Confused on how a PCI-E SSD operates

[GameMusic3]

First, if I have a PCI-E SSD and PCI-E sound card am I losing potential speed on the graphics device?

Second do I need any special motherboard features for a PCI-E SSD If I have a Z97?

Do I want the M.2 interface on a desktop or are those just for mobile components?

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

1. GPU's don't need anywhere near the amount of PCI-e bandwidth most people think. In fact a modern PCI-e gen3 device could easily do with 4 lanes on a gen 3 board. There won't be any real loss in GPU performance.

2. Yes. You also need to make sure your PCI-E SSD is bootable. But if all you want to do is use it a secondary storage device then you should be fine regardless.

3. It saves space. In most cases using the M.2 slot also disables a SATA port.

Note. PCI-E SSDs are fast, but really only work under very, very heavy workloads or high que depths. Under any practical application they have no gains in performance over traditional SSDs

 

[photonboy]

I basically agree with the above.

*Don't waste money on a fast SSD. Benchmarks aside, the real-world advantage of a drive faster than say, a 2.5" Samsung 850 EVO are likely not noticeable.

Perhaps specific video EDITING scenarios might benefit but other than that I can't think of much.

Keep in mind Windows will BUFFER into main system memory (i.e. DDR3) programs and data you use. for example, if I open MS WORD once it will open from my SSD the first time but the second time (unless I reboot) it opens from my DDR3 memory. Windows 10 may even pre-buffer data after I reboot but I don't know the details.

You can probably shave a few seconds off boot time with a really fast PCIe SSD but it's really hard for me to justify the added cost. I suspect most desktop users buying PCIe SSD's are largely wasting their money.

Other:
You should read your motherboard manual if interested. GPU loss of performance is not an issue, however you may deactivate or lose performance on some PCIe slots, M.2 or SATA connectors depending on what PCIe slots are used.

 

[photonboy]

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/intel-750-pcie-ssd-review-400gb/5/

This seems to agree with our comments:
"..this PCIe SSD can replace a set of RAIDed SSDs used for media editing or be used as a high performance virtual machine storage drive.."

(benchmarks and real-world performance can be vastly different. For my basic usage I had to clone to an SSD that was a maximum of a QUARTER of the speed due to an SSD failure and didn't experience much difference. Even for game loading times there's a significant drop-off in time saved. Once you have any reasonably fast SSD most tasks don't tend to be noticeably much faster with an even FASTER SSD.)

 

[GameMusic3]

Right now I have no particular reason to use M.2 but I am a little concerned on future proofing especially because I will do a LOT of virtualization.

Could I just get an expansion device to support M.2 eventually and not worry about the motherboard's support now?

In a while should I consider SATA Express or M.2 the 'future' interface?

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

IMO neither is really important. Sata Express in a way combines multiple SATA ports to achieve speed. This is something that can be done using RAID. By the time SSD speeds reach SATAe speeds, standard SATA will likely have moved on to the next gen. But if I had to choose between the two, M.2 will be the longer lasting standard. M.2 will be useful in laptops and small form factor PC's and it's something that has a need now.