my response isn't as direct to your question as you'd probably like, but should serve - what i found is that the board's M.2 slot uses 2 lanes, not 4 and that limits it in it's potential speed to "10Gbs". A four lane M.2 socket is claimed to be able to hit 32 Gbs. Big difference
When i was setting up the UEFI Bios, one of the choices was either M.2 or SSD drives for SATA ports 5 & 6, so it gave me the impression it shuts those down for M.2 use, while elsewhere in the manual, as you mentioned, it states it "shares bandwidth" with drives on sata ports 5 & 6, so i'm not really sure.
Then I found a post elsewhere here on Tom's forum from someone that had tried a samsung XP941 in his M.2 slot and he returned it for two reasons: 1st, he wasn't seeing any appreciatable speed increase over his samsung 840 SSDs and equally importantly, as the XP941 is currently still only "OEM" sales, ie to computer mfgrs, anyone selling them, are selling them as "replacement/repair parts".
I learned the exposure of that on a samsung SSD 810 i had, that started corrupting files, including boot files - i had bought it 2.5 years ago on ebay, described as a "dell OEM" SSD. When it started going south, i contacted Samsung and as soon as the CSR heard "model 810, he simply told me that it was an OEM part and i've have to contact Dell for support/warranty, end of story. As i hadn't bought it from Dell, i was SOL. It will be the same with the samsung XP941 SSDs until they;re being offered in "retail" sales, direct to end users.
And in researching the M.2 drives, i found a few horror stories re Intel's support or lack of support for their drives, so for the time being, until the M.2 drive market "matures" and they're being sold as "retail" units direct to customers, i'm going to stay on the sidelines.
As far as the Z97M-Plus board goes, i'll say this - i'm not much above the Fred Flintstone of computer literacy, but other than a few idiotic "non-connects' in the manual that gave me a few headaches (ie instructions are not exactly specific on how to install updated bios or drives), I managed my way thru it and the board works beautifully. Speed wise, best i can offer is, running a EaseUS ToDo backup of 166 GBs cloning one SSD to another (both sammy 840 EVOs), where it used to run 1 hour 30-40 minutes on an older pentium dual core computer, it ran 17 minutes (i7-4790) on the Z97M-Plus board - i'm loving it.
If / when ASUS offers a Micro ATX board that runs four lanes for the M.2 socket and doesn't choke or kill two sata ports, i'll upgrade if i'm hungry for more speed
i'll try to find that other post on the M.2 socket and post it
quantum mask :
Petrossa :
No worries dude.
The Orig Ralph :
thanks for the response - i had started reading the online pdf manual but obviously hadn't made it far enough into it.
not sure if I should start a new thread for this, but I had a question along the same lines:
I have not bought this motherboard yet, still doing my research. However, I was reading the manual and on page 1-2 it says that the M.2 slot shares bandwidth with the PCI Express X2, but on page ix and everywhere else in the manual, it says it shares bandwidth with SATA III ports 5 & 6. It's still hard to find comprehensive information on M.2, but from what I understand, it can either have a PCIe interface or a SATA interface, but not both. Am I wrong, or is the manual wrong? In either case, what exactly do I need to look for when purchasing an M.2 for this board?
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