M.2 SATA VS M.2 PCIe

[jrs]

I am in the market for a new Z97 motherboard.

When I look at different boards, I can se that they have different implementation of the M.2 connection.

Some support both M.2 SATA and M.2 PCIe, and some only support one of them.

Anyone here who can help me understand the difference between them?

Do I need support of both standards, or is it enough with one of them if I would "futureproof" my motherboard purchase?

 

[R0H1T]

Just get the ASROCK Z97 Extreme4 or Z97 Extreme6 as they're AFAIK the cheapest boards with support for M.2 & Ultra M.2 SSD's respectively.

As for your original query about M.2 it's just a new form factor (NGFF) for SSD's & will take some time to proliferate the mass market. The M.2 SSD can use the SATA bus with AHCI driver or PCIe bus with AHCI (OR NVMe) driver to transfer data with the latter delivering substantially higher performance.

Now if you plan on having this system or mobo atleast for the next 2yrs then ideally you should get a PCIe (NVMe) drive that delivers in excess of 2GBps read/write speeds, however depending on your current needs you can get a normal RAID0 setup with two SSD's since the GB/$ & perf/$ is heavily in favor of such a setup atm. So, basically what I'm trying to say is that for some form of future proofing you should get a mobo with Ultra M.2 SSD support, like the extreme 6, & get a high end NVMe/PCIe drive based on the M.2 form factor when the price is right or when you need that kind of absolute performance.

Just an FYI, you may lose multi GPU support (with the lanes being shared among various expansion slots including M.2) if you install some of the high end PCIe drives in the M.2 slot since the Z97 mobo is limited to 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes coming from the Haswell processor.

 

[jrs]

I will stay with a "regular" SSD drive for the moment, M.2 will have to come later, when they become cheaper.

If I understand you corrrect M.2 PCIe is faster than M.2 SATA.
So if should not worry if the motherboard I buy don't have support for M.2 SATA, since M.2 PCIe is more faster and more "futureproof".

 

[R0H1T]

I will stay with a "regular" SSD drive for the moment, M.2 will have to come later, when they become cheaper.

If I understand you corrrect M.2 PCIe is faster than M.2 SATA.

Mostly yes, with the M.2 slot the SSD can transfer data via SATA bus OR PCIe bus, just like SATA express. Also there aren't any PCIe SSD's out there, at least not in my knowledge, which don't support a min of 10Gbps transfer speeds vs the 6Gbps on SATA, of course real world performance can be lower but generally you get in excess of 700GBps sequential read/writes vs the ~500GBps (max) from traditional SATA ones.

So if should not worry if the motherboard I buy don't have support for M.2 SATA, since M.2 PCIe is more faster and more "futureproof".

The M.2 slot was made for portable computers & as such is more or less future proof, what I said previously was that if you want better than SSD RAID0 perf you ought to get a motherboard with Ultra M.2 support since the perf differential is substantial, like upto 32Gbps vs the regular 10Gbps.

Edit ~ I'll just clarify that M.2 is a form factor & as such is only comparable to SATA Express, which is an evolutionary new standard superseding SATA 3(6Gbps), cause it can transfer data using either the SATA or PCIe bus.

Computer bus interfaces provided through the M.2 connector, together with supported logical interfaces, are a superset to those defined by the SATA Express interface. Essentially, the M.2 standard is a small form factor implementation of the SATA Express interface (which provides support for PCI Express 3.0 and Serial ATA 3.0), with the addition of an internal USB 3.0 interface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2