SATA vs. PCIE, future proofing.

Vladamir_1

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Jan 28, 2016
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I am going to be replacing my hard drive soon with an ssd. I have seen that there are 2 kinds, SATA and PCIE. From what i can see, PCIE seems to be similar speeds to SATA, but with more potential. Is it worth getting a PCIE ssd over a SATA one? Also will PCIE ssd work with older motherboards (Asrock Z77). At the moment i am looking at the samsung 850 EVO 500gb/1tb (which im told is the best), or the 960 for PCIE. Is it worth the extra money for a PCIE harddrive over a SATA?
 
Solution
Get a Sata SSD for now and you will have the M2 slot or Pcie slot available for the future. Also Sata SSDs like Crucial Mx300 will give you speeds like 1.5-2 GBps when you turn on Ram caching (Momentum cache in Crucial SSDs). Momentum cache also increases the life of SSD since the smaller writes are absorbed in Ram.

srimasis

Distinguished
Get a Sata SSD for now and you will have the M2 slot or Pcie slot available for the future. Also Sata SSDs like Crucial Mx300 will give you speeds like 1.5-2 GBps when you turn on Ram caching (Momentum cache in Crucial SSDs). Momentum cache also increases the life of SSD since the smaller writes are absorbed in Ram.
 
Solution

Rexper

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Apr 12, 2017
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Those are interfaces. M.2" form factor supports PCIe interface and Sata. 2.5" does not support PCIe interface.

An SSDD with PCIe interface would only make a real performance increase if it uses an NVMe protocol and MLC NAND flash, otherwise it will be bottlenecked and end up performing like a high quality sata SSD.
 


That's not true. The NVMe protocol only makes a modest (10-20%) difference, the big speed boost comes from replacing the 600 MB/s maximum throughput of SATA with the ~4 GB/s maximum of PCIe 3.0 x4.

Having an SSD that can transfer data sequentially at a few GB/s isn't going to make a really noticeable difference in regular consumer usage though. It's more relevant for prosumer or workstation.