Any benefit in having a PCI e SSD drive as a boot drive over a SATA SSD?

[Zak33]

More as musing than a real plan... but is there any benefit in PCIe SSD drives?

or any bad?

[deejayburnout]

I can imagine that it's only speed, but not sure if it will be noticeable in normal use for your average user. If you were using your system to do video editing or similar, it might be worth the coin.

[kalniel]

More as musing than a real plan... but is there any benefit in PCIe SSD drives?

or any bad?

A benefit.. yes, if your drive already maxes out the sata connection speed.

A noticeable benefit.. much harder to say.

And likewise, going NVMe provides a benefit for server uses, but I'm not sure the home user would notice much.

[jim]

I'm going to gamble that it's a no.

The reason SSDs were great for the home users was the ultra-low seek times, which I suspect vary very little between PCIe SSDs and SATA 3 SSDs.

For systems with huge amounts of I/O (e.g. databases etc) then I can definitely imagine there'll be an improvement, but I doubt it for typical home use.

I did spend some time looking at NVME reviews / Samsung SM951 (or something like that) reviews last week to see what the real-world home user difference was and came to the conclusion that it was virtually nil, though I can't recall exactly which reviews I looked at to come up with that information that I could pass on. The problem IMO is that most review sites seek to demonstrate (and thus accentuate) the differences, which can be misleading if the usage scenarios differ dramatically to your own.

[kompukare]

Don't forget that a true PCI SSD needs BIOS support to be bootable.
http://www.thessdreview.com/our-revi...-review-128gb/

The big caveat with the Samsung SM951 is that it throttles:
http://anandtech.com/show/8979/samsu...2-gb-review/11

No wonder really since M.2 is a poor design all around. There far too many variants (wikipedia list 4 widths and 8 lengths):

"The M.2 standard allows module widths of 12, 16, 22 and 30 mm, and lengths of 16, 26, 30, 38, 42, 60, 80 and 110 mm."

But also there was no consideration for cooling. Typical Ultrabook / Ultrathin craziness I guess.