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  • Intervenator - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Need MOAR insight into the PCIe SSD market! Wheres it going? Any noticeable performance increased to the end user? Who are the players in the market? Non performance advantages?

    If AnandTech has already written an article regarding any of this, could someone please point me towards it?
  • Intervenator - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Oh, and great review.
  • Kristian Vättö - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    We haven't done an article that collects all bits of info into one, but you may find the following articles interesting:

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/8006/samsung-ssd-xp9...
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/7843/testing-sata-ex...
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/7520/lsi-announces-s...
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/8147/the-intel-ssd-d...
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/8104/intel-ssd-dc-p3...
  • frenchy_2001 - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    >Where is it going?
    M.2 form factor using PCIe gen3 x4 for portable and consumer, PCIe cards, up to Gen3 x8 for Datacenter/server. Both running NVMe protocol.
    I don't see much future for SATAexpress, as the 2 other competing standards cover all the use cases already (and better too).

    > Any noticeable performance increased to the end user?
    Not unless you do a LOT of parallel IOs. For consumer, there is a diminutive return past the original boost from switching to SSD (mostly from lower latencies). HDD to SATA SSD gave orders of magnitude improvements. SATA3 -> PCIe is only incremental compared to that. Unless you need this for a server, video processing or other big IO limited task, there will be little difference.

    >Who are the players in the market?
    Still the same: Intel/Micron/Samsung/Sandisk for professionals/servers using mostly in-house designs (intel P3700 for example).
    Marvel and Sandforce have announced PCIe NVMe controllers. No products for those yet.

    >Non performance advantages?
    M.2 will be more compact. Power draw should be more optimized. NVMe should have lower processor overhead.
  • Impulses - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Thx for that.
  • iwod - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    Since speed is a relative thing. The HDD to SSD leap were amazing. But that doesn't mean you cant feel the different between SSD @ SATA 3GBps and SSD@ 6Gbps. And with the recent controller improvement on Random / Seq RW, I can also feel the difference between SATA and NVMe PCIe SSD.

    But with the increase memory capacity, the time to fetch things SSD will also be lower since they are likely cached. So throughput may become less of a concern after PCIe SSD, and average response time will play a role. Luckily this is already being worked on for server SSD usage. So they will likly filter down once PCIe SSD becomes mainstream.

    For the future I would like to see even lower active power consumption. I wonder if they could get it under 2W.
  • Friendly0Fire - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    This makes me think that the SM951 with X99 will be one hell of a beast... I want one. Heck, the XP941 would already be amazing.
  • GrigioR - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Is it possible to boot from those PCIe drives using a 775 motherboard (p35chipset)? Getting rid of Satall bottleneck would be awesome on my modded Xeon system.
  • Kristian Vättö - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    The SM951 likely won't be bootable since it is an OEM drive, but there will be retail PCIe SSDs that are bootable even in older systems (the Plextor M6e should be, for instance).
  • GrigioR - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link

    Nice. Too pricey 1$/GB on the 256GB model... Since my motherboard is PCIe 1.0/1.1 it would run at 500MB/s max... That should not be that noticieable. My Samsung 840 120/128GB runs at +- 250-260MB/s (read)... At least if it were a PCIe x4 it would do 1000MB (bus speed). I`ll leave this the way it is for now. Thank you very much for your input. Now i know it is possible.
  • thel33ter - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Excellent review as always.

    Personally I see the performance as being slightly disappointing, but it's just a matter of time till performance akin to the Intel P3700 is going to be within reach of the average consumer.

    Probably a silly question, but would it be possible to RAID two PCIe drives?
  • vLsL2VnDmWjoTByaVLxb - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    It is odd that Intel RST is kept from years ago when there are scores and scores of fixes to the drivers since the release you are using. This may dramatically impact test results.

    I get the desire for bench and legacy scoring, but at a certain point you have to let go of legacy when serious improvements have been made to reliability, errata, bugs, etc, from previous drivers. Not to mention nobody should be using the drivers from this review.
  • Kristian Vättö - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    We are in the process of upgrading to a new testbed with the latest drivers, but we stumbled into some incompatibilities that have delayed the transition.

    Remember that storage drivers are not as important as e.g. GPU drivers where one version can have dramatic improvements to one game. After all, the RST drivers are the same for all drives, so driver improvements should affect all drives pretty much equally.
  • joannecdinkins - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    just as Larry answered I didnt even know that people able to get paid $6104 in a few weeks on the internet .
    go to this site>>>>> paygazette.ℭOM
  • coburn_c - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    512GB occupying a desktop pcie slot is still criminal. Works well for mobile devices but we need to get these prices down and these capacities up in the desktop space.
  • Kristian Vättö - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    Quite a few of the newer boards already come with M.2 slots, so if you are shopping for a new system you might as well choose a board that has a proper PCIe x4 M.2 slot.
  • Galatian - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    But that limits your choice to essentially Intel Z97 or X99 chipset and from my research on Z97 this actually only leaves the ASRock Extreme6 and 9 as well as the mITX ASUS Maximus Impact VII.
  • KarlKaiser - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Thanks for this article. It is obvious the storage industry is about to change but what I miss as an end-user is helpful comparisons from journalists like yourself that might help me to figure out what to buy now/soon. Keep it up!
    For example, for another $100 more than the 512GB Samsung XP941, soon we'll get the 400GB Intel DC P3500, which is on paper twice as fast at W/R 2500/1700 MB/s, if a somewhat smaller capacity.
  • Kristian Vättö - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    The P3500 is something I'll definitely be reviewing (for both, enterprise and client since there's been a ton of interest), but unfortunately we don't have any samples.
  • DMCalloway - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    I agree. The Intel DC P series is the one to watch right now.
  • vLsL2VnDmWjoTByaVLxb - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    I understand that sentiment, but even in the release notes of 11 series of drivers, let alone 12, performance enhancements are claimed for some SSD scenarios and interfaces versus others. This chipset is 3+ years old. It does the reader a disservice not to give them realistic modern setups to give them the best idea of what they will realistically come across. PCIe SSDs were in their infancy when this testbed came out. Several of these drives might even have firmware updates that improves their standing.

    It just seems like this testing setup is ideal for the testing environment itself, not the reader.

    Perhaps a compromise could be reached where the testbed is stabilized after maturity of a current or previous chipset and Operating system (say the first major service pack, or a year, whichever is sooner), so that errata/bugs can be worked out.

    In any case, thanks for the efforts!
  • Kristian Vättö - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    SSD firmware updates are something we look at, as long as they claim performance improvements (I'm not going to spend a few days on testing if it just fixes an unrelated bug).

    Keep in mind that while we always try to prioritize our readers, the benchmarking must be humane to us too. If I switched the drivers every time there is an update, we would only have a couple of comparison points, which wouldn't do service to anyone.

    Like I said, we have a new testbed with the latest drivers and that will actually be used for our new enterprise SSD suite. Unfortunately, the new testbed doesn't play nice with our Storage Benches and PCIe drives, so I can't transition the client suite until we get that figured out. Otherwise we would lose a major part of our benchmarks and I don't think anyone would want that.
  • CrazyElf - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Do you think that in the future, we will see the level of choice with M.2 SSDs that we get with SATA 3 SSDs?

    Right now it looks like Micron, Samsung, Plextor, and a few others have M.2 SSDs. With Z97 and X99 offering M.2 slots, this looks like a lot of promise, especially considering X99 M.2s are shipping with 32 Gb/s interfaces through PCI-E 3.0 x4.

    Maybe not Ram disk speed, but still very fast.
  • Sunburn74 - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Why is it that the manufacturers of the revodrive have figured out how to make it universally bootable, but everyone else can't seem to do it?
  • Kristian Vättö - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    Others can do it (like Plextor did with the M6e) but the XP941 is an OEM product, so there is no need for Samsung to provide an universal driver since technically it should only be available as a pre-installed drive.
  • The Von Matrices - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    From your wording in the article it sounds like the OCZ drive use an option ROM to become bootable. Is this true? If so that would be a huge disadvantage since these option ROMs slow down the boot process by 20-30 seconds, an eternity in the world of UEFI.
  • Kristian Vättö - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    That is true, the OROM definitely adds 10-15 seconds to the boot time. However, that is not an issue if you sleep your computer like many people do nowadays.
  • The Von Matrices - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link

    While I don't think you should add an OS boot benchmark, I think it is important to at least mention the extra time required for booting somewhere in the article since that will turn off a not inconsiderable of people from the product.
  • KarlKaiser - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link

    er... the Revodrive won't boot OSX, so not really 'universally bootable'
  • SantaAna12 - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    Timely review. I too would like to know about its benefit to the average user: gaming, 7zip, video etc. I have read that these can run very hot? Some have placed a heatsink on the Samsung. Does this degrade the drive?
  • Riemenschneider - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

    I like the M.2 form factor a lot, just a shame that there are so few ITX boards with support, not for FM2+ and also not for the SoC stuff :(. No real reason to go for a M.2 drive yet, though, but that is going to change as soon as the NVMe SSDs are going to be released.
  • hojnikb - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    I wonder why OCZ didn't went with their barefoot controller (the one in vector150) instead of sandforce. Sandforce is getting really dated now and using it in a premium product like revodrive is kinda silly in 2014.
  • themeinme75 - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    I would like you to add this drive to the review. It reads and writes at nearly 2GB/s.. i not positive it's bootable. It basically 4 ssd in raid. I wonder if someone is working on a pcie3 that would hold 4 1TB m.2 so you get 4tb bootable with like 4GB/s...

    Mushkin Enhanced Scorpion Deluxe MKNP44SC240GB-DX PCIe 240GB Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) PCIe 2.0 x8 $456.31
    Mushkin · Internal · 240 GB · Solid State
    Other capacity options: 480GB ($700) 960GB ($1,071) 1920GB ($1,747)
  • TelstarTOS - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    Still waiting for Intel 3600 test at low capacities (I think 400GB is the lowest) which has a decent pricepoint and it should be slightly better than the SP941 512GB.
  • isa - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    Looking forward to NVMe PCIe M.2 SSDs, but I'm really disappointed in the pricing so far: one can get a 2.5 inch SATA SSD for about $0.50/GB, and while I'd thought that the M.2 format would afford significant cost savings, these SSDs are over $1/GB. Is that just a temporary supply/demand artifact, or is there some kind of huge licensing cost or additional tech complexity costs that hit M.2 that doesn't hit 2.5 inch SATA?
  • TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    A mix of it being brand new technology, low demand (there's, what, 3 non 2011 boards that use it, and a handful of laptops) vs the high demand for data 3 ( every computer made today) and a lack of manufacturers. Most are still making data drives, so those that make m.2 can command a price premium.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    Data 3, not data 3. When will anandtech conceive an edit button?
  • TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

    Sata is a word, android. Stop autocorrecting.
  • Beany2013 - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link

    It's OK, it was clear from the context as to what you meant :)

    I think I'll be waiting for M.2 to become more commonplace before updating my current rig (A8-3870, 16gb RAM, SSD 830) then as there's unlikely to be any real performance/£ increase until the earth moving CPUs are dropped/replaced, and PCIe SSDs are more common/cheaper.

    (Yes, I like my AMD hardware because I'm cheap and like lots of real threads)

    The performance numbers we're seeing from these - effectively first generation - devices are very encouraging though, so I'm looking forward to that point in perhaps two years time when I can throw £500 at a build and get another machine that is hilariously quick for the money.
  • fredey - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link

    If I didn't already miss it I would like to see a raid round up the the revodrive 350 the mushkin skorpion deluxe and a standard sata 6Gbps setup with something along the lines of four samsung 850 pros in raid 0
  • xrror - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link

    Not sure if this is technically possible, but I see a killer niche product of making a "generic bootable" NVMe PCIe card that presents whatever BIOS and/or uEFI code needed to bootstrap legacy systems with any M.2 or (possibly?) ajoining PCIe SSD of your choice?

    M.2 is obvious, just snap it onto the PCIe card.

    I know in the old PCI days, some SCSI cards could boot ajoining cards for you also (Adaptec, LSI) but I was never sure that had to be vendor specific or not (probably).

    Again it probably would take so much effort and be a compatibility hell, but I dunno, it would be nice.

    Or we could get lucky, and bootable PCIe SSD's just take off as a common thing, so older systems can get into the game. Maybe...
  • GrigioR - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link

    Yep, If they can make PCIe x4 or x8 cards that will translate into about 1000MB/s or 2000MB/s using PCIe 1.0/1.1 (bus speed). If you have some old board that have a second x4/x8 slot you could add one of these little things and still have a really fast system. Many good old boards have them and had support for 8GB DDR2 and quad core CPU's. So... you could still have a really fast system out of and old platform. (Phenon x4/Core2Quad/Modded Xeons).
  • mohsin1994 - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link

    very nice post :))

    www.gadgetsalert.com
  • Pwnstar - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link

    Nice spam!
  • MarcHFR - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link

    Hi,
    For secure erasing PCIe drive, what software did you use ? Thanks
  • dxv99p - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link

    Today my XP941 256GB also died. I have not used any erase-tools. It died while PC was running idle with a bluescreen. My board is an ASRock z97 Extreme6. First I thought about the board or the power-supply but a test in another system confirmed it has gone after only 5 month in 24/7 running. Ambient temperatur is controlled at about 30°C so this is not the problem.
  • andrewk18 - Monday, January 9, 2017 - link

    Is there anyway to get the ocz revodrive 350 to work on mac pro 5,1?

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