What is the real use of M.2 ?

[SelenaGomez]

The Samsung 950 Pro has insane read and write speeds compared to regular SSd's. But is it a noticeable difference from regular SSd's? I mean in games and regular computing you arent going to notice a difference are you? When would you notice a difference? IT seems like everything will bottleneck it. IS it jsut more a benchmark thing?

 

[UsandThem]

M.2 is a connection type. There are SATA and PCIe interfaces. The 950 Pro is a NVMe drive, but there are several SATA M.2 drives that perform like a regular SSD drive.

For the vast majority of people who buy it, it is a fast pricey toy to run synthetic benchmarks on. Granted there are some people who benefit from it in professional work, or people who deal with moving large amounts of data like editing video.

In daily PC use for most people, they will not be able to notice the difference from a regular SSD outside of Windows booting faster.

 

[SelenaGomez]

Ya that's what I thought. Pretty much only useful for benchmarks for me at those speeds. However they aren't THAT much more expensive than a regular 850 pro. IF I made a newbuild I would get one I think after looking at the prices. Its $400 CDN for 512 gb vs $270 CDN for 512 gb 850 pro

 

[UsandThem]

It all comes down to what works best for your use, or what you want. It is definitely an enthusiast drive. I don't do anything with my computer that would benefit from the extra speed, so I'd rather save the money and put it towards a better video card or CPU where the performance would be noticed.

Just plan on keeping it cool, or it will throttle its speed to reduce its temperature if you are pushing it with high IO activity.

 

[myocardia]

...

 

[pcslookout]

Will windows bootup in 7 seconds or less even if I have a lot of system tray icons and startup programs ?

Also will games load faster ?

 

[Keljian]

Umm, booting from an NVMe drive adds 45-60 seconds to the boot time, i.e. it makes the boot time about half as fast as a 7,200 RPM HDD, and about 5 times as slow as an SATA SSD. Some day, NVMe SSDs likely be faster at booting, but for now, they are definitely a lot slower at it.

Umm not on my board, boot times in single digits

 

[corkyg]

From my perspective, the real use or purpose of the M2 connection is to fit SSDs into smaller spaces allowed by thinner, lighter notebooks, etc.

 

[wpcoe]

From my perspective, the real use or purpose of the M2 connection is to fit SSDs into smaller spaces allowed by thinner, lighter notebooks, etc.

A nice bonus, especially in builds in small cases (e.g. ITX), is that it helps with cable management and air flow because there are no power/SATA cables.

 

[UsandThem]

Umm not on my board, boot times in single digits

Yeah, if a NVMe drive is adding 45-60 seconds to their boot process, there is something wrong with his configuration or hardware.

I have come across several posts where people were complaining about slow boot times with the 950 Pro, but they fixed it my installing the Samsung NVMe driver instead of using the native Windows NVMe driver, or by enabling fast boot.

 

[wpcoe]

Umm, booting from an NVMe drive adds 45-60 seconds to the boot time, i.e. it makes the boot time about half as fast as a 7,200 RPM HDD, and about 5 times as slow as an SATA SSD. Some day, NVMe SSDs likely be faster at booting, but for now, they are definitely a lot slower at it.

Is your NVME SSD natively supported by your motherboard BIOS/UEFI and attached directly to the motherboard, like in an M.2 slot, or is it in an add-in card in a PCIe slot, or ... ?

If it's in an add-in card or for any reason needs to load its own BIOS before OS boot, that could account for added boot time.

I may have the technical lingo wrong, but here's and example of what I mean: A few builds ago, I had a motherboard without SATA3 (6Gbps), so I added in a PCIe card that added SATA3 ports. That card has its own BIOS to load during the boot process and seriously added to the boot-up time. I wonder if something in your boot chain of events is similar?

 

[jhansman]

From my perspective, the real use or purpose of the M2 connection is to fit SSDs into smaller spaces allowed by thinner, lighter notebooks, etc.

Granted, but my wife's Lenovo IdeaPad has a regular SSD in it, and is about as thin and light as a notebook can be. (under an inch, 3.7 lbs). Dunno why ultra thin is such a selling point with notebooks. Sexy, I guess.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Before you buy an m2 drive you should check your mb and see what gets disabled in order to use the slot. Some boards require the loss of several slots in order for it to work as resources get reallocated.

 

[Bryf50]

Before you buy an m2 drive you should check your mb and see what gets disabled in order to use the slot. Some boards require the loss of several slots in order for it to work as resources get reallocated.

Yea this disappointing me recently. My G1 Gaming 7 board has 2 m.2 slots. One of them disables half of the SATA ports and the other disables the third pci-e x4 slot. I had to stop using my 10gbit ethernet card because of it.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Umm, booting from an NVMe drive adds 45-60 seconds to the boot time, i.e. it makes the boot time about half as fast as a 7,200 RPM HDD, and about 5 times as slow as an SATA SSD. Some day, NVMe SSDs likely be faster at booting, but for now, they are definitely a lot slower at it.

I can understand how people want fast boot times. But a user shouldn't be rebooting or restarting his system every hour. It would seem to me to be a trade-off: you might have slower, longer boot time; but performance during your "session" might be worth it.

I'm still rocking these old Z68 and Z77 systems, with two controllers providing a total of 4 SATA-III ports. No M.2. No NVMe. Instead, a $30 lifetime license to PrimoCache. The software allows me to save the cache to disk at shutdown/restart, making it persistent. It seems like the delay at boot-up is now double. But I noticed an hour ago, for a system that I rebooted last night, the hit-rate on the RAM-cache has increased to 50% just for my pattern of usage.

So if it takes 30 seconds or even a minute to boot, or the same time to come out of hibernate, that's just fine with me.

 

[bonehead123]

Yeah, if a NVMe drive is adding 45-60 seconds to their boot process, there is something wrong with his configuration or hardware.

I have come across several posts where people were complaining about slow boot times with the 950 Pro, but they fixed it my installing the Samsung NVMe driver instead of using the native Windows NVMe driver, or by enabling fast boot.

^^THIS^^

My rig boots so fast now that I barely have time to see the options at the bottom for entering the bios menus.......

And yes I am using the Samsung drivers and the most current firmware for both my board and drives...