asus x99 pro mobo what m.2 stick to buy?

[antec74]

hi I have an asus x99 pro motherboard I was looking at using the m.2 storage but cant find a lot of info regarding what is compatible?
also can I set the m.2 to work with specific programs like Photoshop etc.?

[kalniel]

hi I have an asus x99 pro motherboard I was looking at using the m.2 storage but cant find a lot of info regarding what is compatible?
also can I set the m.2 to work with specific programs like Photoshop etc.?

All m.2 drives should be compatible I think.

It's just a storage drive, you use it like you would any other HDD or SSD, so you can put specific programs or cache files on it.

[antec74]

thank you Kalniel do you know where I can get a compatibility list? I have looked at asus but couldn't find one

[kalniel]

thank you Kalniel do you know where I can get a compatibility list? I have looked at asus but couldn't find one

Any search for m.2 drives should give you a compatible list. If the drive is m.2 then it should be compatible.

edit: above not correct - see more accurate reply below by endlesswave

[EndlessWaves]

All m.2 drives should be compatible I think.

Not necessarily. Some motherboards may only support SATA or PCI-E M.2 drives, and those that support PCI-E drives may only boot from AHCI drives rather than both AHCI and NVMe drives.

In fact, the X99 Pro specifically states it only support PCI-E drives, so the large number of M.2 SATA drives available won't work:
https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards...pecifications/

I seem to remember Asus announced last year that all their X99 boards supported NVMe SSDs.

It's just a storage drive, you use it like you would any other HDD or SSD, so you can put specific programs or cache files on it.

Again, not necessarily. Plenty of cheaper pre-built systems have an M.2 drive set up as a hard drive cache using Intel's RST or similar software. On a high end X99 system I wouldn't bother though. Installing the stuff to SSD directly gives you all of the benefits of that setup and more, and cost clearly isn't a big issue given the platform.

As to which one, that depends on how your workload uses the disk, particularly how many simultaneous requests it makes. Generally if you have to use M.2 then Samsung's SM951 is hard to beat for most popular desktop loads.

[antec74]

thanks Endlesswaves, I want to use it for lightroom and photoshop cc it was recommended by scan to use a 256gb m.2 and have it as a scratch disk?

[GoNz0]

Asus announced all X99 boards will have BIOS updates to allow NVMe.
Samsung have the market share in NVMe at the moment, I have a NVMe 950 pro as a boot drive at the moment in my Asus board, my new Dell XPS has a 1tb Toshiba NVMe that's nearly as fast as the 950 pro.

I guess it is down to budget, smaller drives in the Samsung range tend to be slower but Toshiba's offering seem to be fast across the size range.

[kalniel]

thanks Endlesswaves, I want to use it for lightroom and photoshop cc it was recommended by scan to use a 256gb m.2 and have it as a scratch disk?

Yep just set the cache location to somewhere on the drive. SSDs are brilliantly suited to caches.