M2 SSD Advice

Enapace

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Hello everyone looking to get a M2 SSD for my MSI Z97M Gaming motherboard.

Hoping for a bit of advice looking to get one big enough for my OS and Star Citizen. Will be using my 1TB HDD as my games/video storage drive.

Looking at these but not sure differences between

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-samsung-950-pro-m2-(22x80)-pcie-30-(x4)-nvme-11-ssd-ubx-vnand-read-2200mb-s-write-900mb-s-270k

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/512gb-samsung-950-pro-m2-(22x80)-pcie-30-(x4)-nvme-11-ssd-ubx-vnand-read-2500mb-s-write-1500mb-s-300

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/512gb-samsung-sm951-m2-(22x80)-pcie-30-(x4)-ahci-ssd-mlc-nand-read-2150mb-s-write-1500mb-s-90k-70k-i

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/250gb-samsung-850-evo-m2-(2280)-ssd-sata3-6gb-s-mgx-controller-3d-v-nand-read-540mb-s-write-500mb-s-

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb-samsung-850-evo-m2-(2280)-ssd-sata3-6gb-s-samsung-mgx-3d-v-nand-read-540mb-s-write-500mb-s-97k

Hopefully they will work with my board.
 

The_Tester

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The 951 is the better drive on paper but has potential compatibility issues. The EVO's are just like the 2.5" SSD form factor (EVO=good PRO=better). I personally would go with the 950 pro, it was marketed and sold as a mainstream consumer level product and is more likely to be supported overall later on (I use it as my OS drive and seems to be working wonderfully). IT mainly boils down to longevity and compatibility. I will note that all of these drives will need some sort of cooling.
951: best performance but designed for OEM and a possible crap shoot on warranty and compatibility.
950 PRO: excellent performance with consumer level mainstream appeal for the future and excellent warranty, compatibly and longevity.
850 EVO: Great bang for the buck with acceptable performance and longevity in a wide verity of applications.
As for size, that depends on what you want on your OS drive. My 950 pro (256GB) is basically just the OS (WIN10 PRO) and associated/needed software (about 50GB). My b*tch drive is a regular old 3.5” platter drive and it gets most of the wear and tear. If not done so already cross reference your desired motherboard with a list of M.2 support (should be on MSI's website somewhere) and the OS you want to use. I highly recommend doing a fresh install of the OS if this is a new build. If not, I have had success when testing cloning/migrating with the drive and it seems to work like it should. Acronis True image for backup/clone and Samsung data migration for relocating from the HDD to SDD.
Do you have a finalized list of motherboard related components and the OS you’re going to put on it?
 

popatim

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Your motherbd does not have the latest m.2 slot, it uses pcie2x2 or sata interface meaning you will be spending money for nothing. Your interface runs at best @ 10GB/s... not a whole lot faster than sata3's 6gb/s. New motherbds run m.2 with pcie3x4 at 32GB/s.

Plus you lose 2 sata ports for every m.2 slot you populate.

I would just get a bigger samsung 850 Evo sata drive and enable Rapid mode instead. Your benchmarks will now blow a 950 out of the water since rapid uses your systems ram to cache the drive. LOL
samsung%20ssd%20850%20evo%20rapid%20cdm.png

 

Enapace

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I already have the system built just need think a SSD will be useful for future performance.

I have a 4790K, 16GB of RAM [4x4GB], RM550 PSU, GTX 970 graphics card. Windows 10 Pro is what i'm going be using.
 

The_Tester

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That gives me a little more info to work with. I’m going on the fact you already have a complete/nearly complete system up and running/built. In short yes; pretty much any SSD will provide better performance in the future over an HDD (platter drive).

The only potential problem I see with the use of M.2 is the motherboard wanting to drop your graphics card down to PCIE3x8 in the PCIE3x16 slot. Or something funky like GPU1@ PCIE3x8 / GPU2 @ PCIE3x4 if you went for a second card. None of this should actually happen but things find ways to be weird sometimes.

I got the 950 pro because of its random seek and IOP/s (Input/output operations per second) which are the kind of things that help speed up its responsiveness. Read/Write speed don’t really mean much to me from a performance standpoint when a different drive is going to be doing most of the actual work (SSD for OS another drive/s for games, pictures, movies, Coded push/pull etc…)

The M.2 slot on your motherboard seems to be a Gen-2 socket not the new Gen-3 (for lack Gen-3 being stated on the website or manual). This is actually a good thing in you case because the intrinsic limitation of PCIE3x16 lanes on the Z97 platform is 16 (there are alternate interpretations to this statement I.E. if the board has a PLX chip which your motherboard does not seem to have).

Most (modern) graphics cards need the equivalent of PCIE3x8 (PCIE2x16) to run. If you eventually populate that motherboard with two graphics cards (PCIE3 x8/x8) there would actually be no more available (or usable whichever way you want to look at it) PCIE lanes to use for M.2 Gen3 on that motherboard. You basically went with the same core setup that I have less deferent core hardware.

That mother board should be able to run two graphics cards natively at PICE3_x8 or a single at PCIE3_x16. There will be a performance hit to some degree running at native PCIE3 x8/x8 (as opposed to PCIE3 x16/16 peer to peer via PLX chip) but it’s unlikely that the performance gain you could get would justify switching motherboards at this time (with your current setup and use).

I don’t know about 3D, Tri-monitor, 4K gaming or anything like that, but you should be able to get enough out of this set up to keep you from regretting it anytime soon.
Your power supply would potentially (more than likely) need to be upgraded for a second graphics card of that type btw.

Your power supply is the only real problem (problem as in ultimately stopping from upgrading) I see with the setup if you wanted to go with a second graphics card for example.
 
what popatin said - i installed a 950 PRO into my Z97M-Plus system, and got the spec'd performance or at least the benchmarks

Capture%201_zpswamrprsj.jpg


Then, for whatever reason, i had never enabled Rapid Mode on my 840 EVOs. I recently learned about the performance boost so i tried it - it literally blew me away

Capture2_zps38sdvmar.jpg


Then for the heck of it, i cloned the 950 PRO to the 840, pulled the 950 out of the computer to see how it would run, and to be frank, it was actually "snappier" in response time, ie loading apps, software etc - and i mean noticeably snappier

my system is detailed below in my sig

fwiw
 

Enapace

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Maybe I will get a M.2 256GB or 512GB then on friday and then a 512GB or 1TB 2.5 SSD in new year and use current 1TB HDD till then..

I'm probably not going get a new graphics card till next generation of Nvidia comes out so power supply isn't a major concern at present for me do agree i probably should of got a slightly higher wattage one tho.

Update

Think I will just get one of these.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/samsung-850-evo-series-m.2-500gb-sata-6gbps-solid-state-drive-mz-n5e500bw-hd-204-sa.html

Plenty of space for my OS and Star Citizen and couple of other games.