Ultra M.2 interface

[Flokiam]

Recently I been seeing the latest interface M.2 go yet again to another level, with speeds up to 32Gbs! Im wondering how they do it, and if you really could take advantage of such data transfers which looks pretty promising on paper..

 

[biostud]

Direct connection to 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes. Samsung is developing drives for the standard.

 

[leedreamer189]

Based on their explanation, usually the M.2 device connects with the onboard chipset then to the CPU, but the Ultra M.2 connects directly to the CPU. In theory this sounds pretty cool, no more bottlenecks for expansion cards. Wonder if there are reviews out there that can solidify this.

 

[CoPhotoGuy]

I get about 980MB/s on M.2 myself. Where are you seeing 4GB/s speeds reported? Or do you mean this is theoretical?

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Based on their explanation, usually the M.2 device connects with the onboard chipset then to the CPU, but the Ultra M.2 connects directly to the CPU. In theory this sounds pretty cool, no more bottlenecks for expansion cards. Wonder if there are reviews out there that can solidify this.

Here you go:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-xp941-z97-pci-express,3826.html

I get about 980MB/s on M.2 myself. Where are you seeing 4GB/s speeds reported? Or do you mean this is theoretical?

Those are theoretical maximums currently, there aren't any consumer SSDs fast enough to saturate a PCIe 3.0 x4 link...

 

[biostud]

Also the samsung sm951 will be 1600/1000 Mb/s read/wrie and 130K/100K IOPS 4K random reads/writes.

http://www.custompcreview.com/news/2014-samsung-ssd-summit-samsung-sm951-m2-pcie-ssd/21564/

 

[CoPhotoGuy]

Also the samsung sm951 will be 1600/1000 Mb/s read/wrie and 130K/100K IOPS 4K random reads/writes.

http://www.custompcreview.com/news/2014-samsung-ssd-summit-samsung-sm951-m2-pcie-ssd/21564/

Yeah but given the XP941 doesn't hit 1400MB/s reads, the numbers are a bit inflated. Basically getting 70% of the rating. So if that holds true, the 1600MB/s units may hit 1120MB/s. Now perhaps that is when they jack up the queue depth.

Some of these speeds are so crazy fast you won't see any difference in desktop use. I moved from an older SSD to the XP941 just because it was time to upgrade and might as well get the screaming fast stuff and I like the bleeding edge when I upgrade. So I won't need to upgrade again for 3-5 years depending on what I want.

 

[razel]

M2 is a standard that supports both SATA and the awesome NVMe. If they are saying that the M2 is running through the chipset, then it is probably SATA based. If they are saying it's to the CPU then it's the newer, better future PCIe NVMe variety.

As for these big sequential or bandwidth numbers you see, it's best to understand those as MAXIMUM speeds. On SATA if you want 100MB of data, you will get those at roughly the same time whether you are on SATA II (300MB/s) or SATA III (600MB/s). However if you wanted 301MB of data you have a greater chance of getting it at half the time.

The story is different with NVMe primarily because of latency. The SATA controller is no longer there. You remove one chip from the data path. Of course that's assuming performance is the same or better on the NVMe SSD controller... if the NVMe SSD controller has more latency than it's SATA SSD version, then they just shot themselves in the foot.