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I usual see people post threads like this in regards to a video card or a CPU, but I'm good on those fronts (see system in my signature). What I'm curious about is my Samsung 830 256 GB boot drive. It's probably the oldest component in my system except for the Asus sound card. I guess it's kinda getting long in the tooth but it's not experiencing any issues.

My work load, at least the part I'm mainly concerned about, is gaming. My friend was over with his shiny new Skylake 6700K and his Samsung 950 PRO PCIe NVMe drive and, honestly, he was smoking me in level loading. I suspect that, even though his CPU is (barely) superior to mine this was almost entirely due to his SSD.

I've been building my PCs for nearly 25 years so I'm plenty comfortable with hardware but I haven't yet had the chance to play with a PCIe NVMe drive. I've read lots of stories about them being a bit of a trick to get 100% working sometimes.

I see that my motherboard (Asus Z97-A) has the required M.2 slot but would it be able to boot from said Samsung drive? Is there any circumstance (chipset or motherboard) where using a PCI-e such as this would steal bandwidth from my single GPU?


Thanks in advance for your experience and opinions.

Yeah, it's totally possible that the 830 is a tad slow. I compared a 120GB M500 and a Ultra II 120GB in an old Core 2 laptop (6530b/P8700/SATA II). The M500 was decently faster than the original hard drive, but the ultra II made it downright zippy.

No idea about booting off PCIe/M.2 though.

I recently replaced my Samsung 830 256 with a Crucial BX100 1TB. Now I know that the BX100 is not a super high end drive, but it's not slow either. Anyway, I've noticed just about exactly ZILCH performance difference, for better or worse. I bet that if I had replaced it with a PCIe drive I would have noticed some minor differences (even though the raw speed difference isn't minor at all) but at the moment I feel the premium is still way too high to justify it.

Firestarter wrote:

I recently replaced my Samsung 830 256 with a Crucial BX100 1TB. Now I know that the BX100 is not a super high end drive, but it's not slow either. Anyway, I've noticed just about exactly ZILCH performance difference, for better or worse. I bet that if I had replaced it with a PCIe drive I would have noticed some minor differences (even though the raw speed difference isn't minor at all) but at the moment I feel the premium is still way too high to justify it.

Yeah, that's pretty much why I haven't replaced my Samsung 830 with another SATA SSD. Even though a 1 GB SSD would be nice I figured there would be no noticeable performance difference.

The 950 PRO can be had for ~$300 if you're patient and that much I can manage to slip in the budget margins without too much hassle usually. So cost alone isn't going to deter me much.

Looks like you'd be wasting your money on a 950 pro with your board. The M.2 slot is only 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0. Plus when you enable the M.2 slot your PCIe x1_1 and PCIe x1_2 slots are disabled.

A 950 pro can almost saturate an M.2 port. But you only have 1/4 of the bandwidth available. Might as well be on SATA.

P.S. I came from an X25-M and a wolfdale processor and notice a big difference in the load level times.

i have a 250G 850evo and an old vertex 2 60G and i notice zero difference between them
there might be 1/2 a second in it if i got a stopwatch out and timed game loading or windows booting but without a stopwatch it just seems the same
so similar that i have changed to having my old 60G OCZ vertex 2 as my main boot drive now and having my 250G as a games drive

ssd speeds for your normal everyday usage hasnt changed by an extreme amount, sure newer ones can be faster by 1/2 a second or maybe even a whole second but overall i havnt noticed much difference

a lot of the time my 850 evo is about as good and sometimes better than the new nvme drives http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/4
that nvme is over 2X faster in raw transfer speed but it doesnt help it at all in realworld usage

spiritwalker2222 wrote:

Looks like you'd be wasting your money on a 950 pro with your board. The M.2 slot is only 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0. Plus when you enable the M.2 slot your PCIe x1_1 and PCIe x1_2 slots are disabled.

A 950 pro can almost saturate an M.2 port. But you only have 1/4 of the bandwidth available. Might as well be on SATA.

P.S. I came from an X25-M and a wolfdale processor and notice a big difference in the load level times.

That pretty much seals the deal then. Bummer, I guess a PCI-e drive is an upgrade to be had whenever I next change chipsets. With CPU performance not changing much between generations lately that might be a while.

It's not the sequential performance that makes your system feel speedy. It's the small random read/write performance and access time. This is where any post 2010-built SSD is a bajillion times faster than a HDD.

swaaye wrote:

It's not the sequential performance that makes your system feel speedy. It's the small random read/write performance and access time. This is where any post 2010-built SSD is a bajillion times faster than a HDD.

Wait, crap, the 830's are from 2011. And yeah, this would make sense with my Core 2 machine (though I'm not sure about OP's gaming example).

An 830 was a reasonably fast drive, I wouldn't care about upgrading mine if I had one. But as spiritwalker said already most Z97 boards don't have PCIe 3.0 x4 capable M.2 slots so there literally isn't much point.

Wait a few years, next time ya upgrade your system that's when they'll probably have larger, cheaper PCIe SSDs using x8 slots, or PCIe 4.0 will be out then it will be a really big upgrade.