When will AM4 motherboards offer more than 1 m.2 slot?

[Puffnstuff]

I've noticed a trend on these new AM4 motherboards in that all of them regardless of chipset only offer a single m.2 slot on them with the exception of one which had 2 slots. It seems to me that if you're building an enthusiast level machine that you'd want all m.2 ssd's and would require 3 or more m.2 slots for this purpose. Have any of you seen anything that might indicate that future offerings will give the user more slots?

 

[tamz_msc]

I'm pretty sure that very few people actually want or need all their storage to be M2 SSDs. M2 for OS+apps+most played games, SATA SSD for other games and plain ol' HDD for data and backup is what most opt for.

 

[Elixer]

I've noticed a trend on these new AM4 motherboards in that all of them regardless of chipset only offer a single m.2 slot on them with the exception of one which had 2 slots. It seems to me that if you're building an enthusiast level machine that you'd want all m.2 ssd's and would require 3 or more m.2 slots for this purpose. Have any of you seen anything that might indicate that future offerings will give the user more slots?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813144016&cm_re=am4-_-13-144-016-_-Product has 2...which is the one you are talking about I assume?

I assume better boards will be coming down the pipeline, that will offer more full speed M.2 slots, but, really depends on if the mobo guys think people want them or not.

 

[Valantar]

The AM4 platform only supports a single PCIe 3.0 x4 for storage without splitting off lanes from the x16 meant for graphics. The chipsets provides a 2.0 x4 link for more SSDs. That being said:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AB350 Pro4

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/Fatal1ty X370 Gaming K4/index.asp

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming/index.asp

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370 Killer SLIac/index.asp

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370 Killer SLI/index.asp

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370 Taichi/index.asp

Mind you, that's only one motherboard maker. But I'd say it pretty much makes up for any perceived lack of m.2 slots.

Also, as @tamz_msc said, two m.2* slots is vastly overkill for 99.99% of users, and will continue to be so for years to come. NVMe performance doesn't give average users tangible gains, while costing 2-3x of a SATA drive. This situation isn't going to change much for quite a while yet. And if NVMe prices drop, so will SATA prices (it's the NAND keeping prices high, after all).


*PCIe 3.0 x4 m.2, that is. SATA m.2 is absolutely within reason for most users. But if you're going SATA, getting a 2.5" drive isn't exactly a hassle, in case you've already filled your m.2 slot with another drive.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Also, as @tamz_msc said, two m.2* slots is vastly overkill for 99.99% of users, and will continue to be so for years to come. NVMe performance doesn't give average users tangible gains, while costing 2-3x of a SATA drive.

Z270 boards are appearing with 3 m.2 slots on them and they aren't even an enthusiast grade product. If mainstream boards can offer such features you'd think that a supposed enthusiast level product would at least match them to draw customers over to their offerings. M.2 is the latest wave of storage performance and motherboard makers looking to promote sales need to offer the capability to run multiple drives. I wouldn't even think about buying an am4 mb without multiple m.2 slots on it.

 

[Valantar]

Z270 boards are appearing with 3 m.2 slots on them and they aren't even an enthusiast grade product. If mainstream boards can offer such features you'd think that a supposed enthusiast level product would at least match them to draw customers over to their offerings. M.2 is the latest wave of storage performance and motherboard makers looking to promote sales need to offer the capability to run multiple drives. I wouldn't even think about buying an am4 mb without multiple m.2 slots on it.

As I showed you, there are plenty of boards with two m.2 slots - they're just limited to PCIe 2.0 x4 on the secondary slot. And sure, AMD might launch an X390 chipset down the line with PCIe 3.0 switching instead of 2.0. That should do fine for the "enthusiasts". In the meantime, only a scant few people own a single NVME drive, let alone several. And again: the vast majority of users gain NO noticeable performance from NVME. You want to waste your money on it, be my guest, but I'd rather invest in a cheaper SSD with twice the capacity. OTOH, I'm willing to bet you'd be unable to notice any difference in real-world use between a 960 Pro on 2.0 x4 and 3.0 x4. After all, it's just sequential speeds that suffer, random speeds still keep up just fine - which is what you'll be taxing it with most of the time.

While I agree that future proofing as much as possible is good, there are limits to what's attainable on a mainstream platform. And yes, AM4 is a mainstream platform - it encompasses everything from $50 APUs to $500 CPUs. Which is how AMD is able to offer eight cores at the amazing value they are anyway. If they limited high core count CPUs to an "enthusiast" platform, it would automatically command a price premium. No thanks.

 

[VirtualLarry]

And again: the vast majority of users gain NO noticeable performance from NVME.

TBH, I've got two DeskMini rigs here. They have one PCI-E x4 3.0 M.2 socket, and two SATA6G ports (one of which is effectively inaccessable without removing the whole motherboard).

One of my DeskMini's, has a PNY CS1111 240GB SATA 2.5" SSD, with Win10 Pro 64-bit 1607 on it.

The other DeskMini, has both the same PNY SSD, with Win7 Pro 64-bit on it, and Linux, and an Adata SX8000 PCI-E x4 3.0 M.2 MLC 128GB SSD with the Win10 64-bit on it.

It may be partially related to the capacity, but the one with the PNY SSD as the primary OS SSD rather than the PCI-E M.2, seems faster in practice.

Granted, that M.2 drive has the same (slow?) controller as the Intel 600p drives, which became known for being simultaneously the cheapest PCI-E M.2 drives, and the slowest. Slow enough, that a faster SATA6G 2.5" SSD could potentially outrun it in random I/O.

I noticed that too, when I replaced a 128GB Samsung SM951 AHCI PCI-E SSD, with a 240GB Intel 600p SSD, it seemed slower.

So, there are varying grades of M.2, and even connected up to an x4 PCI-E port, some of them are even slower or as slow as a good SATA6G drive.

I don't particular lament the lack of a gratuitous number of M.2 sockets on a board. I'm only ever probably going to use one, maybe two if I were to clone PCI-E M.2 NVMe drives.

 

[tamz_msc]

@VirtualLarry the SM951 has much better random read performance than the 600p. Not to mention that the Silicon Motion controller on the Intel is all over the place in the Anandtech benches.

 

[Puffnstuff]

As I showed you, there are plenty of boards with two m.2 slots - they're just limited to PCIe 2.0 x4 on the secondary slot. And sure, AMD might launch an X390 chipset down the line with PCIe 3.0 switching instead of 2.0. That should do fine for the "enthusiasts". In the meantime, only a scant few people own a single NVME drive, let alone several. And again: the vast majority of users gain NO noticeable performance from NVME. You want to waste your money on it, be my guest, but I'd rather invest in a cheaper SSD with twice the capacity. OTOH, I'm willing to bet you'd be unable to notice any difference in real-world use between a 960 Pro on 2.0 x4 and 3.0 x4. After all, it's just sequential speeds that suffer, random speeds still keep up just fine - which is what you'll be taxing it with most of the time.

While I agree that future proofing as much as possible is good, there are limits to what's attainable on a mainstream platform. And yes, AM4 is a mainstream platform - it encompasses everything from $50 APUs to $500 CPUs. Which is how AMD is able to offer eight cores at the amazing value they are anyway. If they limited high core count CPUs to an "enthusiast" platform, it would automatically command a price premium. No thanks.

This argument isn't so far from when ssd's were first introduced and people continued to defend mechanical drives. Now we have another standard with higher throughput and people are embracing it. Newer laptops, especially enthusiast grade, have moved to m.2 as the primary architecture and desktops will continue to migrate towards it as well. My next build will embrace m.2 for boot, software and primary storage so I want at least 3 full bandwidth slots on whatever board I buy.

 

[tamz_msc]

This argument isn't so far from when ssd's were first introduced and people continued to defend mechanical drives. Now we have another standard with higher throughput and people are embracing it. Newer laptops, especially enthusiast grade, have moved to m.2 as the primary architecture and desktops will continue to migrate towards it as well. My next build will embrace m.2 for boot, software and primary storage so I want at least 3 full bandwidth slots on whatever board I buy.

Although I don't see how that argument works here since we sill haven't moved away from USB 2.0, SATA etc. and the reality is that HDDs are ubiquitous, so support for them will likely continue for a long time. It's not as if SSDs replaced HDDs as the de-facto medium of storage, is it?

AM4 boards at present don't have what you are looking for.

 

[Valantar]

This argument isn't so far from when ssd's were first introduced and people continued to defend mechanical drives. Now we have another standard with higher throughput and people are embracing it. Newer laptops, especially enthusiast grade, have moved to m.2 as the primary architecture and desktops will continue to migrate towards it as well. My next build will embrace m.2 for boot, software and primary storage so I want at least 3 full bandwidth slots on whatever board I buy.

The main difference is that the performance delta going from HDDs to SATA SSDs was vastly larger than the performance delta when moving from SATA to NVME SSDs. Especially in random reads and IO latency, which makes the biggest difference in day-to-day responsiveness, the difference was dramatic with the former, while it's far smaller with the latter.

HDDs score around the 100IOPS mark for random 4k reads at QD4, versus ~5-10 000 for most SSDs at QD1 and ~20-30 000 for at QD4. That's a 50-300x improvement.

The Samsung 960 Evo 250GB does ~15 000 IOPS of random reads at QD1, and ~60 000 at QD4. That's only a ~2x performance increase. Is it much faster? Of course. Is it noticeable in real life? Not necessarily.

The MyDigitalSSD BPX 512GB, considered the best of the budget NVME drives out there, does ~10 000 IOPS at QD 1, and ~37 000 at QD4. On paper, this is very similar to the Samsung 850 Pro (see the Adata link above). Of course, NVMe is drastically better than SATA at queuing IOPS and handling multiple threads and mixed loads, and mixed loads drastically affect IOPS rates. Still, the differences in day-to-day use are small.

Does NVMe have a place in enthusiast computing? Of course. Is it the future of storage? Most definitely. Does it even remotely make sense to buy a high-end NVMe SSD today, let alone several? Not unless you have more money than you know how to spend, or you need it for extremely drive-intensive workloads that are not really seen in home computing outside of 4K (and above) video editing.