[MSmith83]

Intel is the first to provide consumer SSD solutions with NVMe with its 750 series, running in a PCIe 3.0 x4 link. The latency and sequential/random results that I've seen are extremely impressive and obviously blow away all of the SATA options. Of course it's overkill for gaming, but none of that stopped people from operating RAM disks.

Intel is pushing motherboard manufacturers to adopt the SFF-8639 connector to allow the reasonable proliferation of 2.5" form factor drives, which makes sense as not everyone has free PCIe slots and M.2 cards can quickly overheat/throttle with other hot components around them.

Is anyone here buying one of these at this time? I think I'll go for a 400GB model for now.

 

[moej]

I would really love to have one, but my budget says no.


After seeing the OCZ RevoDrives I got excited for PCIe SSD's. SATAIII is almost maxed out.
I'm kind of surprised that Intel is using the x4 slot and not aiming for x8. At least it's not like the ASUS RAIDR with x2.


With my budget, I'd rather replace my CPU, mobo and RAM. I'd also wait for Windows 10. My i7 860 is still kicking and I hope I don't have to replace it.

 

[MSmith83]

I suspect that the newest crop of consumer SSD controllers cannot be reasonably tuned to take advantage of anything beyond a PCIe x4 link at 3.0 speeds.

The one disappointment with the Intel 750 series SSDs is their rather run-of-the-mill performance with very small file sizes. That is certainly an area that affects normal, everyday consumer use. My assumption is that Samsung will probably have a consumer solution later this year that will handle this aspect exceptionally well.

Regardless, it's a great time for storage as regular SSD prices will likely plummet in the near future.

 

[8IronBob]

Well... I'll consider adding in the 750 SSD when Windows 10 comes about, assuming that installing Windows 10 to the 750 won't revoke my upgrade license (given that it's FREE to do so). For now, I'll install Windows 8.1 to the Intel 730 480GB SSD that I got, and hope for the best. If anything, I don't see the 730 Series going anywhere in the near future...

 

[Hoonose]

I would ask if these new SSD's might load a game significantly faster?

 

[MSmith83]

I would ask if these new SSD's might load a game significantly faster?

Not much when compared to a regular SATA SSD. The real benefits at this time would come from tasks like 4K video editing.

While games are getting larger as time goes by, with much more data to access, we are not at the point where we would see big gains from PCIe SSDs with NVMe. This tech is quite advanced within the context of gaming, but many of us gamers will eat it up because we love new things.

Who knows, perhaps the extremely low latency of these would help with quick data accesses in GTA V? We'll see.

 

[LexInVA]

I would ask if these new SSD's might load a game significantly faster?

Some games, yes. Most, not likely. By some, I mean games with large asset files or lots of stuff to load into memory. NVME is in it's infancy, so it will be several generations until we see widespread adoption in the consumer market and significant performance increases in the SSDs that use it.

 

[MSmith83]

I just read an excellent review at PC Perspective of the NVMe version of the Samsung SM951 M.2 SSD. As expected, it is appreciably better than the Intel 750 in very small file transfers, making it a more balanced drive for regular consumer use.

There's a rumor that Samsung will offer a 3D V-NAND version of this NVMe drive later this year. I couldn't even begin to imagine how hot that sucker would get at high capacities in the M.2 format.

 

[LexInVA]

All I can say at this point is that I'm looking forward to my next PC build as it will definitely have a PCIe SSD of some sort. I just wish PC OEMs (Dell, HP, Acer, etc.) would get on the ball and start incorporating M.2 (and even mSATA) into their products. It would also be great if consoles started adopting M.2 to save space and increase performance. I can only fantasize about how great a PS4 with stacked HBM tied to a state of the art M.2 drive with 3D V-NAND would be.

 

[MSmith83]

There's a rumor that Samsung will offer a 3D V-NAND version of this NVMe drive later this year.

I've been running a Samsung 950 Pro in two different builds (X99 and Z170) and couldn't be happier with it.

Between M.2 and U.2, I wonder what method of connectivity will eventually win out for NVMe drives in the desktop market. We have Samsung championing the former and Intel going with the latter.

Heck, even the current version of SATA Express is more than good enough for me if it means cheaper high capacity SSDs with NVMe. Most of us won't need the insanely high sequentials nearly as much as the extremely low latency for quite some time.