Question How to know form-factor of my SSD ?

[oliveria]

hello members, I'm eager to know if the SSD in my Dell Precision 7720 is M.2 or NVMe form. if I go to disk management and msinfo32, i just see the ssd name as Samsung 850 pro 512GB ssd, but no form-factor indicating if its M.2 or NVMe , in the Media type its listed as fixed hard disk, thanks as I welcome your responses

 

[SkyNetRising]

I think 850 pro were all in 2.5" sata form factor. There were no M.2 sata variants.

BTW - all NVME drives are in M.2 form factor.
850 pro is not NVME. It is sata.

SSD 850 PRO 2.5" SATA III 512GB Memory & Storage - MZ-7KE512BW | Samsung US

Discover the latest features and innovations available in the SSD 850 PRO 2.5 inches SATA III 512GB. Find the perfect Memory & Storage for you!

www.samsung.com

 

[oliveria]

Great, thanks for your response, it means if I buy and replace an m.2 ssd then I should be able to get a very large boost in speed of the whole system, the precision is a powerful machine but I've noted it being slow and I've always thought the ssd is the culprit, the specs are core i7 7820hq, 32GB ram, quadro P3000

 

[SkyNetRising]

Specs says, nvme M.2 drives are supported. So you should be able to install.

Support for three storage devices: two M.2 PCIe solid state drives and one M.2 PCIe/2.5” SATA drive: Dell Fast
Response Free Fall Sensor standard
Hard Disk Drive (HDD): 2.5” 500GB, 1TB 7200RPM up to 2TB 2.5” 5400RPM SATA 6Gb/s
Solid State Drive (SSD): 256GB, 512GB, 512GB SED (Check regional availability), 1TB 2.5” SATA 6Gb/s
M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive (M.2 SSD): 256GB, 512GB, 512GB SED (Check regional availability), 1TB SSD

https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent...ts/en/Documents/Precision-7720-Spec-Sheet.pdf

 

[oliveria]

Thanks for your response, my question is, is it really worth upgrading from the 2.5 inch ssd to m.2 ssd, or the speed difference wont be worth the amount I'll pay for, should I just stick to the current 2.5 inch ssd that this dell is having,

 

[SkyNetRising]

is it really worth upgrading from the 2.5 inch ssd to m.2 ssd, or the speed difference wont be worth the amount I'll pay for, should I just stick to the current 2.5 inch ssd that this dell is having,

Probably not worth it.
Upgrade only, if you need more capacity. Not for performance.
Or, if your current SSD is failing.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Thanks for your response, my question is, is it really worth upgrading from the 2.5 inch ssd to m.2 ssd, or the speed difference wont be worth the amount I'll pay for, should I just stick to the current 2.5 inch ssd that this dell is having,

You won't notice any speed difference, unless you like copying terabytes of files between SSDs constantly.

 

[USAFRet]

it means if I buy and replace an m.2 ssd then I should be able to get a very large boost in speed of the whole system

Not really, no.

I have 6x SSDs in my current system.
PCIe 4.0
PCIe 3.0
4x SATA III

It is hard to tell which one I'm interacting with at any point in time.

Any "speed boost" would be seen in artificial benchmarks, not in daily use.

 

[oliveria]

Thanks for the clarification, then I'll just use the 2.5 inch ssd that's already in my system since I wont really get much speed jump in doing an upgrade to m.2 form factor, I thought it could give me a boost when running games or heavy softwares related to CAD.

Mod Edit: according to the manufacturers documentation, the transfer speed of this Samsung ssd 850 pro is 850mb/s, while the other m.2 factor can do around 2gb/s plus, could it be that the speed difference here is large such that it can be noticed when running applications like games and other heavy softwares like CAD , or rendering softwares

 

[USAFRet]

according to the manufacturers documentation, the transfer speed of this Samsung ssd 850 pro is 850mb/s, while the other m.2 factor can do around 2gb/s plus, could it be that the speed difference here is large such that it can be noticed when running applications like games and other heavy softwares like CAD , or rendering softwares

No.
That speed difference is really only seen when transferring large blocks of data between 2 like drives.

For games, see these:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YoRKQy-UO4

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9LyNXpsOo



For rendering, I tested this a while ago:
PCIe 4.0, PCIe 3.0, SATA III (equal to your 850)

 

[popatim]

I think 850 pro were all in 2.5" sata form factor. There were no M.2 sata variants.

BTW - all NVME drives are in M.2 form factor.
850 pro is not NVME. It is sata.

SSD 850 PRO 2.5" SATA III 512GB Memory & Storage - MZ-7KE512BW | Samsung US

Discover the latest features and innovations available in the SSD 850 PRO 2.5 inches SATA III 512GB. Find the perfect Memory & Storage for you!

www.samsung.com

correction:

NVME drives can be M.2 or PCIE slot.
Sata Drives can be 3.5", 2.5", or M.2

Both are probably available is specific oem formfactors as well.

 

[popatim]

I use an intel 13th gen laptop with a WD 850 2tb nvme drive right next to my old 5th gen desktop that has Samsung 850 1T drives in it. The laptop is marginally faster loading windows and when loading a large game its only seconds faster then the desktop. Not impressive in the least.

 

[SkyNetRising]

correction:
NVME drives can be M.2 or PCIE.

Those are just regular M.2 NVME drives on PCIE M.2 adapter.
Possibly heatsink covering everything, so you don't see the actual M.2 drive.

Sata Drives can be 5.25", 3.5", or M.2

SATA 5.25" drives? Have never seen such a thing.
Can you provide link to any such devices?
Edit: Unless you meant optical drives.

 

[popatim]

wow did I screw that up LOL
3.5" & 2.5" is what I meant. Going back to edit the post to fix and not confuse people.

 

[Ralston18]

FYI

You can obtain a greal deal of disk related information via Powershell and the use of disk related Get cmdlets.

E.g.:

Get-Disk

Get-PSDrive

Get-PSDrive | Where-Object{$_.DisplayRoot -match "\\"} | Select-Object Name, DisplayRoot

Get-PhysicalDisk | Select *

And others

Just be sure to google the cmdlets for specific details and usage.