mobile devices such as laptops'

U.2 is a 2.5 inch form factor, with no issues with space for high capacity SSDs, and it's easy to fit a integrated heat sink, like the one found on the Intel 750 U.2 SSD.

All we need now is for more SSD manufacturers to bring out U.2 SSDs.

 

[ShintaiDK]

The good thing is you can convert M.2 to U.2

 

[moonbogg]

I don't like M.2 drives and will probably not buy one, regardless of cost. The performance of course I like, but I don't like sacrificing PCI-E bandwidth for a hard drive and it seems you can only have one of these drives plugged into your motherboard. I'd like to see yet another SATA or something similar.
I like hard drives that connect with cables. I can route them where I want and mount them where I want. I want to connect more than 1 hard drive to my computer. I have 3 SSD's. Can you have 3 M.2 drives? Oh really? That's interesting.

 

[biostud]

Obviously M.2/U.2 ports are the way forward, U.2 drives would be better suited for passive cooling and larger capacities as they can be made in 2.5" form factor, while M.2 drives are optimized for mobile.

 

[biostud]

I don't like M.2 drives and will probably not buy one, regardless of cost. The performance of course I like, but I don't like sacrificing PCI-E bandwidth for a hard drive and it seems you can only have one of these drives plugged into your motherboard. I'd like to see yet another SATA or something similar.
I like hard drives that connect with cables. I can route them where I want and mount them where I want. I want to connect more than 1 hard drive to my computer. I have 3 SSD's. Can you have 3 M.2 drives? Oh really? That's interesting.

I think that the idea is to have a single M.2/U.2 drive + SSDs + HDD for maximum storage if you need it. And since you have 40 PCIe lanes on a X79 motherboard it is not likely that you will miss anything by using 4 of them for a very fast SSD.