Replacing SSD; another SATA, new board with M.2 or PCI E

[newconroer]

Originally I was not ready to invest in a new CPU/Motherboard/DDR4 upgrade, at least until boards started offering M.2 commonly or I felt PCI-E SSD is worth while.

I may not need the throughput of PCI-E right now, but I have noticed a lot of 270 generation boards offer at least one if not two M.2 connections natively.

Yet Kaby lake brings with it support for Xpoint storage architecture which may toss it all in the air in the next coming years.


I guess maybe the best thing is to just get a cost efficient SATA SSD to replace my dying one, and keep the setup I have now?

 

[jboydgolfer]

I guess maybe the best thing is to just get a cost efficient SATA SSD to replace my dying one, and keep the setup I have now?

The thing holding me back from buying m.2 or NVMe ssd's is that for all their performance, and increased speeds, no-one is showing blazing fast boot times over sata ssd's, or some form of increased everyday performance that shows the benefit of paying 2-3x more for that premium(aside from some possible programs that might actually show the capable speeds which many people Dont use). Until it is like it was with ssd & hdd, and the perf gains were undeniable and didnt require a benching program, whats the point?

A fitting analogy would be buying a 60ft yacht while living nowhere near ANY water & not being able to sail it,and Waiting for the water to come after you've bought the Boat. Sure it would be sweet, it would be cool to say i have a million + $ boat, but aside from the imaginary voyages you'd have as it was parked in your driveway, it would never be put to use. I have no problem paying more for more performance, but not when i need to use a program to "imagine" that performance increase.

Im sure in time OS's WILL be able to show the speeds capable with these newer ssd's, but until then I'll leave the wasting of money to those with good imaginations

cart before the horse

 

[Final_Fighter]

^ Also i would not bother with updating your system just yet. intel has yet to respond to ryzen with anything new. when they do im sure it wont be a 5% ipc improvement. in order for them to justify their i5 lineup they will need to offer some significant ipc improvement or add more cores threw out their entire lineup.

edit: just get a new ssd to replace the dying one. i7 2600k @ 4.8ghz is still pretty decent.

 

[newconroer]

There are other factors to consider, such as physical foot print, cabling, redundancy etc. M.2 is a cleaner solution and theoretically faster. I believe in the capacity sizes such as 256/500/1TB prices are not all that much higher for the M.2 variant.

I just hope whatever I do, it solves my issue(s) because I am tired of the hanging system scenarios and /or rebooting to find it cannot see the drive anymore and power cycling twenty times just to get Windows to load.

My initial fear is that according to OCZ's system utility, my drive is at 99% health, fully operational with only 6 Raw Read Error Rates. I appreciate those programs don't always paint the whole picture though..

 

[Tomgang]

If you want to use an M.2 NVMe SSD in your current build that also can boot and all. I will say try and find a used Samsung 950 PRO 256/512 GB. They are out of production, so finding a new one can be hard i think.

But what makes Samsung 950 PRO your choise is that this SSD has a Legacy mode or OPT-Rom. That makes it possible to boot on old systems with out M.2 support. You just need and PCIe M.2 adaptor. Bios sees the SSD as an IDE drive. Just to make it clear, the newer samsung 960 EVO/PRO SSD does not have legacy mode. I have asked samsung support about it.

I have a Samsung 950 PRO 256 GB running in my old X58 setup for the last 3 months now with out any trouble.

You can se more here about if you want to: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...stem-with-m-2-pci-adaptor-can-it-work.231611/

 

[jboydgolfer]

There are other factors to consider, such as physical foot print, cabling,

Yes you're correct there are other factors. Additionally I would have to say that if you're at a point where you're buying NVMe ssd's just to cut down on cabling that's a good problem to have I wish I was in such a financial position . Sadly I'm not willing to pay a significant premium over current technology just to hide a couple cables. Especially with cases that make it so easy. as far as hanging OS with your current SSD's/Drives, i cant speak on that, it might be due to OCZ SSD's, but im not certain. I run my main PC on 100% SSD's, (samsung 850 evo's) and it is VERY fast.

i built this PC for the Memorial Kreij giveaway, and Anyone who has built a PC more than once could tell You that a NVMe, or M.2 SSD would be MORE of a visual intrusion than the 2 Drives i have installed in this PC..since all You can see that is evidence of there being any drives installed is 2 tiny Sata plugs to the right of the MoBo which are stacked to reduce visual footprint

 

[Final_Fighter]

ive had ssds die that said they were at 99% and 97%. most software is not accurate.

 

[EarthDog]

Id go for it... 2600k, is still plenty serviceable.., but you can get more out of a modern system, including an nvme based m.2 drive.

While boot times may not break records, they are overall faster to boot, and even open programs, game loads, snappier desktop, etc. Plenty of tangible uses....its just whether the premium is worth it to you. It is to me...and as you can see, not others.

ive had ssds die that said they were at 99% and 97%. most software is not accurate.

its not so much they are not accurate, they are, but hey can die in different ways.... you wont be hitting too many writes (which is what that value is....) with an ssd.

 

[newconroer]

A little update here.

I purchased a Samsung 850 Evo M.2 NVME drive and a M.2 <> PCI E adapter(it's a dual slot, one for M.2 to PCI-E and the other is M.2 to SATA).
So far on this MSI Z77 board, it's not showing in BIOS or windows.
The board hasn't any M.2 or PCI-E 'boot' features or configurations that I have found.

From reading around I am to understand you can make these Intel chipsets work with NVME M.2 by doing a bios flash. Gigabyte Z97 is the BIOS that seems to work (requires some extra tweaking).

Though as this is an MSI board, I haven't found any information on how to do the same with MSI bios.

So at the moment, I am having to use the SATA connection of the adapter.

If anyone has read or knows a way flash MSI boards up to more a recent BIOS, such as E79XX series, I might be able to modify it and make this work. Otherwise, I'll have to keep it in SATA mode till I upgrade my motherboard sometime in the future.

*fingers crossed that by using the PCI-E adapter it's only taking power from the PCI-E, and not bandwidth as well, slowing down the GPU*

 

[Tomgang]

A little update here.

I purchased a Samsung 850 Evo M.2 NVME drive and a M.2 <> PCI E adapter(it's a dual slot, one for M.2 to PCI-E and the other is M.2 to SATA).
So far on this MSI Z77 board, it's not showing in BIOS or windows.
The board hasn't any M.2 or PCI-E 'boot' features or configurations that I have found.

From reading around I am to understand you can make these Intel chipsets work with NVME M.2 by doing a bios flash. Gigabyte Z97 is the BIOS that seems to work (requires some extra tweaking).

Though as this is an MSI board, I haven't found any information on how to do the same with MSI bios.

So at the moment, I am having to use the SATA connection of the adapter.

If anyone has read or knows a way flash MSI boards up to more a recent BIOS, such as E79XX series, I might be able to modify it and make this work. Otherwise, I'll have to keep it in SATA mode till I upgrade my motherboard sometime in the future.

*fingers crossed that by using the PCI-E adapter it's only taking power from the PCI-E, and not bandwidth as well, slowing down the GPU*

And i know why your M.2 SSD its not showing up in bios. normal M.2 SSD is only working on Z97, Z170, Z270, X99 and AMD AM4 platform native. As far i know. Normal M.2 will only work as a storage drive and can only be seen i windows and not bios.
On your motherboard. There may be bios mods or other tweaks to get it to work.

You can try this but its for X58 but may work on your mobo aswell. Else as i told i #5 Samsung 950 PRO is your only option to get a bootable M.2 NVMe SSD because this SSD has a legacy mode or OPT-ROM build in, what that means is that it will work out of box and dosent need any tweak og bios flash. As far i know no other M.2 SSD has that.

https://audiocricket.com/2016/12/31/booting-samsung-sm961-on-asus-p6t-se-mainboard/

 

[newconroer]

That's an excellent little project, however the requirement to always have the USB stick in to boot, is not something that works for me.

I may just wait until I upgrade to a motherboard that supports it natively.

Thank you though.

 

[Tomgang]

That's an excellent little project, however the requirement to always have the USB stick in to boot, is not something that works for me.

I may just wait until I upgrade to a motherboard that supports it natively.

Thank you though.

Your welcome and yeah dont try flash bios with another modet bios with out knowing how to do just for this. You risking to fuck up your motherboard meaning it becomes unusable and by that cant sell it later on.
I dont think its worfh the risk at least thas why i chose to wait until i cut find a used Samsung 950 PRO and its whas worfh the wait cause it dit make my system faster and thanks to legacy mode it worked with out any hassel and ditten need to mod or tweak any thing besides dropping raid and go AHCI to get bios to se SSD in bios and to set it as a boot drive and i dont use any USB stick to boot. All the magic happens from Samsung 950 PRO alone.

 

[eidairaman1]

@CAPSLOCKSTUCK X58?