Hardware & Technical m.2 SSD: Worth it for boot-up times?

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I'm asking because they are pricey, but... If I did get one, how much an improvement am I looking at for my boot time?

Just looked up what .m2 was. After 5 minutes of research unless you are running a tablet IMO it's not worth the extra cost for the "early adopter" tech.
 
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Just looked up what .m2 was. After 5 minutes of research unless you are running a tablet IMO it's not worth the extra cost for the "early adopter" tech.

Early adopter? They've been out for quite a while now. A Samsung m.2 drive , 512g is actually fairly cheap.
Just make sure you get an NVME drive -- m.2 just speaks to the form factor, not the interface. So you can get an M.2 sata drive, which will still be capped by the SATA limits. m.2 NVME ois not. And they are give you a significant bump in boot times and overall system responsiveness, I highly recommend them.
 
"meh." It's one of the things that a normal consumer workload won't really notice outside benchmarks.

HDD to pretty much any SSD is a huge boon, but once you're there the best you can get is small, barely noticeable gains that are rarely worth the price. (edit) Unless you managed to get a really bad SSD; buy good stuff.
 
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While m2 is a neat technology, it's still in that "meh, why bother" stage. Most prosumer (and quite a few budget) SSD's are more than enough for R/W speeds.
I disagree Brett. M.2 is much more than "meh" right now. It gives the best performance by far for the dollar, has a lower form factor and directly accesses PCIe lanes instead of being limited to the SATA standard.

You'll see decent performance improvements by having your OS on a M.2 drive over a SSD. There is a price premium, but not a lot more and you get substantive performance for that.

Today, a Samsung 1TB M.2 on Amazon is $449.99 USD
Samsung 1TB SSD is $431.84

The M.2 performs 163% better than the SSD for an extra $18. That's not 'meh,' especially on a gaming rig.

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compar...e-M2-1TB-vs-Samsung-850-Pro-1TB/m200815vs3577
 
The M.2 performs 163% better than the SSD for an extra $18. That's not 'meh,' especially on a gaming rig.

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compar...e-M2-1TB-vs-Samsung-850-Pro-1TB/m200815vs3577


165% on gaming rig that would be quite impressive, but this is on synthetic benchmarks, nothing to do with actual game loading times which are similar to Sata SSD. Also plenty compatibility issues with m.2 drives. I was trying to get Samsung 960 to work on Maximum VIII Hero and it worked only with CSM enabled, but CSM caused something like 4 seconds delay on boot, so the actual Windows login time was similar or even slower than normal SSD. I know they look mighty good when it comes to specs, but real world performance is not so magical, often not worth the fuss. Plus you sacrifice one sata port when connecting m.2, for people like me who have more than 6 drives connected it may be hard to swallow :)
 
I disagree Brett. M.2 is much more than "meh" right now. It gives the best performance by far for the dollar, has a lower form factor and directly accesses PCIe lanes instead of being limited to the SATA standard.

You'll see decent performance improvements by having your OS on a M.2 drive over a SSD. There is a price premium, but not a lot more and you get substantive performance for that.

Today, a Samsung 1TB M.2 on Amazon is $449.99 USD
Samsung 1TB SSD is $431.84

The M.2 performs 163% better than the SSD for an extra $18. That's not 'meh,' especially on a gaming rig.

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compar...e-M2-1TB-vs-Samsung-850-Pro-1TB/m200815vs3577



m.2 is just the form factor for plugging the drive directly into the motherboard. The two drives you compared are SATA SSD vs NVME SSD. The SATA SSD uses the sata bus, where as the NVME uses the MUCH faster pcie bus.
 
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Bit of a necro.... :p

My cheapy £30 120Gb SSD reduced my laptop's bootup time from 15~ minutes, to around 5 seconds. Heh.
I'd say it was (not very much) money well spent!

Waiting on a similar sale on a larger SSD for my main PC. Ideally I need a minimum of 256Gb but ideally 512Gb. But for like £30. :p

I'll wait.
 
Very happy with the 960 Pro NVME - nice little performer.

However, for absolute raw boot time, nothing else I have beats the 840 Pro on my Haswell I5 with 8Gb RAM. Power, display flash, desktop in about 3 seconds.

No idea how it manages it, all my other machines with better specs get nowhere near.
 
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