I've sort of been living in a cave for the last few years, so I haven't been on the forum much in the last few years. Well, imagine my surprise when I learned about m.2 just a couple of days ago. One article I read yesterday said if you're shopping for a m.2 drive: "Welcome to the cutting edge! You’re shopping for a kind of drive that most folks don’t even realize exists."
I must admit that I'm a little gun shy with SSD. I tried a SSD (2.5" SATA drive) seven years ago on a new build and it died within days. I'm assuming newer versions are vastly improved and are more reliable nowadays.
I don't plan to upgrade my computer immediately, but I will do a complete overhaul in a few months. I will most likely get an Asus motherboard that allow the m.2 drives to run on the PCI-E bus. My understanding that is a lot faster than the more common way of running them on the SATA bus. So... I have a few questions.
1) I'd like to use the m.2 as a boot drive for the OS (still on Win 7, but will likely use Win 10 when I upgrade). Any drawbacks to using a m.2 as a boot drive?
2) If you install two m.2 modules, does it show up in the BIOS as one drive or as two? Can it be configured into partitions like a HDD?
3) Just a few minutes ago I read an article that says you can run these m.2 drives in a RAID setup. Anyone here on the forum try that yet? If so, how did it work? Not really serious about SSD RAID, but I'd like to know more.
4) I've heard the Samsung 960 Pro is the one to get, yes or no?
5) Are prices trending up or down right now?
I know most of these were answered but I am going to try going into a bit more detail for the OP here:
1) No disadvantages of using an M2 as a boot drive. Be sure that your M2 slot supports both SATA and PCI-E. PCI-E are what NVME drives use and are B keyed not A and B. Some slots support A+B, B, A, or only one or the other. This is more an issue in laptops than desktops. My Alienware supports both A+B SATA3 drives and B keyed NVME drives.
2) That depends on the configuration, unless otherwise specified on a PC that is already booted if it is configured for RAID 960s have a bug where they will not show as visible in Windows unless they are set to AHCI. As for the drives themselves yes that is correct you can treat them as normal drives and behave the same way. The only difference is how they show up in the PCH hierarchy ie SATA or PCI-E.
3) Yes you can RAID them and yes I have! There are multiple advantages to RAID but the poors don't like to hear them. First running drives in RAID disperses the load and reduces SOC temps on the HDD controller. This is especially important with NVME drives, not so much SATA3. It is not uncommon for NVME drives like the 960PRO to overheat within a few seconds of use so it is IMPERATIVE that they are cooled with a large heatsink. There are multiple kits available, buy one. Thermal throttling occurs at 80C and it is not uncommon for drives to idle at 60C or higher, the bigger you can find the better, active cooling is also recommended if possible. You wont get quite double without hardware RAID like an LSI but it will come close to maxing out the bandwidth and give you around 4k read and 3k write with two drives. The only disadvantage is that access time (latency) is increased.
4) Ooooook fun time here....
Alright if you remember the best SSDs were SLC, followed by MLC and most of the ****ty drives that failed were MLC, that has evolved now to include TLC or three layer cell. Here are how most drives are configured (using yours as an example). You have your SOC (system-on-a-chip) which is an ARM processor, in your case it is a 5 core called Polaris. Polaris has 4 real cores and a fabric controller similar to Threadripper. When you write to the drive it his a 2gb RAM of DDR3, that then gets passed to an SLC cache chip. That SLC chip holds 22GB and is blazingly fast which is how you get your high read and write speeds. Once you exceed this cache buffer it then has to write directly to its 64 layer MLC V-NAND storage array. When that happens your read/write speeds go into the toilet, probably close to 700-900 read/write or so. This is why RAID0 on NVME is worth it! When you do heavy sequential writes it minimizes the hit you take writing directly to the array. Why the 960 is praised is that Samsung's VNAND is the fastest MLC/TLC available and is far better than everyone elses. The reason why the 960PRO is better than the 960EVO is because the PRO uses MLC (2 bits per cell) as opposed to TLC (3). That greatly increases its write endurance and is why most people consider the 960EVO a paper tiger because of it's high failure rate from the TLC array.
Now to answer your question is the 960PRO the best? It depends. In a laptop? Hell the **** no!!! Do NOT use one in a laptop, they use WAY too much power and throw off almost 8W by itself which makes it the 2nd or 3rd hottest thing in a PC. In a desktop where power and cooling isn't restrictive? Absollutely! I'm waiting for Toshiba XG5 or Samsung Phoenix controller to hit before I move to NVME for the above reason. The drive speeds wont be much faster but in the case of the XG5 vs the XG3 the 5th gen uses less than half the power on load and almost 1/10th the power when idling. That brings the power and heat down enough in my mind to justify going with NVME and move off SATA.
5) Up.....waaaaaaay up until the iPhone is launched.
Fairly short order???? It took 2.5PTB written to kill the drives longest lasting drives. That is 24/7/547(18 months in days) of writes to do so. Some were less, in the several hundred TBW range, but, i dont imagine 1 in 10,00 users of an ssd need to worry about writes.
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
Are you one in 1000+ that writes dozens of GB a day every day? What are you doing?
The Evo sucks plain and simple and should be avoided. I'd rather take my chances on an XG3 with slower speeds then having a catastrophic failure tons of information showing that TLC's endurance is no where near advertised.
