What are the Pros and Cons of using M.2
- Thread starter Kaapstad
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Pros: Less cables, look neat, massive read / write speed and IOPS performance compared to SATA SSD's.
Cons: Expensive per GB still, uses PCIe bandwidth (assuming we are talking about PCIe based drives, though non issue for X99 / z170 and what not).
Biggest benefit is for those who really can make use of the drives and read / write to the drives often and thier random performance. For gamer and casual users makes no difference really. Well at least for myself when comparing my 950 Pro over 850 EVO's. Just less cables to faff with is my reasoning
Cons: Expensive per GB still, uses PCIe bandwidth (assuming we are talking about PCIe based drives, though non issue for X99 / z170 and what not).
Biggest benefit is for those who really can make use of the drives and read / write to the drives often and thier random performance. For gamer and casual users makes no difference really. Well at least for myself when comparing my 950 Pro over 850 EVO's. Just less cables to faff with is my reasoning
Soldato
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Pretty much above, I think the only downside is that a lot of people don't understand how the PCIE variants work in terms of speeds and consuming PCIE lanes. Which could have a negative performance hit on other kit, I.e. Graphics cards and getting full 16 lanes to each card.
Associate
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pros: Nice and compact
cons: Is a form-factor not an interface type so may in fact not be fast at all
I assume you mean the PCI-E x4 interface?
Having got some cheekiness out of the way...
pros: fast fast fast!
cons: the size of the drives means some can decrease in performance with sustained load due to heat dissipation limits. Not normally an issue for client workloads but still. Also what radox-0 said.
cons: Is a form-factor not an interface type so may in fact not be fast at all
I assume you mean the PCI-E x4 interface?
Having got some cheekiness out of the way...
pros: fast fast fast!
cons: the size of the drives means some can decrease in performance with sustained load due to heat dissipation limits. Not normally an issue for client workloads but still. Also what radox-0 said.
The difference between a fast PCI-E/M.2 drive is not that noticeable until you go back to a SATA drive. I Just moved a few games and a VM from a SM951 256GB to a MX 300 750GB as I needed more space, did not think it would be a big deal but the VM went from 5s boot time to 12s boot time and it just feel slow. The games also have longer load times. Think the Intel p600 is the sweet spot in terms of performance per £ as they don’t cost that much more than SATA drives, that said I would not go lower than the 512GB version.
Thanks everyone.
If I used one it would be in the M.2 slot on a Rampage V Edition 10 motherboard.
Am I right in thinking that the 40 PCI-E lanes available with a 6950X would have to be shared between the M.2 and the GPUs?
If I used one it would be in the M.2 slot on a Rampage V Edition 10 motherboard.
Am I right in thinking that the 40 PCI-E lanes available with a 6950X would have to be shared between the M.2 and the GPUs?
Thanks everyone.
If I used one it would be in the M.2 slot on a Rampage V Edition 10 motherboard.
Am I right in thinking that the 40 PCI-E lanes available with a 6950X would have to be shared between the M.2 and the GPUs?
Yup. Unlike on Skylake, X99 only has DMI 2.0 so only 8 x Gen 2.0 lanes on the chipset. As a result, M.2 slots on X99 boards will use the CPU lanes.
A Non issue I expect as even with 4 GPU's you would have had most running at x8 either way.