M.2 drives. Thoughts for a boot drive.

[Kanifee]

Ok so I got my MSI Z97 G55 Board up and running around a week ago after being out of the scene for around 12 months, everything I need I have apart from a SSD drive for my windows installation. Now I remember from my last system that the single biggest upgrade I made for performance and feel for every day use was a Solid State Drive so I know it is a must in a modern system. With my motherboard offering a new way to connect my storage though I'm a little unsure how to proceed.

I understand that the new M.2 sockets potentially offer better performance being hosted on PCIe lanes and that SSD performance goes much deeper than just on the face of read/wright speeds, I also understand that the way the new socket uses PCIe means that the connection is full duplex (simultaneous read/wright) rather than the half duplex the SATA connection offers currently. Instead of informing me though this seems to have done nothing but muddy the water even more.

My intention is to buy once and forget about it, avoiding potentially re installing my pc moving from a standard SSD to M.2 in the future would be nice if possible, that said if it just isn't worth it currently then I don't want to pay for the privilege of avoiding this.
Is it worth waiting and shopping around for a M.2 Drive, I plan to run a 120gb drive for my OS along with two conventional 500Gb drives in raid0 for my steam folder/games installation's. Is the benefit of this new socket utilized by the current crop of thin on the ground early iterations aimed at the mass market pc user or is this just something that needs to mature still?

 

[LordBarrass]

Hi Kanifee,

That motherboard does support the PCI-E M.2 SSD's. Currently we have a lot of brands offering me M.2 boards that are only SATA III compatible. So you would see an improvement but not a great deal over a standard SATA II SSD. The Only brand to offer me full PCI-E M.2 SSd's is Plextor and I hope to get these in June. I am chasing for a better leadtime at the moment. Intel and a few others will be releasing full PCI-E SSD's later this year as well.

We will also be getting all the SSD's and doing some benchmarking on them as well to see how well they perform against each other. Expect some posts around Mid June.

I hope this helps.

 

[Kanifee]

I look forward to them, I will be very interested in what you have to say as I have been reading some dreadful things about the impact the Microsoft Ahci drivers in win 8/8.1 have on the M.2 drives. it will be interesting to see if Intel plan on releasing a superior driver to correct the issues the native windows driver can not resolve.

 

[Dazza_Random]

The Only brand to offer me full PCI-E M.2 SSd's is Plextor and I hope to get these in June. I am chasing for a better leadtime at the moment. Intel and a few others will be releasing full PCI-E SSD's later this year as well.

Any idea on when/if you will be getting more PCI Express SSDs similar to the Plextor's?

 

[Bazzer]

Started a new build last week with MSI Z97 G55 SLI board, a Crucial M.2 240GB SSD running Windows 8.1 x64

All seemed well and OS installed OK. But I started getting instancess of 'no boot drive present' on start up, which enatiled shutting down, removing and reinstalling the SSD on the board and rebooting. This usually worked, but the occurrences became more frequent.

When checking the Bios, all my drives would be showing as present, except for Sata5 (where the SSD should display) and this would show as no drive present, although it was clearly in its slot.

It got to the stage where I could not boot no matter what I tried. I woild reset the bios, and miraculously the drive would show. I would set it as the first boot device, save bios, exit & reboot, only to get no boot drive message.

Kept going round in circles like this until I got so frustrated and removed the SSD and installed OS temporarily on a HDD.

I am in the process of returning the M.2 drive and ordered a SATA connecting one and hope for better luck.

My first experience with this has not been good

 

[Evil Shubunkin]

I'm using a Crucial M550 M.2 512Gb SSD as my boot drive for the past month or so and it's worked fine in my ASUS Z97-Pro motherboard. Wasn't sure how well it was going to work, but can't fault it.

With this drive, it's only just as fast as a SATA III drive (550Mbps read speed) so I'm currently waiting on DPD to deliver a Plextor M6e PCI-E based SSD to see how that performs in comparison.

As your board supports both SATA and PCI-E M.2 drives, you might have better luck with a PCI-E based drive rather than going back to a SATA III one.