new z97 mobo coming, m.2 drive or 2.5 SSD??

[silent]

i love the idea of the m.2 having had a msata in my old z77, is there much gain over the standard ssd?

i have 6 sata ports on the z97 extreme 4 from asrock altough i may get the extreme 6 as it has 10 so i can use the newer ultra m.2 port and m.2 standard for space saving and speed.

[gupsterg]

AFAIK from reading reviews and info when I recently was deciding which type of SSD to buy there was no real performance difference between a M.2 version of an SSD vs a SATA version of it.

Another thing that made me also get the SATA version was price, M.2 drives were more expensive.

[silent]

yes, but not to much more, but a saving is a saving. a 500 gig m.2 crucial is around £180 before flubit, and a 500 gig ssd is around 160-170 so not to much difference.

[Biscuit]

In theory, if you get an M.2 card that uses the 4 x PCI-E lanes available to it, it has the capability to be quicker than a SATA based drive. Be careful though, many M.2 cards actually just use SATA anyway so they will be no different to a 2.5" drive.

In real world performance, the interface might not even be the limiting factor and you probably wont notice the difference. I personally would say the £10 spent to save the space in the case is worth it, but YMMV.

[gupsterg]

yes, but not to much more, but a saving is a saving. a 500 gig m.2 crucial is around £180 before flubit, and a 500 gig ssd is around 160-170 so not to much difference.

Which Crucial are you getting? over the weekend Amazon had Crucial MX100 512GB for £131 ish, flubit offer £120 ish.

I personally would say the £10 spent to save the space in the case is worth it....

This did appeal to me when considering my purchases of SSDs recently but after doing a build for a friend and his case had SSD space on back of mobo tray the bubble burst for me to get a M2 to save space.

[Biscuit]

You still have to wire the cables to that position though. If you are like me and you like your cables to be well organised, that can be a real challenge.

[gupsterg]

Not my preference of case due to plastic top/door but didn't present challenge on wiring up tidily and was happy with build for my friend.



IIRC I placed all SATA cables from mobo through the middle vertical routing hole therefor all wiring to HDD trays & SSD tray was hidden, power cables where also hidden in the cavity behind mobo tray.

But I do agree in some cases can be an issue , so guess depends on the build?