Motherboard ?

24c · 11 Aug 2018

ignatzatsonic said:

24c:

I'm kinda waiting for the price of 2 TB SSDs to come down.

When I buy, I'll be faced with what form factor to choose. I've always used standard 2.5 inch SSDs with cables.

Have you experienced any major advantages to M2 other than avoiding cables?

The lack of cables is a great feature, but the M.2 drives can be much faster. Below is a benchmark of C:\ drive on the ASUS machine.

Samsung 960 PRO M.2 512

bobkn · 11 Aug 2018

M.2 drives can be either SATA or PCI-E. Some of the PCI-E ones support NVME. PCI-E drives are the fast ones.

I'm not sure whether any of the SATA M.2 drives are faster than similar drives in the 2.5" format. (That's an oversimplification; there are 2.5" drives that use other interfaces, but I doubt that they are intended for use in a desktop PC.)

It is also possible to get PCI-E drives that fit into PCI-E slots. They can be expensive.

M.2 drives have one potential drawback: poor cooling. There are heatsinks available, and some MBs have heatsinks built in. If the drive gets too warm, it'll throttle.

24c · 11 Aug 2018

bobkn - all good info - I have fans blowing over 2 of the M.2s on my ASRock machine - makes a big difference - all my M.2s are the fast ones.

JAM83 · 11 Aug 2018

24c said:

I want 3 M.2 slots, I'm an M.2 junkie -

Thanks for the "positive" on the Gigabyte brand

I wanna get my hands on an M.2, but everytime I try and save money for one, I end up having to use it.

24c · 11 Aug 2018

Gigabyte mobo ordered - thanks all.

Steve C · 12 Aug 2018

Gigabyte boards offer good performance for the price and they provide tech support for the product life. However, they only post BIOS and driver updates for about 3 years after the product release. Other brands offering longer software support may be an advantage if they exist.

ignatzatsonic · 12 Aug 2018

bobkn said:

M.2 drives can be either SATA or PCI-E. Some of the PCI-E ones support NVME. PCI-E drives are the fast ones.

I'm not sure whether any of the SATA M.2 drives are faster than similar drives in the 2.5" format. (That's an oversimplification; there are 2.5" drives that use other interfaces, but I doubt that they are intended for use in a desktop PC.)

It is also possible to get PCI-E drives that fit into PCI-E slots. They can be expensive.

M.2 drives have one potential drawback: poor cooling. There are heatsinks available, and some MBs have heatsinks built in. If the drive gets too warm, it'll throttle.

Thanks for that info, Bobkn. I'll file it away for when I shop for a 2 TB. That might be a year or two as I'm cheap and would rather not pay more than $200.

ignatzatsonic · 12 Aug 2018

24c said:

Gigabyte mobo ordered - thanks all.

Post back with your experience, particularly if you end up tearing your hair out.

Are you gonna do a clean install or just connect your hard drive and see what happens? Windows 10 is supposed to be very tolerant of that.

24c · 12 Aug 2018

ignatzatsonic said:

Post back with your experience, particularly if you end up tearing your hair out.
Are you gonna do a clean install or just connect your hard drive and see what happens? Windows 10 is supposed to be very tolerant of that.

I'll move the drives from the ASRock mobo to the Gigabyte mobo. I have done this several times with several boards over the years and never had any issues. Windows 10.

Berton · 12 Aug 2018

vgkfan83 said:

I wanna get my hands on an M.2, but everytime I try and save money for one, I end up having to use it.

Yep, whenever you have spare time someone finds out and whenever you have extra money something finds out and breaks. The time issue is a biggie after one retires.