Storage Choosing a M.2 SSD

XCOM-SFF

Caliper Novice
Original poster
Jun 21, 2016
29
1
Hello Everyone

As with my current project, I am looking for a suitable M.2 SSD for the Asus Z170I.

According to the motherboard specs it can support up to 32GB speeds, so I am looking to take full advantage of this. Has anyone got any recommendations of a suitable SSD please. I can only seem to find speeds up to 6GB.

Thank you - Athy
 

jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
Silver Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
4,969
4,780
Just so we're on the same page, PCIe 3.0 x4 is capable of a theoretical max bandwidth of 32 Gigabits per second, that's 32Gb/s (little "b" not capital "B").

8 bits per byte, so 32 Gigabits (Gb) per second = 4 Gigabytes (GB) per second.

ASUS's marketing is confusing on this point because sometimes their marketing graphics use all-caps, implying 32 Gigabytes/sec.

Ok, with that out of the way, there are a few high-performance drives on the market: the Samsung 950 Pro, OCZ RD400, and the Samsung OEM drives like the SM961, SM951, etc.
 
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K888D

SFF Guru
Lazer3D
Feb 23, 2016
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The PM951's are also good if your on a budget, they're not as fast as the SM models, but the one I have is reaching sequential read speeds of 1500+ MB/s which is around 2 - 3 times faster than a Sata based SSD. The PM951's cost around the same price as high end 2.5" Sata drives.