Samsung 840 EVO M.2 vs 870 EVO Plus M.2

[stockhausen]

I am running a system based on a Gigabyte Z97X-SLI motherboard which I am (reluctantly, finally) moving over from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
My current System "disk" is a 120 GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD (no longer available).
I am considering replacing it with a larger and faster 250 GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 SSD.
The former (SSD) uses a SATA-III 6.0 Gb/s ACS2 interface.
I believe that the EVO 970 M.2 SSD uses a PCIe 3.0 (x4) interface.
The Z97X-SLI spec says that it offers M.2 support for SATA & PCIe.
It doesn't appear to mention what version of PCIe it offers.

Any suggestions as to whether the Gigabyte Z97X-SLI will benefit from the improved performance that the Samsung 970 Plus M.2 SSD can offer?


edited:
Just been reading some reviews of the Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2. Quite apart from some crafty beggar managing to substitute 3 pieces of cut card for the SSD in a few cases, it seems that they may have a rather severe overheating problem!

 

[darael]

I'm guessing you mean the 970 EVO Plus and not 870? I have a 970 EVO Plus and have yet to experience any issues with overheating. That didn't stop me buying a heatsink for it anyway however, as I've always been a believer in trying to keep my components reasonably cool.

This is a post I made not too long ago:

If you search a popular auction site, you can find Jonsbo heatsinks for under £10. I bought one and installed it a few months ago, as I was worried that my usage of the drive during the warm weather would be doing it no good.

The idle temperatures stayed the same, but the temperature while briefly active didn't move much away from the idle temperature. When it active for longer, it seemed to increase gradually, before gradually decreasing again when idle.

Even where my 500 GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus was reaching nearly 60c during constant activity, it would only reach about 45c doing the same task with the heatsink.

 

[stockhausen]

I'm guessing you mean the 970 EVO Plus and not 870? I have a 970 EVO Plus and have yet to experience any issues with overheating. That didn't stop me buying a heatsink for it anyway however, as I've always been a believer in trying to keep my components reasonably cool. . . .

Thanks for that. Yes, I was referring to the 970 EVO Plus; in fact both the content of my post and the title show a few errors!

Interesting about the cooling. I had a look last night at cooling for 2280 M.2 cards and encountered (amongst other cooling solutions) a "Dual Port M.2 PCIe/SATA SSD Adapter Card with Heatsink" which could allow RAID 1 mirroring and sounds interesting.

 

[skyripper]

TI had a look last night at cooling for 2280 M.2 cards and encountered (amongst other cooling solutions) a "Dual Port M.2 PCIe/SATA SSD Adapter Card with Heatsink" which could allow RAID 1 mirroring and sounds interesting.

If you're looking at the same accessories that I was, that card is probably PCIe M2 on one slot, and SATA M2 on the other, which are two completely different types of M2 drive.

 

[stockhausen]

If you're looking at the same accessories that I was, that card is probably PCIe M2 on one slot, and SATA M2 on the other, which are two completely different types of M2 drive.

Presumably with the SATA drive having worse performance figures than the M.2 drive and probably not allowing "mirroring" (RAID 1)?

I'll check

 

[skyripper]

M2 is the form-factor or shape. SATA or PCIe or NVMe is the type.
PCIe will outperform the SATA drive by a long margin. An M2 SATA drive will be around the same speeds as a 2.5in SATA SSD.

Any mirroring will be software raid only, being done by your OS.

 

[stockhausen]

I suspected as much, I guess I will just have to continue making regular "image" copies of my system disk (and restoring occasionally).

My motherboard is a Gigabyte Z97X-SLI, it offers RAID which I would assume is (sort of) carried out in hardware since it is presumably not dependent on any particular OS?

 

[skyripper]

I suspect it offers RAID via the SATA chipset then.

Your image copies are safer anyhow. RAID1 is only there to protect against "poof, my disk has gone" and not "doh, that update has caused BSOD loops"