Why are m.2 ssd so expensive relative to sata ssd?

[barrelrider]

I am buying my first ssd after keeping a safe distance for too long. I am getting a PNY CS2211 960GB drive for $280. I am buying a motherboard which supports m.2 with NVMe, but not getting any m.2 drives yet. I expect to at some point but intend to use windows 7 for the time and have underestood that NVMe and windows 7 can be hard to combine; may skip m.2 until I move to windows 10.

That's the background. My question is why are the m.s drives so much more expensive than the sata bus ssd? Like, the PNY I just bought is $280 for 1Tb. The m.2 I was looking at is the Samsung 950 PRO Series - 512GB PCIe NVMe (MZ-V5P512BW) which costs $40 more and is half the capacity.

 

[jsmithepa]

Not sure, but a m.2 board is tinny, the Sata kind is pretty much the size of a 2.5" drive and lots of room, they can use lower density (cheaper?) chips?

 

[justanotherjose]

They're much newer and faster, although not by a considerable amount. It's not like jumping from an hdd to an ssd. They're just newer technology and therefore much more expensive. Here's a video explaining it better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opwON-7J_wI

 

[barrelrider]

I know a fair amount re why m.2 NVMe is better; but the cost is what I'm curious about. I have not read much about specifically why it costs 2x more.

 

[lxgoldsmith]

The modest bandwidth gains and the decreased size are enough to sell for a higher price in computers that have limited space in the case. It's more useful in general, so it's more marketable.

 

[Lodocarbo]

The M.2 SSD you are refering to is probably NVMe.
NVMe or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCI) is the latest interface designed specifically for SSDs!
The practical difference is that a usual 2.5" or even M.2 SATA 3 device can transfer data up to a theoretical 560 MB/s while NVMe can will be running at PCIe speed (Up to 32 GB/s!!!), this translates generraly in a 2-2,5 GB/s read and 1GB/s write speed. This is the latest technology that will make SATA obsolete, just like sata did with IDE cables

 

[barrelrider]

HI lodocarbo. Yes I was asking about NVMe, I mentioned that 2x in the original post and in a later response. And as I also mentioned, I know why and how NVMe is a superios bus in comparison to SATA for this purpose. Why the COST is the question.

Interesting that no one has suggested any explanation for COST except for lxgoldsmith, who proposed the reasonable suggestion that the smaller form factor and in his terms modest performance gains drive the cost. The small factor may combine with jsmithepa's guess about smaller chips which might inply more exensive chips.

I didn't read exhaustively about NVMe m.2, and I may have missed it in what I read, but the reason I have been a bit puzzled but the 2x cost is that I have not read that the chips involved are smaller or faster; mostly it's about the bus and form factor, which wouldn't seem to explain doubling the cost. If the critical components where either smaller or faster, that could easily drive cost via production cost.

 

[BadAsAl]

Wow, guess lodocarbo got told off. I was going to try to help but not now.

 

[barrelrider]

As far as I could tell from reading posts over the years there are a lot of informative answers in these forums. I laid out my question carefully. Half of the responders clearly didn't read or comprehend the question. Yeah for some crazy reason I did expect basic comprehension of the query esp after I repeated it a couple of times in response to the responders. "NMVe

It's not the end of the world. But it's not what I expected out of this crowd. Your time and interest in responding is appreciated. But it ends up being a waste of my time too if I have to respond and re-explain to most of the posters. I mean come on! It's not a subtle question - WHY MORE EXPENSIVE. It IS an idle question, simple curiosity.

 

[Suzuki@1473780084@1473780163]

That 950 Pro has got about 4-5x more read speed and about 3-4x write speed than a SATA 3 SSD. The problem is that even if you buy a super fast SSD, your performance won't be that difference from a regular SSD. The reasons are:

- Your other drive(s) have to be able to keep up, writing from a PCIe to a SATA SSD is a HUGE bottleneck
- Access times is what's making SSD's appear fast, no noticeable difference between the PCIe and SATA SSD

Your SATA SSD is likely around 400-500 MB/s realistically, perhaps 200-300 MB/s after running out of cache.

The PCIe SSD is around 2500 MB/s (read's ~1500 MB/s). PCIe SSD's are also larger than SATA SSD's, so more expensive to manufacture.




All the best!

 

[Lodocarbo]

HI lodocarbo. Yes I was asking about NVMe, I mentioned that 2x in the original post and in a later response. And as I also mentioned, I know why and how NVMe is a superios bus in comparison to SATA for this purpose. Why the COST is the question.

Interesting that no one has suggested any explanation for COST except for lxgoldsmith, who proposed the reasonable suggestion that the smaller form factor and in his terms modest performance gains drive the cost. The small factor may combine with jsmithepa's guess about smaller chips which might inply more exensive chips.

I didn't read exhaustively about NVMe m.2, and I may have missed it in what I read, but the reason I have been a bit puzzled but the 2x cost is that I have not read that the chips involved are smaller or faster; mostly it's about the bus and form factor, which wouldn't seem to explain doubling the cost. If the critical components where either smaller or faster, that could easily drive cost via production cost.

I am sorry for my previous answer, I clearly misread your question, I apologize.

(To me) The thing is that since NVMe will become the latest standard (like 4K resolution in a couple years) and since it just came out to the consumers (1,5 yrs?) it will cost much more!
While lxgoldsmith stated that the size could be an excuse for the cost, m.2 NVMe are actually the cheapest NMVes, if you look at U.2 or PCIe SSD cards, they are larger but more expensive!!

 

[lxgoldsmith]

While lxgoldsmith stated that the size could be an excuse for the cost, m.2 NVMe are actually the cheapest NMVes, if you look at U.2 or PCIe SSD cards, they are larger but more expensive!!

... so you're agreeing with me? I can't tell if you read my reply

 

[Lodocarbo]

While lxgoldsmith stated that the size could be an excuse for the cost, m.2 NVMe are actually the cheapest NMVes, if you look at U.2 or PCIe SSD cards, they are larger but more expensive!!

... so you're agreeing with me? I can't tell if you read my reply

Not 100% agree, as we can see from the market, there are bigger NVMe SSDs like 2,5" U.2 that actually cost more, even some PCIe add-in cards are much larger and expensive than m.2

 

[Lodocarbo]

While lxgoldsmith stated that the size could be an excuse for the cost, m.2 NVMe are actually the cheapest NMVes, if you look at U.2 or PCIe SSD cards, they are larger but more expensive!!

... so you're agreeing with me? I can't tell if you read my reply

Not 100% agree, as we can see from the market, there are bigger NVMe SSDs like 2,5" U.2 that actually cost more, even some PCIe add-in cards are much larger and expensive than m.2

 

[barrelrider]

Thanks for the reply lodocarbo, I was a bit frustrated after a couple of mismatched answers. You certainly show your good nature by not biting me in response.

The consensus here seems to be that the heftier price tag is mostly market driven. I don't know why that surprises me but it does. I guess there are fewer systems out there at this time that support m.2 than the ssd format that we've had for many more years, so a lot of upgrades can't involved m.2 NMVe or otherwise.

 

[Bluesh1ft]

It's not any more expensive to make. But it's specs are higher yea? so higher performing product is more expensive because the performance is higher even though it's not more expensive to make it. Same can be applied with processors. Cars. Cellphones etc.