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First of all, hello world. This will be my first post here. What brought me here was difficulty finding good answers on this subject, at least to my satisfaction. That was followed by a search for a forum with the right membership for my silly question. So here it is. I am building a system I have been toying with for a very long time. Originally I was going to use a standard SSD as the system disk, and a 1TB (12.5mm) laptop drive I already have (Steamdata) as the media disk. In the interest of really nothing more than the elegance of it I got this damn idea in my head that if I could find a Micro ATX gaming board with an mSATA port I could do something interesting with the discs (or lack thereof). The board I'm looking at is the ASRock Z87M OC Formula. The two drives I was comparing for the build are both Crucial M500 240GB. One the SSD (Part Number: CT240M500SSD1), and the other the mSATA (Part Number: CT240M500SSD3). I'm getting a little cross eyed reading about mSATA but it sounds like you are plugged in at whatever the SATA controller you're piggy-backing (or whatever it does) operates at. So in the case of that motherboard it would be a SATA3 connection and both drives are SATA3. Am I even remotely understanding this? If there is a hit for going with mSATA over the standard SSD how big is it (and what causes it)? I apologize if I missed this well explained somewhere else in the forums. I did search first. Thanks for reading.


Otasan

SATA (both are SSDs) are your desktop form factor. It is meant to have a power cable and USB cable plug into the appropriate outlets, and run to the SATA SSD. The msata plugs into a mobility "msata" slot, that is built to have it actually "click" into place and held there by the mount. If you do not have a motherboard with this mount, you will not have a good way of mounting the msata drive in the case. In that situation, just use the regular SSD SATA.

StuG wrote:

SATA (both are SSDs) are your desktop form factor. It is meant to have a power cable and USB cable plug into the appropriate outlets, and run to the SATA SSD. The msata plugs into a mobility "msata" slot, that is built to have it actually "click" into place and held there by the mount. If you do not have a motherboard with this mount, you will not have a good way of mounting the msata drive in the case. In that situation, just use the regular SSD SATA.

Thanks for the reply. I'm really only concerned about the read/write performance difference.

Admittedly, I don't have much hands-on experience with mSATA, but my understanding is that it still goes through the same SATA controller (rather than direct through PCIe), and therefore offers no performance benefit. There is a very real chance that it could have a performance penalty though, due to the manufacturer using different chips. They may do this to meet space constraints, or because the usual mSATA applications (tablets, netbooks, ultrabooks) typically are not performance oriented.

So basically, the only benefit of mSATA is a smaller physical footprint. If you're not extremely limited in space, there's no reason to risk lower performance and limit yourself to an uncommon interface.

Assuming that the drives themselves are equivalent (which as the Egg points out is a real issue), the only thing I would be worried about is whether the mSATA was using JMIcron SATA ports. From the specifications page it looks like this motherboard has only an Intel SATA controller and that the mSATA uses the SATA3_4. So, assuming that the drivers themselves are identical, you shouldn't lose any performance just from plugging it in as an mSATA.

I know it's not the M500, but this article might shed some light on your question.

Alternative reading material.

I don't see the point of using mSATA outside of laptops. It shouldn't hurt your performance, but it won't help either and they cost more than regular 2.5" drives.

As far as how it works, think of mSATA as an alternative form factor for one of the mobo's SATA ports--the manual will specify which one.

For now, use mSata if you have to. Standard SSD are really small for even mini-ITX builds.