My mobo and processor are almost four years old and its just time for a major hardware upgrade. I have already decided on a 4790K and an ASRock Z97 Extreme4. I was going to use the Samsung 512 Gb 850 Pro that is currently my C: drive with a W7 clean install but I am now seriously toying with buying the new Samsung 950 Pro M.2 512 GB PCI-xpress 3.0X4 (MZ-V5P512BW). I am only willing to do this (the M.2 is $350) if I will get a very significant and/or very apparent increase in performance. I do not know enough about M.2 drives to have kind of intelligent opinion of my own so I have the following questions:
-I assume the M2 drive just plugs/mounts in the appropriate mobo location and a SATA port is not used except for maybe a second large capacity non OS data drive.
-I assume the M.2 drive will then function just as my C: boot drive does now and that is where I will do a new W7 clean install.
-Is it reasonable to expect almost instantaneous W7 startup times and effectively instantaneous program and data load times. Things are very snappy with the 512 GB 850 Pro SATA SSD I am now using but I am a speed junkie with respect to a snappy machine. I extensively use a program called Paperport that is an excellent paperless filing system. I have almost 50 GB of sometimes very large PDF files (200-300 Mb). Paperport handles these files but sometimes I have to wait a relatively long period of time when reading or manipulating these files. Most of the wait issue may be with Paperport itself but I am hoping by providing Paperport with much faster access to the files the wait times will be noticeably shorter.
-What have I not asked because I do not know enough to ask.
I am currently using a GeForce GTX 750 Ti Vid Card but I expect to use the 4790K CPU video to drive both my monitors leaving the PCI-Express busses totally available to the M.2 drive.
In other words, I will spend an additional $350 for the new Samsung M.2 drive if that $350 gives me a big bang for the buck and works just like a C: bootable drive plugged into a SATA port. Just noticeable performance improvements would not be a big motivator to spend another $350 especially since I already have a 512 GB 850 Pro I bought only a few months ago. BTW, Newegg shows the referenced Samsung M.2 being available starting tomorrow Nov 3.
-I assume the M2 drive just plugs/mounts in the appropriate mobo location and a SATA port is not used except for maybe a second large capacity non OS data drive.
-I assume the M.2 drive will then function just as my C: boot drive does now and that is where I will do a new W7 clean install.
-Is it reasonable to expect almost instantaneous W7 startup times and effectively instantaneous program and data load times. Things are very snappy with the 512 GB 850 Pro SATA SSD I am now using but I am a speed junkie with respect to a snappy machine. I extensively use a program called Paperport that is an excellent paperless filing system. I have almost 50 GB of sometimes very large PDF files (200-300 Mb). Paperport handles these files but sometimes I have to wait a relatively long period of time when reading or manipulating these files. Most of the wait issue may be with Paperport itself but I am hoping by providing Paperport with much faster access to the files the wait times will be noticeably shorter.
-What have I not asked because I do not know enough to ask.
I am currently using a GeForce GTX 750 Ti Vid Card but I expect to use the 4790K CPU video to drive both my monitors leaving the PCI-Express busses totally available to the M.2 drive.
In other words, I will spend an additional $350 for the new Samsung M.2 drive if that $350 gives me a big bang for the buck and works just like a C: bootable drive plugged into a SATA port. Just noticeable performance improvements would not be a big motivator to spend another $350 especially since I already have a 512 GB 850 Pro I bought only a few months ago. BTW, Newegg shows the referenced Samsung M.2 being available starting tomorrow Nov 3.
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