Types of SSD?

[dharanbabu]

What are the different types of SSD, I heard about m.2,sata (nothing rather than names), So which is the better one?

 

[kanewolf]

There are three basic SSD interfaces: SATA, M.2/U.2 and PCIe expansion card (which may internally have a M.2/U.2 device). The type of interface chosen depends on the available ports on your motherboard. If you are creating a new build then you have flexibility.

 

[Rabmac]

With regards speed: SATA < M.2. < PCIe | The same is probably true in terms of price.

Unless you are using your PC for work and hard drive read/write speeds is important, then I would recommend getting SATA III SSD as this is already pretty fast and a good bit cheaper. If you are getting a PCIe SSD then you need to check that there is not a space issue in terms of your other components (normally extra GPU or CPU cooler are the main culprits).

 

[IDProG]

There is no "this is better than that" in storage. Every type has its advantages. A standard 3.5" HDD is super cheap and is available in a big capacity. A PCIe SSD is super fast, it even is about 5x faster than SATA SSD, but it's super expensive (double the price of SATA SSD while offering same capacity). A SATA SSD is between the two worlds. It's faster than the standard 3.5" HDD, but is more expensive than it. It's slower than the PCIe SSD, but is cheaper than it. I personally will buy all 3 of them. I will use 16 or 32GB of PCIe SSD as a boot drive, so it will boot the fastest. I will use 480-512GB SATA SSD as a game and program drive, so it will perform faster. I will usebat least 2TB of HDD as a media drive, since media doesn't need speed to perform well. In terms of mSATA and M.2, they're only form factor, in which the latter is smaller than the former.

 

[Rabmac]

I thought that PCIe SSD in a PCIe 3.0 slot was faster than M.2. although not by much. Is this wrong?

 

[kanewolf]

I thought that PCIe SSD in a PCIe 3.0 slot was faster than M.2. although not by much. Is this wrong?

It depends on the specific devices being compared and the metric used...

 

[IDProG]

There are two types of M.2: M.2 SATA and M.2 PCIe. M.2 SATA is no different than regular SATA SSD in terms of speed. It's just smaller. M.2 PCIe is the smaller version of regular PCIe SSD, but I think we aren't able to keep the speed of M.2 PCIe the same.

 

[IDProG]

For now.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Form factors/connectors:
-2.5" (use SATA connector or U.2 connector)
-M.2
-PCIe add in card (plug into PCIe slot)
Interfaces:
-SATA III (used by 2.5" SATA drives and some M.2 drives), up to 600 MB/s
-PCIe (used by U.2 and some M.2), speed varies by PCIe revision and number of lanes. Most high end SSDs tend to be PCIe 3.0 x4, so up to 4 GB/s
Protocol:
-AHCI, old, higher latency
-NVMe, new, optimized for high speed, low latency modern storage.

I don't know if there's really a "best" form factor, but otherwise a PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD that uses the NVMe protocol would be the "best" (fastest). It would also be the most expensive.

 

[geofelt]

M.2 is a form factor. It is about the size of a stick of gum and fits into a m.2 slot.
A conventional ssd will be a 2.5" and be like a thin pack of playing cards. PCIE is an interface that allows higher sequential speeds. Such devices wil come as a add in expansion card.

The advice to use a 2.5" ssd is, I think a good one.
Do not be much swayed by vendor synthetic SSD benchmarks.
They are done with apps that push the SSD to it's maximum using queue lengths of 30 or so.
Most desktop users will do one or two things at a time, so they will see queue lengths of one or two.
What really counts is the response times, particularly for small random I/O. That is what the os does mostly.
For that, the response times of current SSD's are remarkably similar. And quick. They will be 50X faster than a hard drive.
In sequential operations, they will be 2x faster than a hard drive, perhaps 3x if you have a sata3 interface.
Larger SSD's are preferable. They have more nand chips that can be accessed in parallel. Sort of an internal raid-0 if you will.
Also, a SSD will slow down as it approaches full. That is because it will have a harder time finding free nand blocks to do an update without a read/write operation.