m.2 or 2.5" SSD? and other strange questions...

[975m]

Hello, I'm an old fart from back in the days of destroying BH5 and 1700+'s who is slowly limping my way back into this world after giving up and dragging an ageing XPS laptop around, please excuse my lack of modern PC enthusiast knowledge and feel free to correct me on any terminology or stupidity in this post.

So far into my build I've bought;

• 1 x Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz (Skylake) Socket LGA1151 Processor - Retail
• 1 x Asus Z170 Sabertooth Mark S Intel Z170 (Socket 1151) DDR4 ATX Motherboard
• 1 x NZXT H440 New 2015 Edition Case - White & Black
• 1 x Ballistix Sport LT 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-19200C16 2400MHz Quad Channel Kit - White (BLS4C8G4D240FSC)
• 1 x Super Flower Leadex Platinum 750W Fully Modular "80 Plus Platinum" Power Supply - White
• 1 x Alpenföhn Matterhorn White CPU Cooler

And now that I am onto buying some storage I have a few questions relating to M.2 drives;

• Is it worth spending the money on them now or will prices/performance improve drastically over the next 3/6months?
• Does anyone sell a range with a white PCB?
• If I did buy one should I use it as a boot drive over a 2.5" SSD?

For reference I'm currently looking at the Samsung 950 Pro M.2 drive and/or a couple of SK Hynix SH910 2.5" SSD drives. Mainly because they fit into my colour scheme (I have a plan!) but also because the performance seems relatively decent compared to an option where colour was an afterthought. I'm in no hurry to dive into any purchases as I'd rather get it right than buy something NOW just to have it.

Also, is it just a coincidence that 256GB 2.5" SSDs have faster write speeds than 128GB 2.5" SSDs or am I missing some informations on the internal technological wizardry at work here?

 

[5abr3]

Write speeds could be down to the size of the cache. If you copy a file larger than the cache you effectively saturate the higher speed SLC memory and your speed will drop down to the TLC/MLC actual storage speed. A lot of this could therefore be very dependent on the test method.

From looking at this, the pro 950's main advantage is with very large files so something with lots of small files (like an OS) gets some benefit but the jump from spinning disk to SSD is nuch more noticable than SATA 6 to M.2. I am still tempted to get an m.2 though!

 

[975m]

Aye maybe, I had a good trawl through various benchmarks and informations the other night and honestly I don't think it'll matter which direction I go in at the moment. In benchmarks the difference is huge but from what I can gather the majority of the benefits aren't something I'd notice on a daily basis, maybe on the odd occasion where I'm copying a large file from here to there but then I'll probably end up bottlenecked by the other device.

I'm going to go ahead and answer myself with what I have gathered.

• Is it worth spending the money on them now or will prices/performance improve drastically over the next 3/6months?

I'm going to pass on M.2 for now, give it a little time for the market to normalise.

• Does anyone sell a range with a white PCB?

No and probably not going to be a thing.

• If I did buy one should I use it as a boot drive over a 2.5" SSD?

Your monitor takes 12 seconds to boot from 0 and either choice would match or be faster than that so why bother?