What kind of SSD is fastest?

[PCnooberson]

PC Noob here,

Im looking to get around a 1 TB SSD for my PC, but the last time i ever went shopping for SSDs, all that was really relevant where the 2.5" little drives.

But looking now, there are just insane amounts of different types of SSDs. Just looking off Newegg, theres m.2, m.2 2280, m.2 2242, mSATA, PCI-E, Mini PCIe, half slim, half heigh, half lenght.

I am utterly and hopelessly confused. What kind of SSD is the fastest? Or what should someone who i looking of the fastest/best performance be looking for? Could someone give me a ranking or brief comparison between these? My budget is around $500-$700 for the SSD.

 

[oczdude8]

The fastest ssds are PCI-E based ones. I think the 1TB 960 pro meets your needs exactly. Give it a google search and compare its speeds.

Some info to help you out:
m.2, mini pcie, half slim etc are form factors, while PCIE and msata are different connections.

You can have a m.2 msata drive and an m.2 PCIE drive for example. They would look the same (form factor) but have a different communication protocol to your motherboard.

 

[JaredDM]

Let me help to summarize this for you.

Standard 2.5" HDDs and some SSDs use regular old SATA as the interface. We use that as the baseline.

mSATA is just a smaller connection designed for an SSD that clips directly into the motherboard. But, it is electronically the same as SATA, so the speed is the same.

PCIe is a type of data lane originally used for graphics cards, so it's much faster than SATA.

M.2 is another form factor direct motherboard connector similar in appearance to mSATA. But it has both SATA and PCIe lanes built into the connector. If both the SSD and motherboard have PCIe lanes availble it'll use those instead of SATA since it's faster. This is pretty much the new standard for SSDs.

There's also SSDs that are just built to fit right into a regular 4 lane or 16 lane PCIe slot on your motherboard. These tend to be among some of the highest performing, but you need to be sure you have the lanes available. Don't forget that some motherboards have 16x sized slots that are actually only 4x or 8x lanes if the other slot(s) are used. Each motherboard chipset has a maximum number of lanes it supports and they may be shared across different slots including the M.2 if available.

Those other numbers you mention such as 2280, 2242, etc. are actually just the measurements of the SSD (E.G. 2280 = 22mm x 80mm). That way people can know if it's going to fit into their laptop which probably only takes one length of SSD.

Now since you say you are buying an SSD for your PC, you'll need to look at what you have available on your motherboard. If your board doesn't have an M.2 slot, there's no point buying one of those unless you have a free PCIe slot and an adapter card.

 

[geofelt]

Define "fastest"

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.

m.2 is a size format. About the size and shape of a stick of gum.
They vary by length.
The pcie devices will do sequential transfers up to 4x faster, depending if it is a x1/x2/x4 connection.
In actual use that does not matter much except for things such as virus scans.
I suggest for simplicity to buy a conventional 2.5" ssd.
I would buy a Samsung 850 evo 1tb for $350 or so.
The 850PRO is marginally faster at $425.

 

[PCnooberson]

My motherboard is capable of m.2 cards, but i was just under the impression that cards connect directly where the GPU's would connect would be the fastest, then i saw all these different types of PCI-e cards, i just got confused