The price premium of lower-end NVMe SSDs forms a big part of their problem in my head. When I build a computer for somebody, I usually use an M.2 SATA SSD if I include an SSD, because SATA SSDs are the cheaper alternative, and most people won't use the performance of an NVMe SSD. If they *do* need the performance of NVMe, I find it a little hard to justify stopping at the low end when they can pay a bit more and bump up the performance by quite a lot. My thoughts are that while products like the SBX are a step in the right direction, they really need to match SATA drives in price to become fully worthwhile.
The other thing they have going for them is size. I can see a cheap nvme being used quite a bit in mid range laptops that came with a SATA disk but have a spare nvme slot. For desktops not only does the drive sit flush with the motherboard mostly, but it requires no cabling and no hd cage to put it in. I could see myself getting one as a second drive - it's not like I'd really be able to tell it's any slower then a high end drive for standard desktop usage.
My current machine no longer has any type of SATA drive in it. I have a single 1TB Samsung 960 EVO. I thought about going going for the pro or a 2 TB EVO, but this fits my needs perfectly. Now if we could just get a mini-itx threadripper board... ;)
For me, I need bulk storage, so SATA isn't going away any time soon. However, I don't think Mini-ITX Threadripper will happen, as the socket is too big
Price wise, for a lot of people in your situation, you could get the 500 GB 960 EVO for $200 and also the 1 TB MX500 for $249. That would give you a total of 1.5 TB for the price of a 1 TB 960EVO. Then EVO could then be used for OS and programs with some data while the cheap but still pretty good MX500 could provide the big storage.
The popular budget Micron 3D TLC 2TB drives are on sale all the time from $280-$300 range. They don't have much marketing or even a fancy name associated with them, come in a bare OEM type box but the few reviews out are all favorable. I have one as a secondary storage drive with a 960 EVO 500GB boot drive but tbh when I moved my Steam library over to it, I can't even tell the difference in performance between it and the NVMe EVO.
Why eat the slot? Do your clients get grumpy if they see and "old fashioned" 2.5" drive? I'd rather leave the M.2 slot waiting for a card that really needs it, and still have the SATA drive connected.
I sell to a variety of clients (I co-own a small business so we cover all sorts), and usually they don't have enough technical knowledge to know the difference between a 2.5" drive and M.2. I use the M.2 slot because it allows me to either disconnect the SATA cable (for a modular PSU), or tuck it out of the way to increase airflow. Most of my customers won't need the performance boost of upgrading to an NVMe drive, so it hasn't been a problem before. In the cases where that is a viable upgrade path, I discuss it ahead of time, and do use a 2.5" drive in situations where necessary/desired.
Ditto. I think it'd crazy to use a 2.5" over an M2 if you have the M2 slot available, especially since M2 SATA drives are often cheaper than 2.5" drives (because they are less expensive to manufacture, and the OEM market is larger.)
And as far as SATA M2 drives, if you have an M2 slot that supports NVMe, it's hard to justify not using an NVMe SSD when the cost difference is less than 20%...I picked up the WD Black 512GB NVMe drive last week for $150. A decent 540GB class SATA M2 SSD is at least $120.
If every dollar counts and the performance increase is small or won't be used, it's pretty easy to justify getting a SATA M.2 drive instead of an NVME one.
Honestly, I find it about the same amount of time/difficulty to (un)screw an M.2 drive as it is to work with even a toolless 2.5" drive. Unless the M.2 drive is under the GPU, in which case that really annoys me
Still £/$30 more for a customer who is not going to benefit from the nvme ssd (and less money for you)
I hardly notice the difference between the sata and nvme ssd my self, main difference is them above 1GB/s speeds but day to day usage I don't really notice much the difference between them unless I am looking for the difference (as long as it's Not a HDD even a slow ssd is many times faster then a hdd)
Do Samsung 850 evo have am issue if they have been left on for to long (like 30 days) as my 850 evo just crap it self out smart fail at Bios and can't read it (only done basic not hirions boot CD yet)
Actually, I'd technically make a little more money if I sold them an NVMe SSD (my labor cost scales with price of parts), but they wouldn't benefit from it, so I generally don't recommend them. 850 Evo's don't normally have that issue.
AT, how about a couple of user-reproducible, real life tests? Compilation of a large software package. Unzipping a large archive. Recoding video. Just to demonstrate the scale of improvement the buyers could actually SEE.
Two reasons come instantly. Because only salespeople left in IT. No one even discuss calling lawyers for such confusing people blatant claims like 1600MB/second read speed this product has. And because Windows for example will load something like in 17.6 seconds instead of 17.9 with this drive vs SSD.
Funny also is that 2-3 times slower drive which does not deliver at all is just 25-30% cheaper then the leaders.
This site is often for people for assemble their own PCs and/or choose what to buy for their companies. I'd think a few reproducible, real life tests vs proprietary and compressed tests would show the value of improvements. Maybe it is what AT really is afraid of, because tests show the improvements which do not exist in real life?
An external USB 3.0 connected PCIe M.2 type NVMe adapter would be faster than any USB thumb drive, and would be ideal for a bootable external "Windows to Go". Is such a device available yet? Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-M-2-SATA-SSD-E... but compatible with PCIe NVMe M.2 80mm drives, such as this MyDigitalSSD, or the Samsung 960 NVMe, for example.
The only ones I've seen are Thunderbolt adapters, which require a Thunderbolt port. They all come populated with an SSD too. The "cheapest" I've seen is the TekQ Rapide, which while priced below others and with decent performance, isn't exactly cheap at $250
Since NVMe SSDs still command a price premium even with low cost drives like the SBX out there, it may just not make a lot of sense to build NVMe-to-USB drive enclosures. After all, SATA 3.0 is rated to 6 Gbit/s and USB 3.0 is rated at 5 Gbit/s which means you're already going to be at the saturation point of USB 3.0 with a SATA SSD in a USB enclosure at a relatively low cost for a removable boot drive. I've been doing something like that with a 2.5 inch SATA to USB 3.0 enclosure and a spare 120GB Patriot Torch. Ubuntu happily boots from it and I can't really discern much difference (responsiveness, performance, read/write speed, etc.) between using the drive in the external enclosure and using that same drive on my laptop's internal SATA connector.
http://www.microsatacables.com/m-2-ngff-pcie-ssd-t... This explicitly states PCIe (and is out of stock), all others just state SATA M.2. But as Peach described, USB 3.0 is already saturated by SATA 3.0. You could frankenstein something. Get one of those PCIe slot to USB things the mining community uses, then a PCIe to M.2 NVME adapter and then hope it somehow works. :D Not pretty though. ;)
No problem. I also checked out the drive you linked, and it only supports the one Samsung OEM drive that uses PCIe with the AHCI protocol, not NVMe. Not sure why it doesn't support NVMe, but it says it doesn't, so good idea to keep an eye on that.
That would presume that there is a USB to PCIe adapter chip, which there isn't. Thunderbolt, as previously mentioned, is available, but that is because Thunderbolt is based on PCIe anyway. So, no bridge chip is required.
I'd like to see a low performance M.2 PCIe to USB enclosure just to make it easier to format and transfer drives. E.g., suppose you have a laptop with one M.2, and you want to upgrade. You'll have to make a disk image from M.2 PCIe, copy it to a SATA USB drive, then install the new M.2 drive and copy the image. You need a third drive in between. It'd be nice to copy straight from one M.2 drive to the other.
Well, as far as that goes, it would be nice if laptop makers would replace the 3.5" bay with two m.2 slots so it wouldn't be so much trouble for those very things. However, it seems laptop makers have their heads about as far up their behinds as is possible.
The new WD Black is more of a high-end NVMe drive in both price and performance. I didn't want to make the graphs too large, and I only have 1TB samples of the WD Black so it wouldn't be a fair comparison against the 512GB and smaller SBX.
seems that Crucial MX500 is a VERY good drive taking everything into account price is "reasonable" performance is also "reasonable" given the price.
to each their own, I kind of like the good ol 2.5" sata drive, they do not seem to have any throttle from heat related crud that so many of the u2 or m2 (whatever version you want to call them) as pretty much all mobo put them really close to massive heat producing parts such as cpu or gpu and those stupid heatshields 9/10 are useless as crud ^.^
the other side of NVME based is not only does your motherboard have to support such (from OS as well as mobo point of view) seems there are many of them out there that are not as plug and play as they should be considering the cost IMO.
I am ok with a corvette over a station wagon (i.e SSD vs HDD) I do not have need to pay that extra $$$$$$ for a ferrari (that seems that given the proper workload are obviously WAY faster, but, run of the mill race, SSD are already fast enough and much more costly than a standard HDD to begin with)
Actually, yes, NVMe is a mode. The other mode is AHCI under PCIe, and all NVMe drives can operate in AHCI mode, and yes it does hurt random performance because the instruction parallelism allowed isn't nearly as wide under AHCI mode.
The thing is that unless you need to work with huge data (editing for example) buying an NVME SSD makes ZERO sense specially on a laptop with the added powerconsumption and heat vs a sata ssd that will be as fast for all of the usages of a non-prosumer.
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MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
The price premium of lower-end NVMe SSDs forms a big part of their problem in my head. When I build a computer for somebody, I usually use an M.2 SATA SSD if I include an SSD, because SATA SSDs are the cheaper alternative, and most people won't use the performance of an NVMe SSD. If they *do* need the performance of NVMe, I find it a little hard to justify stopping at the low end when they can pay a bit more and bump up the performance by quite a lot. My thoughts are that while products like the SBX are a step in the right direction, they really need to match SATA drives in price to become fully worthwhile.Dribble - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
The other thing they have going for them is size. I can see a cheap nvme being used quite a bit in mid range laptops that came with a SATA disk but have a spare nvme slot. For desktops not only does the drive sit flush with the motherboard mostly, but it requires no cabling and no hd cage to put it in. I could see myself getting one as a second drive - it's not like I'd really be able to tell it's any slower then a high end drive for standard desktop usage.Dribble - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Ah didn't read the previous comment carefully enough "M2 SATA SSD" not "SATA SSD", never mind.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Yeah. I can see 2.5" SATA going away entirely / being replaced by 2.5" U.2, but M.2 SATA still has a place for meeek2121 - Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - link
My current machine no longer has any type of SATA drive in it. I have a single 1TB Samsung 960 EVO. I thought about going going for the pro or a 2 TB EVO, but this fits my needs perfectly. Now if we could just get a mini-itx threadripper board... ;)MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
For me, I need bulk storage, so SATA isn't going away any time soon. However, I don't think Mini-ITX Threadripper will happen, as the socket is too bigRatman6161 - Monday, May 7, 2018 - link
Price wise, for a lot of people in your situation, you could get the 500 GB 960 EVO for $200 and also the 1 TB MX500 for $249. That would give you a total of 1.5 TB for the price of a 1 TB 960EVO. Then EVO could then be used for OS and programs with some data while the cheap but still pretty good MX500 could provide the big storage.gglaw - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
The popular budget Micron 3D TLC 2TB drives are on sale all the time from $280-$300 range. They don't have much marketing or even a fancy name associated with them, come in a bare OEM type box but the few reviews out are all favorable. I have one as a secondary storage drive with a 960 EVO 500GB boot drive but tbh when I moved my Steam library over to it, I can't even tell the difference in performance between it and the NVMe EVO.https://www.amazon.com/Micron-1100-SATA-2-5-inch-M...
that's the drive but it goes on sale lower than that pretty much every week.
wumpus - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Why eat the slot? Do your clients get grumpy if they see and "old fashioned" 2.5" drive? I'd rather leave the M.2 slot waiting for a card that really needs it, and still have the SATA drive connected.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
I sell to a variety of clients (I co-own a small business so we cover all sorts), and usually they don't have enough technical knowledge to know the difference between a 2.5" drive and M.2. I use the M.2 slot because it allows me to either disconnect the SATA cable (for a modular PSU), or tuck it out of the way to increase airflow. Most of my customers won't need the performance boost of upgrading to an NVMe drive, so it hasn't been a problem before. In the cases where that is a viable upgrade path, I discuss it ahead of time, and do use a 2.5" drive in situations where necessary/desired.Samus - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Ditto. I think it'd crazy to use a 2.5" over an M2 if you have the M2 slot available, especially since M2 SATA drives are often cheaper than 2.5" drives (because they are less expensive to manufacture, and the OEM market is larger.)And as far as SATA M2 drives, if you have an M2 slot that supports NVMe, it's hard to justify not using an NVMe SSD when the cost difference is less than 20%...I picked up the WD Black 512GB NVMe drive last week for $150. A decent 540GB class SATA M2 SSD is at least $120.
Death666Angel - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
If every dollar counts and the performance increase is small or won't be used, it's pretty easy to justify getting a SATA M.2 drive instead of an NVME one.Death666Angel - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Especially since small capacities are likely to be very close in speed, when comparing NMVE and SATA M.2.Byte - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
As someone who does a lot of testing/tweaking, i love the easy formfactor, but hate having to screw and unscrew. We really need a tooless update.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
Honestly, I find it about the same amount of time/difficulty to (un)screw an M.2 drive as it is to work with even a toolless 2.5" drive. Unless the M.2 drive is under the GPU, in which case that really annoys meleexgx - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Still £/$30 more for a customer who is not going to benefit from the nvme ssd (and less money for you)I hardly notice the difference between the sata and nvme ssd my self, main difference is them above 1GB/s speeds but day to day usage I don't really notice much the difference between them unless I am looking for the difference (as long as it's Not a HDD even a slow ssd is many times faster then a hdd)
Do Samsung 850 evo have am issue if they have been left on for to long (like 30 days) as my 850 evo just crap it self out smart fail at Bios and can't read it (only done basic not hirions boot CD yet)
MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
Actually, I'd technically make a little more money if I sold them an NVMe SSD (my labor cost scales with price of parts), but they wouldn't benefit from it, so I generally don't recommend them. 850 Evo's don't normally have that issue.peevee - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
AT, how about a couple of user-reproducible, real life tests? Compilation of a large software package. Unzipping a large archive. Recoding video. Just to demonstrate the scale of improvement the buyers could actually SEE.SanX - Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - link
Two reasons come instantly. Because only salespeople left in IT. No one even discuss calling lawyers for such confusing people blatant claims like 1600MB/second read speed this product has. And because Windows for example will load something like in 17.6 seconds instead of 17.9 with this drive vs SSD.Funny also is that 2-3 times slower drive which does not deliver at all is just 25-30% cheaper then the leaders.
peevee - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
This site is often for people for assemble their own PCs and/or choose what to buy for their companies. I'd think a few reproducible, real life tests vs proprietary and compressed tests would show the value of improvements.Maybe it is what AT really is afraid of, because tests show the improvements which do not exist in real life?
dgingeri - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
For $53 for a 128GB one, with a 5 year warranty? That's now the boot drive of my server.dgingeri - Monday, May 7, 2018 - link
It has worked remarkably well as a server boot drive. I highly recommend it.vailr - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
An external USB 3.0 connected PCIe M.2 type NVMe adapter would be faster than any USB thumb drive, and would be ideal for a bootable external "Windows to Go". Is such a device available yet?Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-M-2-SATA-SSD-E... but compatible with PCIe NVMe M.2 80mm drives, such as this MyDigitalSSD, or the Samsung 960 NVMe, for example.
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
The only ones I've seen are Thunderbolt adapters, which require a Thunderbolt port. They all come populated with an SSD too. The "cheapest" I've seen is the TekQ Rapide, which while priced below others and with decent performance, isn't exactly cheap at $250PeachNCream - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Since NVMe SSDs still command a price premium even with low cost drives like the SBX out there, it may just not make a lot of sense to build NVMe-to-USB drive enclosures. After all, SATA 3.0 is rated to 6 Gbit/s and USB 3.0 is rated at 5 Gbit/s which means you're already going to be at the saturation point of USB 3.0 with a SATA SSD in a USB enclosure at a relatively low cost for a removable boot drive. I've been doing something like that with a 2.5 inch SATA to USB 3.0 enclosure and a spare 120GB Patriot Torch. Ubuntu happily boots from it and I can't really discern much difference (responsiveness, performance, read/write speed, etc.) between using the drive in the external enclosure and using that same drive on my laptop's internal SATA connector.Death666Angel - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
http://www.microsatacables.com/m-2-ngff-pcie-ssd-t...This explicitly states PCIe (and is out of stock), all others just state SATA M.2. But as Peach described, USB 3.0 is already saturated by SATA 3.0.
You could frankenstein something. Get one of those PCIe slot to USB things the mining community uses, then a PCIe to M.2 NVME adapter and then hope it somehow works. :D Not pretty though. ;)
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
The PCIe slots to USB cable just repurpose the pins on the connector to carry PCIe signals. They do NOT follow USB communication protocolsDeath666Angel - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Thanks for that info and sorry for my misinformation. :)MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
No problem. I also checked out the drive you linked, and it only supports the one Samsung OEM drive that uses PCIe with the AHCI protocol, not NVMe. Not sure why it doesn't support NVMe, but it says it doesn't, so good idea to keep an eye on that.dgingeri - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
That would presume that there is a USB to PCIe adapter chip, which there isn't. Thunderbolt, as previously mentioned, is available, but that is because Thunderbolt is based on PCIe anyway. So, no bridge chip is required.Mikewind Dale - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
I'd like to see a low performance M.2 PCIe to USB enclosure just to make it easier to format and transfer drives. E.g., suppose you have a laptop with one M.2, and you want to upgrade. You'll have to make a disk image from M.2 PCIe, copy it to a SATA USB drive, then install the new M.2 drive and copy the image. You need a third drive in between. It'd be nice to copy straight from one M.2 drive to the other.dgingeri - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Well, as far as that goes, it would be nice if laptop makers would replace the 3.5" bay with two m.2 slots so it wouldn't be so much trouble for those very things. However, it seems laptop makers have their heads about as far up their behinds as is possible.peevee - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
You will have zero benefit from NVMe on USB 3.0. Maybe USB 3.2.Samus - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Is there some reason the WD Black NVMe results are missing from all your charts, when you just did a review of that drive?Seems kind of weird considering it's this drives natural competitor.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
The new WD Black is more of a high-end NVMe drive in both price and performance. I didn't want to make the graphs too large, and I only have 1TB samples of the WD Black so it wouldn't be a fair comparison against the 512GB and smaller SBX.Dragonstongue - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
seems that Crucial MX500 is a VERY good drive taking everything into accountprice is "reasonable" performance is also "reasonable" given the price.
to each their own, I kind of like the good ol 2.5" sata drive, they do not seem to have any throttle from heat related crud that so many of the u2 or m2 (whatever version you want to call them)
as pretty much all mobo put them really close to massive heat producing parts such as cpu or gpu and those stupid heatshields 9/10 are useless as crud ^.^
the other side of NVME based is not only does your motherboard have to support such (from OS as well as mobo point of view) seems there are many of them out there that are not as plug and play as they should be considering the cost IMO.
I am ok with a corvette over a station wagon (i.e SSD vs HDD) I do not have need to pay that extra $$$$$$ for a ferrari (that seems that given the proper workload are obviously WAY faster, but, run of the mill race, SSD are already fast enough and much more costly than a standard HDD to begin with)
moheban79 - Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - link
Anyone know if these nvme drives come with legacy option roms?peevee - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
Looks to me the drives were not in NVMe mode. Random performance should not be so much lower than SATA drives.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
NVMe is not a "mode", and random performance is dependent on the drive, not the interface (up to a point)dgingeri - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
Actually, yes, NVMe is a mode. The other mode is AHCI under PCIe, and all NVMe drives can operate in AHCI mode, and yes it does hurt random performance because the instruction parallelism allowed isn't nearly as wide under AHCI mode.https://www.anandtech.com/show/7843/testing-sata-e...
peevee - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
What dgingeri said. Learn your stuff before commenting.Looks like it is a fraud on the part of manufacturer, or a fk-up on the AT side.
Billy Tallis - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
Literally everything in your comment is wrong.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - link
I don't see in your link where it says that drives can switch between NVMe and AHCI.Lolimaster - Saturday, May 5, 2018 - link
The thing is that unless you need to work with huge data (editing for example) buying an NVME SSD makes ZERO sense specially on a laptop with the added powerconsumption and heat vs a sata ssd that will be as fast for all of the usages of a non-prosumer.Lolimaster - Saturday, May 5, 2018 - link
It's nice that you see those 1-2-3GB/s on crystaldiskmark but it's totally wasted for 99% of your daily usage.Lolimaster - Saturday, May 5, 2018 - link
Want faster boot having alreayd an SSD? Enable fast boot on bios to skip some checks.