SSD Thread: (its good, ignore the anime)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > SSD Thread: (its good, ignore the anime)

Harveygod: Jan 4, 2014; YEEAAH HEH HEH HEEEHH

YOU KNOW WHAT I'M SAYIN

THIS TRASH WAR AIN'T GONNA SOLVE ITSELF YA KNOW

I'm looking to upgrade my 250GB SATA SSD to a 1TB M.2 SSD.

It looks like Samsung's 1TB 980 is only $130, so I'd go for that.

I've got a bit of an older motherboard (ASRock Z97 Extreme4). I don't see this exact model on ASRock's support list, but it's "PCIe gen 3 x4", which a bunch of other supported units are.

I'm guessing they just stopped updating that list. I haven't really done anything with M.2 stuff before, so I just wanted a sanity check before I ~~spend my kids' tooth fairy money~~ took the plunge that I wasn't doing something stupid.

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 21:16

Harveygod: Jan 4, 2014; YEEAAH HEH HEH HEEEHH

YOU KNOW WHAT I'M SAYIN

THIS TRASH WAR AIN'T GONNA SOLVE ITSELF YA KNOW

Klyith posted:

Samsung is overpriced across the board for what you get.

By comparison, the WD SN550 is just over $100 and is comparable as a dram-less PCIe 3.0 drive. It's a pretty ideal drive for a regular games & apps desktop. Stepping up a notch, the SN750 is equivalent to the 970 Evo for the same price as the drive you were looking at.

edit: also good value at $135, the SK Hynix P31. This is a great drive if you ever might recycle it into a laptop, as the P31's interesting gimmick is being way more power efficient than most other drives.

Yep, NVMe drives without dram use system ram. It's not even at driver level AFAIK, it's in the NVMe spec as a low-level feature.

Using system ram, they keep a small portion of the lookup table in memory (like 10-100 MB) and the rest in the flash. A drive with dram normally has 1GB per TB of storage, so lots more. Having the whole table in memory right on the drive is important when doing lots of small, highly random reads & writes. That's database & server workload. For most desktop users, a dramless NVMe drive has basically zero real-world performance impact.

BIG HEADLINE posted:

You're not wrong, and honestly screw them for making an "incomplete" product and charging a premium for it. It also *only* takes "up to" 64MB, which while it isn't a lot, still pales in comparison to something like the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 (not the Q SKU) which packs 512MB DDR4 on-package for more: https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Internal-Extreme-Performance-SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-1TB/dp/B07TLYWMYW/

The Rocket's a PCIe 4.0 drive, but it'll work just fine in your Z97 and give you something to plug into a 4.0 (or 5.0) board when you finally upgrade.

I'd also recommend the SKHynix P31, but last I heard their SSD division's being bought out.

Thanks for the responses! I'll probably spring for the Sabrent.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2021 02:37

Harveygod: Jan 4, 2014; YEEAAH HEH HEH HEEEHH

YOU KNOW WHAT I'M SAYIN

THIS TRASH WAR AIN'T GONNA SOLVE ITSELF YA KNOW

BIG HEADLINE posted:

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Internal-Extreme-Performance-SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-1TB/dp/B07TLYWMYW/

The Rocket's a PCIe 4.0 drive, but it'll work just fine in your Z97 and give you something to plug into a 4.0 (or 5.0) board when you finally upgrade.

I connected this M.2 drive to my motherboard, but I didn't see anything in the when I booted to the BIOS. I ran Macrium Reflect and was able to copy my C drive to it. Windows made it the D drive and it's there with all my files and everything:

However, when I go back into BIOS/UEFI it still doesn't see it. How does Windows find it but not the BIOS?

The only option I see is the "M2_1/SATA3_4.SATA3/5 Swith", which was "Auto" by default. I changed it to "Force M.2" but it still doesn't see it. I've tried unplugging the old SSD just to try to force it to boot there but nothing. There's also not an option when I go to the "Boot" tab in UEFI.

Am I overlooking something dumb?

E: It turns out I had to do update the bios to "Improve M.2 compatibility". Now it shows up as a boot option.

And here we are!

Thank you thread for help!

Harveygod fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Mar 28, 2021

# ¿ Mar 28, 2021 03:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > SSD Thread: (its good, ignore the anime)