Can we expect a new version of samsung SSD's this year?

[Exeonx]

I'm looking to upgrade my SSD capacity from my 250GB samsung 850 EVO, though I'm wondering before I jump the gun if there are any newer versions then this coming this year?

 

[marko55]

SATA capability has basically been maxed out, so I wouldn't count on much improvement there. There's still some room at the SATA interface, but the SATA SSDs can't seem to fully saturate it for some reason.

The 950 Pro didn't release very long ago and I'd expect that will be the focus moving forward, and its a beast. The PCIe interface seems to be the future of SSDs, and the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface still has a TON of room on it for the PCIe SSDs to grow in to. For instance, the current PCIe m.2 slots have 3600MB/s of bandwidth available and the 950 Pro can "only" chew up 2500MB/s of that. Hitachi should be coming to market with their new PCIe 3.0 SSD soon, and more competition from other manufacturers should pop up. Samsung will likely continue to push to meet the IOPS of the PCIe SSDs from Intel, but some of that will likely come with better drivers for the 950 as the year progresses.

Even though you can get SAS3 HBAs, that can handle a 12Gb/s SAS device, there aren't even SAS SSDs out there that can match the performance of the PCIe SSDs anyway so there's no benefit here (not to mention the cost to go that route...woof).

I expect the biggest thing we'll see this year will be the ability to RAID PCIe SSDs, which is going to just be ridiculous! At that point you're going to likely be limited by the bus speeds on many motherboards. Z170 is the only consumer chipset using DMI 3.0 right now that could support the full bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x4 to the CPU also. Beyond that you'd have to jump to server class motherboards.

 

[Exeonx]

So basically my options are either go with the 850 EVO or Pro, or upgrade to a PCI SSD.

I see, though from what I can see pricing/wise PCI m.2 SSD's are pretty much at what first/second-gen SSD's were priced, though I assume they will go down in price(like pretty much any storage device every year).

Edit: Seems there is only a 15€ difference between the 850 EVO(500GB) and the m.2 version....

 

[marko55]

Correct. However, upgrading to a PCIe SSD isn't as clean cut as it sounds. Your system has to have PCIe lanes (and a slot) available to support the bandwidth of said PCIe SSD.

I wouldn't count on PCIe SSDs coming down in price for a while, but eventually they will. SATA SSDs are still very much alive and still being created, so this technology isn't really "replacing" SATA SSDs. Look at HDDs, many people still use them as their primary drive these days.

 

[Exeonx]

Correct. However, upgrading to a PCIe SSD isn't as clean cut as it sounds. Your system has to have PCIe lanes (and a slot) available to support the bandwidth of said PCIe SSD.

I wouldn't count on PCIe SSDs coming down in price for a while, but eventually they will. SATA SSDs are still very much alive and still being created, so this technology isn't really "replacing" SATA SSDs. Look at HDDs, many people still use them as their primary drive these days.

Oh i knew about that, I use an Asus Maximus hero VIII, seems that the 850 EVO, Sata or M.2 both have a limit of around 500Mb/s so it doesn't matter unless I go for something like the 950 Pro, which while not having a budget doesn't really seems worth it as just a gamer(I feel like sitting around 500Mb/s will be quite enough for a while)

 

[marko55]

You're absolutely right. The 850 Evo is about as top notch as you need for gaming. I never even recommend the 850 pro to anyone because its just way overkill for a home user. Its meant to take a TON of writes for a very long time which makes it fall in to the business market, not consumer.

The PCIe SSDs have their place in the market, and of course everyone building on a board that can take one wants to use one because they're technically MUCH faster than the SATA SSDs, but when it comes to real world performance for things like gaming they won't feel much different. Certainly NOWHERE near the difference between HDD and SSD. That said, booting a win10 machine to a PCIe SSD with some form of "quick boot" in your bios should be ridiculously quick; like turning on an iPad quick.

Now when you're building a workstation, or server, that has a database on it, the PCIe SSDs are awesome. Other applications that can utilize those IOPS and/or that kind of transfer rate to other drives or arrays in the same machine benefit too of course.