The state of PCIE-SSD boot disks

[Minotaar]

Hi all,

I've long had a crush on PCIE SSD boot disks. But they always seemed to have interoperability issues; they dont boot right, etc etc. I've noticed that the M2 connector (which is apparently PCIE-based) looks like an interesting evolution, and since they are used for laptops, they should boot just fine.

Are these ready for prime time yet? Are there bootable full-card SSDs that are any good yet? Most of the research I've found online appears to be influenced by ASUS (and others) promotional material, so I thought I'd come here for the straight dope. By prime time I mean slap it in, tell the bios to boot from it, zero problems. I'm only interested in performance better than ~500M read ~500M write, but all the M2 solutions appear stuck in that range - does anyone know of better?

The OCZ revodrive looks nice, but it appears that it's kind of flaky on booting. The ASUS RAIDR gets only half the performance; a disappointment. Is there anything else in this space?

Apologies if you feel the answer is "let me google that for you". I've been watching this space and to avoid TLDR i'm not mentioning a lot; I'm curious if anyone heard of some new things coming down the pike that might be a good super-fast boot disk.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

My macbook boots just fine.

There are too many standards now, and too much half-implemented interoperability (this works with this, but not if that's there, and that works with those, but only if that. These things are physically compatible, but only work if this other thing is enabled...)

I'd expect another round or two of back and forth before the dust settles. Call me when Intel releases its next chipset (10-series? X-series? Ugh) - that'll probably be the standard. And retrofitting or patching it into older motherboards will probably be doable, but a complete waste of time.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Windows 8.1 (with update?) supposedly supports PCI-E M.2 SSDs. I don't know if those are based on NVMe or not. That's the new controller standard for PCI-E SSDs. Unknown if Windows 7 or plain 8 will get support for them.

 

[mfenn]

The physical form factor doesn't really matter when it comes to boot compatibility. M.2 (PCIe) or SATA Express, or a PCIe card would be the same. What matters is the logical interface that the drive presents to the OS (i.e. what driver does it use?). NVMe drives are bootable by Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2. Anything that's not NVMe will be really scattershot.

 

[Minotaar]

The physical form factor doesn't really matter when it comes to boot compatibility. M.2 (PCIe) or SATA Express, or a PCIe card would be the same. What matters is the logical interface that the drive presents to the OS (i.e. what driver does it use?). NVMe drives are bootable by Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2. Anything that's not NVMe will be really scattershot.

This is really informative. Thanks!

 

[ViRGE]

The physical form factor doesn't really matter when it comes to boot compatibility. M.2 (PCIe) or SATA Express, or a PCIe card would be the same. What matters is the logical interface that the drive presents to the OS (i.e. what driver does it use?). NVMe drives are bootable by Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2. Anything that's not NVMe will be really scattershot.

And keep in mind the mobo needs to support it too. Just because Windows 8.1 can handle it doesn't mean that every device that runs Win8.1 can boot an NVMe drive.

 

[sm625]

You're not really gaining anything noticeable by having a PCIe SSD vs a SATA3 SSD. What really has true potential is the DDR3/SSD combo DIMMs I've been reading about. It seems someone is listening to me... It's too bad this is moving at such a glacial pace. By simply placing ASICs and NAND on the DIMM you are granted free access to an extremely high performance memory controller. You can use economies of scale to produce notebooks with 8GB of DDR3 and 256GB of NAND for less cost. And it opens up the option of not bothering to support SATA at all on certain notebooks, ie macbook air. And it would be so frickin fast. I wouldnt put it past Apple to do this, but microsoft is so far behind... Even in the year 2014 they still have not provided any means of installing/running windows from nonvolatile RAM. It just does not compute for them.

 

[Minotaar]

You're not really gaining anything noticeable by having a PCIe SSD vs a SATA3 SSD.

Can you explain why not? I'm not interested in regular desktop use; I'm interested in HPC uses that require low latency high performance disk. The benchmarks indicate approximately 3x the read/write performance over sata3.

 

[greenhawk]

the m.2 sounds good but a check of what it actually is makes it feel like something done by a comity more interested in pleasing everyone, but not being a step forward.

A check of the wiki page for it will show that there are 12 different types of ways the interface on a m.2 slot can be wired up, and a lot of them result in a sata port connection for data transfer, so still no faster than sata, just in a smaller case.

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

Given the device used and the slot need to be compatible, it makes the whole process of plug and play more like the old PCI than the one size fits all of USB. To me, the M.2 is a step backwards for the average consumer.

On the side of small space / enclosures, having officially 8 allowed different thicknesses and 8 different lengths all under the same title is very stupid. To make maters interesting, the width of the module can change as well and still be "valid". The spec allows for 4 widths.

At least for starting out, it is one width and 5 different lengths.

in short, I am just going to wait for things to settle down.

side bit of news, I noticed this laptop recently and had to be amused with the 4 m.2 ssd's it is meant to have installed in it. I just had to wonder, just how much trouble someone would be in if they wanted to increase the size of them

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=28600&cPath=1539

 

[mfenn]

Can you explain why not? I'm not interested in regular desktop use; I'm interested in HPC uses that require low latency high performance disk. The benchmarks indicate approximately 3x the read/write performance over sata3.

For HPC, you're going to want to look at devices which will be available on servers. So M.2 is less relevant than SATA Express and just plain old PCIe.

Also, in a server, having the drive be bootable is generally not as important. You're going to stick the OS on some plain old disks (mechanical or inexpensive SATA SSDs), and then dedicate the fast device to the application. At that point, you don't need to worry about bootability and the options really open up.

Fusion-IO is of course the big dog in this space, but their pricing is out of this world. Virident (now part of HGST) is the scrappy underdog, but they still deliver very good performance. Dell is also starting to ship Samsung's NVMe drive, which should come in at a lower price point than either Fusion-IO or Virident.