Choosing the right SSD: SATA, M.2, PCIe, and NVMe explained by JJ

hello everyone and welcome back to the Asus North America YouTube channel this is jayjay and we're going to be talking a little bit about something a lot of you guys have a lot of questions about that's going to be storage specifically we're going to be diving a little bit more into finding out about SSDs and what's going to be the right SSDs to look at depending a little bit on the usage a little bit on the performance a little bit on the features and functionality as far as if you're going to be building a system what's going to be maybe the right SSD or some of the points to consider for that SSD in your build so we're going to go ahead and explain a little bit about the different various form factors the different levels of performance and also how they ultimately affect you when you go about building your system and we're going to be giving you some insights into how all this all ties together to be able to hopefully improve the experience you're going to be having when it comes to interfacing your storage with your build so let's talk a little bit more about SSDs and how they affect you so when it comes to SSDs and storage in general there's actually a lot of different terms that are out there right now everything from HCI to SATA to nvme to PCI Express to m2 so there can be a lot of confusion when it comes to understanding what might be the right choice as far as putting into your build and how it's going to affect your build and what are going to be the overall considerations you're going to make when it comes these relative storage devices so first and foremost if we kind of go about the different crop of drives their solutions that we have available to you because not everything looks like a traditional drive you can see right here that we've actually got four different storage solutions and you're going to have first and foremost the traditional 2.5 inch SATA based SSD now this is very much a kind of the most common type of solution that's currently available in the marketplace and it offers performance markers in terms of sequential performance up to about 600 megabytes theoretically in the real world tops off about 550 megabytes now over the last about year and a half we've seen a lot more popularity and smaller form factor storage solutions specifically in the m2 so with m2 this was predominately a form factor that was designed for a small form factor in notebook solutions or ultrabooks but has now found its way into the desktop motherboard arena whether you're talking about ATX micro ATX or mini ATX solutions now this is where the storage aspect is a little bit more complicated as MDOT to can offer traditional sat abased connectivity but it can also offer a higher form of conductivity that is referred to as PCI Express now for you guys that know about motherboards you've all probably very familiar with the wide range of PCIe slots that you have on a motherboard that you would use for graphics cards all those utilize PCI Express so this is a much faster interconnect in terms of the bandwidth that it supplies and those M to base SSDs can potentially leverage it but the connector that you're going to see on the m2 drive is essentially the same so this is where things get a little bit complicated you want to make sure to check the specifications for the drive that you're looking at now if you get a native PCI Express based m2 drive you can offer significantly faster speeds easily twice that to three to four times the performance of what would be offered with a traditional 2.5 inch SATA AHCI based SSD so we have another crop of SSDs on the market that have now come out and that specifically going to be drives like what we have here with Intel 750 series now these are absolute game changers in terms of the features and functionality the performance and really the overall specifications that they offer as they're not only utilizing that PCI Express we talked about earlier but they're also introducing the nvme protocol now without getting overtly complicated when you take a look at different storage solutions you have a interconnect that it's essentially used to be able to communicate from the actual device to the motherboard and what we have with previous generations is we have an AHCI protocol which has been around for about 10 plus years and it is a predominantly first and foremost designed for mechanical based solutions and it's been transitioned into flash based solutions of course with flash based solutions they offer much better performance a whole slew of other advancements so the nvme protocol was specifically designed for them and that's what you have now within this generation now right now predominantly pretty much all the native PCIe and mdme based solutions are going to be PCI Express based and either an adding card solution like this or potentially in an m2 based SSD but Intel has also released a 750 series drive which will be utilizing a specialized connector that you'll find featured on ASUS motherboards with a special hyper kit module that allow you to leverage the same type of performance that you would have traditionally from a standard adding card so that overall gives a little bit of perspective terms of the current range of devices that you have available to you but what we want to talk about more now is depending on the usage that you're going to be utilizing for these SSDs is which one might make more sense depending on your build and your usage model so let's talk a little bit more about that so first and foremost one of the key things a lot of people care about when you go about building a system is going to be the post in the boot time so the post is the power-on self-test it's pretty much your system powering on initializing all the devices now with pretty much all generation SSDs when it comes to your post time all of you are going to offer extremely fast post times because all the current generation chips that motherboards all offer very fast optimization to be able to acknowledge all the devices as they're connected but like in a lot of cases your post time can really vary depending on a wide number of factors whether it's the amount of memory that you have installed the number of graphics cards installed a number of storage devices connected to it even the number of peripherals that are connected to corresponding i/o ports on your motherboard that being said if we take a look between a m2 basis is the a traditional SATA HDI base SSD a PCI Express of SSD whether it's going to be nvme or HCI all are going to offer very comparable speeds if we talked about you know which one's going to be faster than the other we would probably say as of right now you would probably give the edge maybe to the PCI Express a HCI based SSDs or adding card base SSDs as those are kind of right now purposely optimized within the Intel chipset architecture so that's going to give you a little bit slight edge but we're talking literally just a couple of seconds now beyond that of course a lot of us care about performance so let's talk a little bit more about how these different SSDs when we talk about performance are going to be impacting the overall experience so in regards to the performance any SSD is pretty much going to offer you significantly improved performance in an order of what's called magnitudes it's going to be quite a bit faster you're talking about factors of 2 3 4 5 up to 10 times faster than what you're going to have with a traditional mechanical based hard drives so when it comes to overall just the snappiness the general responsiveness how quick you were going to install applications uninstall them load patches load up your games browse the internet all those things are going to be dramatically improved with any type of SSD now as you get into more complex workloads and as you get into using your system more dynamically more specifically for specialized application larger file sizes bigger maps and games of course the better performing architecture that's in the SSD is going to give you correspondingly improved performance but it will become a smaller interval of improvement that you're going to have as let's say an example let's say an entry-level SSD that we may purchase well let's say allow us to go from a mechanical hard drive low time in a game of let's say a minute 1/2 to when an SSD it may drop down to something about let's say 20 seconds and then going to a high even a higher performing SSD with let's say a more advanced controller is going to maybe get us maybe two or three seconds maybe five seconds on the onset of it being the absolute best assist that you can get so you can see definitely the margin improvement is quite a bit more granular but it really comes down to the usage model content creators out there professional users that have much more demanding workloads may benefit from going to multiple drives in a raid array or may benefit from going to higher performing solutions like you have with PCI Express which offers much much higher bandwidth now to quickly kind of recap again on this performance side remember we talked about initially SATA based SSDs being limited to a throughput of about 500 550 megabytes now even if you raid those drives on a modern generational motherboard you can't exceed about 1500 megabytes in terms of the performance while we can easily exceed that in some m2 basis these if the motherboard supports the corresponding speed for that MDOT to drive whether it's a by 2 or by 4 interconnect which would let you know essentially how much bandwidth is offered to that connection and of course for adding cards like what we would have with the 750 series that plug directly into the PCI Express slot they can offer easily in speeds of you know 1.5 to 2.5 even in excess of 3 gigabytes sequential performance in terms of read and write performance so definitely when we talk about if you want the absolute highest level of performance it's going to traditionally be offered right now in PCI Express adding cards followed up by M 2 based SSDs and then lastly SATA base as this these would offer the lowest level of overall total performance but the one that bucks the trend would be solutions like Intel's m2 interfaced 2.5 inch SSD which connects into an m2 slot be an adapter which will offer you the same speed as what you would have with a traditional adding cart so last thing let's take a little bit something else in consideration which is going to be capacity as well as price and how that associates into all this so lastly we want to talk a bit about kind of price and capacity as it's definitely a large influence traditionally when we take a look at the most robust option set in terms of the different SSDs at the most varied price points and the most aggressive price points you're going to have available to you the traditional 2.5 inch SATA SSD by far is going to be the cheapest solution with the most variation in terms of the number of controllers that are available to you controllers dictate the performance of the SSD and also have the widest variation in terms of capacity right now predominantly you're looking at capacities that start off at about 120 gigabytes and then go all the way to about one terabyte is what we traditionally see in the consumer space and in terms of the pricing pricing has become very competitive in terms of price per dollar per gigabyte that you're going to have an SSD which where if you look at let's say 240 gigabyte SSD it's easily below $1 a gigabyte now as you go into higher performing solutions whether they're going to be MDOT - basis as these are definitely as you look at highest performing solutions and PCI Express adding cards whether we're talking about solutions like the Intel 750 series or other PCI Express space necessities that are on the market you're going to generally be talking about a factor of sometimes 1.5 to 2.5 maybe even 3 times the cost so you definitely have to evaluate the perspective of whether or not that improved level of performance that that SSD is going to be offering to you is going to be worth the investment that you're going to bring in - so wrapping things up we've given you a lot of different information we given you a little bit of the technical aspects of far as the different types of SSDs that are out there on the marketplace a little bit about how they have varying levels of performance also the different types of considerations you might have in terms of how they interface on to a motherboard but there's a whole lot more that actually goes into making your decision making process but try to give you guys a little bit of a kind of concise reference point if first and foremost all you care about is how quickly your system can post and how quickly it can boot up into your operating system any traditional SATA based SSD right on the market is going to provide you a great experience if you invest a little bit more into some of the higher positionned offerings that they have out there in the marketplace you're going to get a little bit better performance but all the way around entry solutions to top-end solutions are going to provide a very fast post in Bhutan now when it comes to performance there's going to be quite a bit bigger difference when it comes to the overall experience you might have between let's say SATA based SSD and then a PCI Express space SSD and then on top of that of course the difference between a HCI and nvme based assist ease now when it comes to the overall performance that most you guys are probably going to be looking for once again the traditional SATA base SSD on the market is going to offer a great experience and but that's going to be across all types of usage model whether you're talking about web browsing general applications loading of course boot time for those applications as well as overall copy performance and a wide range of other aspects that your storage interface influences on how you go about using your system now if you're absolutely looking for the best experience possible you absolutely want the fastest level of performance possible that's going to be beyond what a traditional SATA base SSD is going to offer you and you're going to want to move into a PCI Express space SSD whether that's an m2 base SSD or PCI Express adding card based SSD those are going to offer you the absolute fastest levels of performance that are currently available in the marketplace and if you're looking for the absolute best of the best it's pretty much going to be an nvme based PCI Express base SSD now lastly in terms of users that are looking for the absolute best when it comes to capacity I'm going to probably favor the traditional base SSD as well and that's just because in terms of the overall performance to the price ratio or if you're targeting fast high-density storage based solutions your best option is going to once again be the traditional SATA base SSD so overall hopefully this gives you a little bit more insight into what is going to be the right SSD as you go about building your system and as always if you guys have any questions comments concerns or feedback feel free to go and drop them here on the channel we'll do our best to go ahead and get back to you and you can as well you can also make sure to hit us up at our PC our website it's PC DIY ACS comm for more information there on this and a whole lot more so as always don't forget to subscribe and thanks for watching

Channel: ASUS North America

Views: 1,212,243

Keywords: PCI Express, Serial ATA, Solid-state Drive, NVM Express, M.2, jj, overview, x99, z97, asus motherboard, best ssd, fastest ssd, fastest boot time, windows 8, windows 10, nvme, rampage v extreme, gaming ssd, ram disk, ssd cache, x99 deluxe, z97 deluxe, asus, rog

Id: u-kACJLKNOI

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2015