My personal experience with m.2 NVMe SSD's

[jboydgolfer]

Don't get me wrong I'm certainly waiting for it to work where it becomes (financially) justifiable to purchase nvme solid-state drives. it was a night and day difference between hard drives & ssd's when the tech became widely popular/available( come to think of it never mind night and day it was like last week and this week) regarding perf difference.

There are some benefits, no data or power cables being a major one, but for me to make the jump and justify the financial premium , there needs to be a performance benefit that manifests itself without the use of benchmark software. I don't know if that falls on the shoulders of the drive makers or the operating system developers but I'm sure in time will reach that point

 

[Mussels]

i feel like nvme M.2's will take off rapidly (hurrr) in the workstation/laptop markets first - where high speed in a small size is a big deal.
Think NUC's and ultrabooks.

SSD's on SATA 3 are just so damn fast already that speed wont be a large enough motivation to upgrade and capacity is limited due to SATA drives being physically larger, so its gotta be 'forced' (systems with only M.2) before it'll take off.

 

[cdawall]

I have had both I prefer my NVMe drives.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

It will come down, just like all storage. I paid $250 for a 512gb one, and it's worth every penny of that over 2000mbps read and 750mbps write speeds via AIDA64. Also, if I'm building a top end computer, I'm not going to choke it with sata. That is sort of the last bottleneck in a way.

M.2 requires a lot of layers of PCB to be compliant. On the other hand, if you dismantle a 2.5" SSD, you'll find the SSD often only takes up 1/3 of the case and it's on a thin PCB. Because of that, M.2 SATA should be more costly to manufacture going forward but I'm in the same boat as you: no cable mess, hidden by graphics card, if you got it why not use it? One caveat: they're a PITA to replace because stuff is covering them up.

M.2 NVMe drives cost a lot more than M.2 SATA. In my opinion, the price difference isn't worth the cost for average consumers. I'm not sure NVMe prices can ever compete with SATA because SATA is limited by the protocol so there's an incentive to putting faster chips on NVMe solutions. I think NVMe ~550 MB/s SSD could be about the same price as a SATA ~550 MB/s SSD but until SATA is driven completely out of the market, that won't happen.

That said, SATA IV, 12 Gb/s (1,500 MB/s) is said to be in the works. It's not as fast as some NVMe drives are but we should see the SATA limit lift on budget 550+ MB/s SSDs.

 

[Ruru]

I'm happy with my Intel 600p even that it's kinda low-end for a NVMe drive. Fast boot times and fast enough for me for everything I want my system drive to be.

Next thing would be to replace my HDDs with SATA SSDs, games doesn't need NVMe drives..

 

[Deleted member 67555]

I have been on RAID 0 for a long time.. software and hardware... I appreciate the speed of M.2
I want to see one unpack and install CoD WaW... Lol

 

[Hood]

I see a lot of people post results from benchmarks to prove how fast their nvme drives are. I'd like to see maybe a file transfer in windows or something to that effect( or drastically shorter bot times over sata ssd). I've just grown weary of disc benchmarks because of "rapid mode" and all that and it's like showing pretend benefits to having paid 2-4x as much of a standard ssd cost.

I looked into getting an nvme solid-state drive but because of the use of words like "theoretical" and the lack of the use of the term "real world" I was dissuaded from making a purchase. I just hate the sink that kind of money on technology that can only be utilized in a few theoretical environment

In the real world, my Intel 750 400GB NVMe drive (PCIE3.0 x 4, AIC) speeds things up in many subtle ways and some that are very noticeable, like Windows utilities that are normally very slow are now many times faster (Windows Update, Disk Cleanup, Defrag & Optimize, imaging your boot drive for backup. Also virus and malware scans, and file copy/move. It helps that I also have a Plextor M6e M.2 drive (PCIe 2.0 x 2) that I use for downloading torrents, which are eventually moved to spinning rust. It might not be worth the high price to those on a budget, but in my case, it was the last bottleneck and the best way to speed up my user experience, since I already had fast RAM, a fast CPU, fast video card, and a fast SATA SSD. It all works together to make my system rank in the 98th or 99th percentile among all systems benchmarked on Passmark Performance Test, depending on my overclock level.

 

[bug]

But I honestly cannot tell any difference between nVMe and sAtA M.2. Benchmark shows. Reality doesn't.

It comes down to NVMe only improving on sequential transfers overs SATA while everything else is in the same ballpark (i.e. not the same, but not dramatically improved). And then NVMe can only sustain the sequential transfers for as long as it doesn't overheat.

So yes, if you look at NVMe through the right benchmarks, it can be made to look stellar. Meanwhile, the rule for buying a SSD hasn't changed: get the biggest one you can fit in your budget. Avoid planar TLC if you feel picky.

 

[fullinfusion]

i started with an intel 600p series and moved up the food chain to a Samsung 960 NVMe pcie x4 and the performance is exceptionally better..

Personally I'd never go back to Sata ssd's again.. where I live it was about a $35 difference in price for the NVMe vs the same sized ssd capacity so to me it's a win all around..

Tiny form factor, it's hidden away behind the chipset cover on my mobo, and just rocks at whatever you toss at it. Encoding is faster, image editing faster, load times faster ect ect...

 

[Dethroy]

I love the M.2 form factor. Having said that, it doesn't need to be an NVMe drive (yet) in particular, as its biggest benefit is the absence of cables imho.

 

[biffzinker]

It comes down to NVMe only improving on sequential transfers overs SATA

Pretty sure NVMe also provides a kick in the pants on low quence depth (1-4) transfers, and random 4KB transfers over a SATA SSD.

Sequential transfers only get you so far were as the small random transfers should provide a noticeable improvement.

 

[Gasaraki]

the downside is that my motherboard is too old to have a native M.2 slot, stupid modern technology.

I have an X58 mobo and I boot off of an MyDigitalSSD M.2 SSD. It's not an issue if you try hard enough.

 

[Gasaraki]

The practical tests don't show much of an improvement. Boot time is a second or two max faster which is, really, nothing. File transfer is a tricky test because you'd need to move files from a nVMe to another nVMe to see the real speed but quite frankly how many would have two nVMe and how often would one transfer files to one another?

The only real life application that would benefit from nVMe's strength is hosting Minercraft server on it. That game loves I/O. And, maybe, if you are doing SQL, that, too, requires nice I/O. I guess video editing will also benefit from it. It might kill the drive quickly though.

So, you can't really show it off unless you do the benchmarks.

It's attitude like this that holds technology back. "No one NEEDS more than 640KB of memory."
What about access times? My M.2 SSD has a .03 sec access time. NVMe is more efficient than AHCI.

 

[Tomgang]

I have been on SSD like since 2011 and besides the Oldes Crucial C300 64 GB i sold years ago i am still rocking and own every one of them. But its only 3 months ago i jumped to M.2 SSD, but i have no regrets so far. The jump from sata SSD to an M.2 SSD whas not as big a jump as it where with the jump from a HDD to a sata SSD back then. But i still feel a more snappy and faster responding pc with M.2 over sata. But that might be because the old X58 system has sata 3 but with a crappy marvel controller that is not giving full true sata 3 speed.

Right now i own these SSD:

Samsung 950 PRO 256 GB M.2 NVMe SSD
Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB sata SSD
Crucial MX300 275 GB sata SSD
Crucial M4 64 GB sata SSD

Besides that i like M.2 small size as well the fact that it is fast and easy to install compare to sata SSD + no cables are needed and off cause the higher speed. In my opinion M.2 is a welcome peace of teknologi that is far better than sata. only the higher price takes it down a bit but i think its only a matter of time before prices drops on M.2.

I think for future plans on SSD. M.2 is gonna be for my OS and games and then cheaper sata can be used for storage. I am really looking for to the day that SSD gets to a point where they can be owned for little money and i can finnaly say permanent goodbey to old, noisy and slow HDD.

Just to prove that M.2 can work on old tech as well. Here is a screenshot of my system:

I have an X58 mobo and I boot off of an MyDigitalSSD M.2 SSD. It's not an issue if you try hard enough.

Nice to se a fellow X58 user also enjoying M.2 and yeah new tech is not a problem, you just need an PCIe m.2 adaptor. So what that guy cries about you comment to, i can not se the problem.

 

[bug]

Pretty sure NVMe also provides a kick in the pants on low quence depth (1-4) transfers, and random 4KB transfers over a SATA SSD.

Sequential transfers only get you so far were as the small random transfers should provide a noticeable improvement.

You'd think, but NVMe is only 10-20% faster in 4k QD1 reads/writes. 20% faster means if it took 5s on SATA, it takes 4s on NVMe; or if it took 1min on SATA it takes 48s on NVMe. Better, but not by much.

 

[biffzinker]

Any one else knew about the new 1.3 specification just published at the being of the month?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11436/nvme-13-specification-published-new-features

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I think I would find it hard to see a difference ,samsungs caching software is pretty good for free , i wish it was different and ill buy one anyway but im not expecting too much.