M.2 SSD's

Anyone of you (including of course @you;) who have experience with those?

I'm looking at Corsair Force Series MP510 960GB M.2 SSD, which claims read/write speeds of 3480 MBps/3000 MBps, which on paper seems to be significantly better than 550 MBps/520 MBps offered by, say, a Samsung EVO SSD.

My MB supports PCI Express 3.0 x4 (NVMe).

pibbur who would like to know.

Currently using one of these in my own rig. It was just the right mix of size, random IO performance, durability and price. No complaints. I was a little concerned why it didn’t come with a heatsink but no issue with it thus far.

I've never actually taken the time to benchmark it, but now that we're talking about it, I may do it later today and send you results if you're curious.

M.2 is a form factor but drives can either be sata or pcie. Sata drives like samsung evo series are limited by the sata protocol. Given the stated performance of the corsair drive it is almost certainly pcie (I forget how many pcie lans the m.2 standard permits but i think it is just 2).
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Those speeds are max speed - i've not looked up that specific drive but i suspect the sustained write speed is a bit slower as well as random access speeds (you read very few huge files - so those speeds are mostly bragging rights - but is almost certainly much faster than the evo due to interface if nothing else… I suspect sustained write speeds are no where close to those speeds but I would have to look up the drive specifics.
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The other thing you want to check is the warranty - there are two factors to warranty - number of years and endurance (number of times a cell can be rewritten expressed as total writes to the drive). A good drive will have a min of 5 years and the best have 10 years (such as samsung pro). For a 1TB drive I would want a min of 1PB writes.
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Tom hardware has a review that indicates the drive has a 5 year and 2PB write warranty. Hum. The new samsung pro are only 5 year warranty - i thought the old ones were 10 years - either i'm mistaken or they were…
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By the way newegg has that drive for $124 dollars.

Anyway i didn't look at the perf numbers - it is probably decent but almost certainly not the best of the best (of course the best of hte best might cost 2x or 3x or more so there is always that to consider).

pibbur who said:

Anyone of you (including of course @you;) who have experience with those?

I'm looking at Corsair Force Series MP510 960GB M.2 SSD, which claims read/write speeds of 3480 MBps/3000 MBps, which on paper seems to be significantly better than 550 MBps/520 MBps offered by, say, a Samsung EVO SSD.

My MB supports PCI Express 3.0 x4 (NVMe).

pibbur who would like to know.

Click to expand...

pibbur who said:

Anyone of you (including of course @you;) who have experience with those?

I'm looking at Corsair Force Series MP510 960GB M.2 SSD, which claims read/write speeds of 3480 MBps/3000 MBps, which on paper seems to be significantly better than 550 MBps/520 MBps offered by, say, a Samsung EVO SSD.

My MB supports PCI Express 3.0 x4 (NVMe).

pibbur who would like to know.

Click to expand...

On paper it is a big difference but unless you’re benchmarking or regularly dealing with large files you’re not going to see much difference.

I went from Sata to nvme and don’t feel any noticeable difference. As for gaming I just watched a tube video that benchmarked loading times for several games. The NVME average 1-2 seconds faster over the SSD.

M.2 uses up to 4 PCIE lanes and one sata 3.0. I personally would never use a sata drive with M.2 as you’ll be limited to sata speeds. Save it for an NVME drive.

I have an NVME drive for my boot drive. Not necessarily for performance though. I often hand down hardware and I like the convenience of having the boot drive screwed to the motherboard.

The rest of my drives are sata SSD’s and I’ll keep it that way until NVME becomes so cheap it no longer makes since to. Also the # of NVME drives you can have will be limited to the number of M.2 and PCIE lanes you have on your motherboards.

As was mentioned before, M.2 is only a form factor.

But to go with your samsung examples you can check out the following:

The "original" 2.5" Samsung EVO 860 is the common SATA drive.
The M.2 Samsung EVO 970 is the M.2 drive using NVMe (~PCIe), so the fast one.

There is also a cheaper version for the M.2 though which is the M.2 EVO 860. This is the slower one, using SATA and also still has the SATA name scheme (with the 8XX).

Regarding Speed: Yes, M.2 NVME are faster, but the real life performance isn't that much better due to other factors which take up loading time.
So while the switch from a HDD to SSD is like switching from walking to driving to the next city, the additional time gain by switching from a SATA to NVMe is like switching from a toyota corolla to a porsche. Yep, the porsche is much faster and has much more PS. But in the end, both have to wait the same time at a red light and have to follow other rules. In most cases the difference will be negligible.

Now the latest AMD boards also have support for Gen4 M.2 drives which are supposed to be even faster. However they need additional cooling and well…they thermal throttle quite a bit if you actually use their full speed over some duration and in games the difference is basically non existant.

In this video by overclocker Der8auer you can see the SATA M.2 SSD VS NVME M.2 SSD VS Gen4 SSD


So in the end, there is a slight advantage of M.2. NVMe, which you will probably not realize in the real world. But the price difference is also getting lower and lower so you might just want to get it. The new generation (if your board supports it) doesn't seem to make any sense at all atm.