M.2 Worth it?

Jasoncmor · 16 Dec 2017 at 10:38

Hi all

I am in need of another drive for my PC, im looking at either getting a Samsung M.2 SSD or a second Samsung SSD.

I've been reading a lot of mixed information regarding the M.2 drive, is it worth the money? Is it much faster for the primary O/S drive?
Or should I just stick to a standard SSD?

Kind regards
Jason

nzaptx · 16 Dec 2017 at 10:47

It's faster but not as fast as the difference between a HDD and SSD. Right now its a luxury, a higher capacity SSD for the same price/slightly more may be a more sensible purchase right now.

DarkHorizon472 · 16 Dec 2017 at 11:12

I looked at it and just bought a higher capacity ssd.

Disco_P · 17 Dec 2017 at 09:35

As an owner of one for the best part of the year, definitely not.

David Bisset · 17 Dec 2017 at 14:42

Reminder in case you're not aware - m2 is a form factor not related to performance. If it's m2 and uses sata it'll be no faster at all than any other sata drive. Only if it's using pci-e will it potentially be faster (and personally i still wouldn't bother)

AiiR · 17 Dec 2017 at 20:07

Assume you mean NVMe over PCIe rather than m.2. I've found going from a SATA SSD to a NVMe Samsung drive kinda like going from 144hz to 240hz. Yes one is better, but nowhere near the difference like going from 60hz to 144 or from a HDD to a Sata SSD. Highly diminishing returns.

Although much quicker for certain workloads, I found the OS booted about a second quicker which I only noticed with a timer. If I had the choice I'd get a 500GB SSD rather than a 250GB NVMe drive.

edscdk · 17 Dec 2017 at 20:14

I went from normal 500read / 250 write to a 3500/2000 ssd and it's faster but not noticeably! Well if you benchmarks it maybe it's loads faster but nothing like hdd to ssd..

eddiew · 18 Dec 2017 at 10:38

Similar to the above, I had a sata Samsung 850 Evo as my system drive and moved to an m.2 960 Pro. Benchmarks show 3000mb/s read, 2000 write, just as promised, which is around 5-6x faster than the old. System does not feel significantly faster... and I'm constantly worried about it getting too warm because my stupid motherboard puts it behind the gpu heatsink x(

On the whole, nothing wrong with it, does what it says on the tin, very tiny. Windows boots very fast, starting up or resuming from hibernate in the time it takes to sip my tea - but that's probably where the visible performance increase ends. I suspect most games (or at least the ones I play) load each file they need one at a time, then process them before requesting the next file, adding a lot of pauses that are nothing to do with the drive's throughput. Nothing I do saturates the drive, so I'm never seeing the full speed of it. Maybe if I was writing uncompressed video files with a thread-optimised program it would come close, but day to day gaming, Photoshopping, etc, no change.

If you need the capacity or want to shrink your pc by removing sata devices, go for it, but I wouldn't buy it expecting to see a speed upgrade for normal uses.