The fastest drive I have ever owned (so far).

[Tom Speirs]

Samsung 950 Pro PCI-E 3 NVMe M2.

Yep, it reads sequential at over 2 Giga"bytes" per seconds. That's 20 GB (bits).

PS: Sorry for showing off! I don't do it often but f*ck that is fast. Its not even in RAID.

[Draco1962]

Not bad!

[nullPointer]

Wow, I bet that thing must get heavy ... you know, being as it approaches the frickin' speed of light.

Nice one Tom!

Edit

But ... how fast can it make the Kessel Run?

[Adultery]

Woah, that's fast! If only I were a rich man...

[Tom Speirs]

I guess you have a different definition of rich to me or have a wife instead. These drives only entered the consumer market last month.

[Draco1962]

The secret to the speed lies in the speeding the spindle to 88 MPH to generate the 1.21 gigawatts needed to engage the flux capacitor. Where we're going, we won't need hard drives!

[tthurman]

Woah, that's a radical departure from what I was expecting. This thing looks more like a stick of memory, thanks for sharing your experience, time to rethink that 850 in my wish list

[imagamejunky]

That's quick Tom!

I want to run all of my OSs on a pci ssd. Maximum fast boot up.

Junky

[hansolo77]

How do those things even connect to the motherboard? Do they just go into a PCIe slot or do they require a special slot?

[nullPointer]

How do those things even connect to the motherboard? Do they just go into a PCIe slot or do they require a special slot?

I believe this is exactly the case. Check it out. I've been curious about how the BIOS would "know" to load the OS from this sort of drive. I'm sure there is dark wizardry involved.

Edit:

I guess the real question is how does this thing display in the BIOS? Do you need specific features in the BIOS to support it?

[RIP-Felix]

I'm looking into this as well since I just upgraded to an i7 and GTX 970. I made sure to get a mother board that supports "M.2 ultra" AKA "PCI express 3.0 x4" devices". It' a small connector usually located under your graphics card on the motherboard itself. It just plugs in and is secured with a small screw. It's very low profile and very fast! It wont block you GPU either as it's not higher than the PCIe slot your GPU plugs into. Basically if your motherboard supports M.2 Ultra, any modern OS should see it. You may have trouble with older OS's. Win7 and up should be fine, don't know about mac (Yuck!)..

The Samsung 256GB version is a good buy, you get half the write speed (900MB/s) but it's still way faster than any SATA SSD. Besides, read is way more noticeable than write in everyday tasks. Chances are you wont even perceive the difference in write speed from the 512GB version. I'm waiting a while first, but will likely pick one up when prices fall next year.

BTW, if you get the 512GB at Neweqq now you get a free Assassins Creed Syndicate game code. Not bad!

[RIP-Felix]

I just picked this up. I'm getting 2.25GB/s Read and 1.3GB/s write (Measured with ATTO disk)!

[Tom Speirs]

Looks like a good deal although for what its being used the 950 pro I have is a little overkill. I have seen some slow SSDs but I tend to think now any decent SATA SSD drive is enough to remove the storage bottleneck on a desktop PC.

[RIP-Felix]

2 hours ago, Tom Speirs said:

Looks like a good deal although for what its being used the 950 pro I have is a little overkill. I have seen some slow SSDs but I tend to think now any decent SATA SSD drive is enough to remove the storage bottleneck on a desktop PC.

True. I'm upgrading from a 180GB Intel 520 SSD that is great. I've been through a few SSD upgrades as significant progress has been made at maximizing the SATA 2 and then 3 interfaces. However, the "bottleneck" was easily removed by my first SSD (Intel X25M 80GB).  So I'd have to agree that any SSD, even the cheap small ones will remove the bottleneck, if by "bottleneck" you mean the perceivable slowness of booting and navigating windows. It's more about latency, random access, and 4K reads than anything else (Since most system files are this size or smaller). The higher transfer rates really only come into play when transferring larger files, like movies between drives. However, most software breaks these files into manageable file sizes at 1-2GB each so as not to exceed the sweet spot for transfer rates in most HDDs. Even still, the increased IOPS in the smaller file sizes has greatly increased even the perceivable slowness with this upgrade over my 520. It was great while it lasted...

I say was because it crashed soon after booting and refused to boot again. I'm still in the process of tracking down the issue. Essentially, I used acronis to clone my SSD installation. It worked, for a few seconds, then crashed. I tracked that problem to a molex 4pin to 2x SATA power connector that wasn't working correctly, it caused my SSD to disconnect during the clone at 93%. The Master Boot Record  must have got all screwed up because it wouldn't boot either installation. Rescue CD restored the MBR to the SSD but the M.2 wouldn't boot again. I'll try a clone once again to see if it will work, but it may be better to do a clean install. I've been needing to start with a fresh install of windows anyway (the remnants of old windows updates has been eating my drive space and the usual drive utilities won't clean it up). My ASRock Z97 Extreme 6 supports M.2 Ultra gen3x4 but there are special installation instructions not provided in the literature. The win install CD can't install the drive, say's I need to enable an option in BIOS, but really I need to install from a USB key. I found this video that is a great help. We'll see if it fixes my issue.

 

 

 

 

[Tom Speirs]

I believe windows 10 resolves a lot of the issues as it has built in MVME support. Not sure if that is what you went with.

[RIP-Felix]

10 minutes ago, Tom Speirs said:

I believe windows 10 resolves a lot of the issues as it has built in MVME support. Not sure if that is what you went with.

Well, I thought I had cloned my drive. So, i decided to upgrade my main installation to win 10 (from 7 home premium). After the upgrade, when I tried to boot into the M.2 ultra with my win 7 clone is when I discovered it wouldn't boot. Anyway, I played with 10 for most the day and got everything working good (I recently installed Kodi to replace Media Center because of this eventuality). Now I'll try a clone of the Win 10 install. If no luck, Ill try a fresh UEFI install from USB as shown in the Video. I need to anyway, I just don't want to have to reinstall all my apps and configure them all over again (there have been a lot since the last fresh install). So I've been putting it off. Actually, my boot times are way off, it takes like 30-45 seconds once the windows logo shows to even get the loading circle thing to spin and then load windows. So, the install is messed up anyway.

[Tom Speirs]

Best to do a fresh install anyway. My boot speed is nothing special either just so you know.

I won't give details but MC is doable on windows 10.

[Kustom Kid]

21 hours ago, Tom Speirs said:

 

I won't give details but MC is doable on windows 10.

I may or may not have WMC on my emulation rig running Windows 10. It's pretty simple to get up and running. Still rocking Windows 7 on my main PC for primary recording duties if only for peace of mind.

[RIP-Felix]

Well, I can't say I prepared for how fringe these M.2 gen3x4 devices are ATM. Future, yes. Plug and play, No! So the M.2 ultra port on my motherboard jacks directly into my i7-4790 instead of going through the z97 chipset as does SATA. This has the advantage of bypassing the SATA bandwidth limitations theoretically allowing speeds of 4GB/s. However, it decreases the primary Graphics PCI interface from x16 to x8 and disables SLI! That's a big one! M.2 robs the bandwidth from my CPU's limited 16 PCI Express lanes that would otherwise be used for the video graphics as x16 single or x8 SLI. So the the decision I made to go with this cpu/motherboard combo is looking a little less apealing in hindsight. Had I gone with the 2011v3 6-core i7-5820K I would have got 28 lanes or 40 with the 5930K. These support 3-way SLI at thanks to these PCIe lanes and would allow more sharing with M.2 devices. I expect the PCI express lanes to increase on all new CPUs to reflect this trend.

Regardless. I read here that I need to install windows using a GPT UEFI USB Key formatted with FAT32 only. More than that there are specific instructions to force UEFI only in BIOS. Then I have to remove every USB device, SATA device, and put the USB installation key in a USB3.0 back pannel I/O port. Yikes, these M.2 drives are very picky. The drive I got cannot use MBR, and thus it can't be used as a clone of a SSD that was installed using MBR. So, fresh install only. Or so I've read...off to it then...

EDIT: It worked! Specifically this worked:

 

• Using Rufus should work, but use FAT32 for formatting and GPT. The USB flash drive should be in one of the USB ports on the board's IO panel on the back of the PC.
• Start over with the UEFI/BIOS settings, select Load UEFI Defaults in the Exit screen.
• Then in the Boot screen, at the bottom find the option CSM. Click on that to open that screen.
• Find the Launch Storage OpROM Policy option, and select UEFI Only. Go back to Exit screen, select Save and Exit. Then go right back into the UEFI/BIOS.
• Now select the entry for the USB flash drive that has "UEFI:" in it.  Then select Save and Exit on the Exit screen and it should boot the Win 8 installer on the flash drive.
• It is important to ONLY have the SM951 connected to the board, all other SSDs or HDDs should have their power cables removed during the Win 8 installation.
• When the Win 8 installation begins, select the Custom Installation option. If the SM951 appears with any partitions on it, delete them with the options on that screen. After the SM951 has no partitions left, click the New button on that screen. You'll see a message about Windows creating extra partitions, just click Ok. You then should have four partitions on the SM 951. If the main partition is not highlighted, select it. Now continue the installation.

Now I just have to bite the bullet and set everything (EVERYTHING) back up again. Luckily my old/template drive is a simple F11 key away from booting.

UPDATE:

Well, I managed to get most of my installation up again. Took about a week. I'm only going back and forth between drives for a few little things here and there now. Interestingly, the Ultra fast boot option in my UEFI says that it only works in windows 8.1 but it works with 10 also. I can boot from button press to desktop in 9 seconds. 12 seconds with fast boot enabled and about 20 disabled. This is an HTPC, so when I select HTPC on my universal remote windows is just loading Kodi by the time the TV's input is changed over to it. Good upgrade overall, but now I'm limited to 1 VGA card. I'll have to think hard about a GTX 980ti instead of the 970 I bought and returned (good thing It had a defective fan).