SFF.Network [SFF Network] Computex 2016 SSD Roundup

Computex 2016 saw quite the number of new SSD announcements. For brevity, I'll skip the 2.5" SATA drives and focus on M.2, U.2, etc. since they're the future of SFF storage from a performance and space-savings perspective.

Read more here.
 
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BirdofPrey

Standards Guru
Sep 3, 2015
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I wonder how many of those PCIe SSDs just have an M.2 stick on an adapter inside the casing.

It's great to be seeing higher capacity M.2 start coming out of the woodwork. I tend to prefer one drive solutions where possible since it can be a pain managing multi drive solutions, but M.2 is fast approaching a point where they have enough capacity to be a one drive solution. I ONLY have a single Samsung 950 512GB in my system, and feel the crunch if I install everything, 1TB would be barely enough, but once I can get 1.5-2TB I'm set. Of course price is still problematic at those capacities, but at the very least higher capacity drives mean the lower capacities should get cheaper.

It does make me wonder where the 1TB Samsung is. They touted their ability to pack more storage into a space when their last batch of SSDs came out only for a couple other companies to be putting out 1TB sticks first.

Its good to see SOMEONE figure out that fast M.2 drives need a heatsink.
 

GuilleAcoustic

Chief Procrastination Officer
SFFn Staff
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Jun 29, 2015
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Sandisk Extreme PRO 240GB ... with Archlinux and a dozen soft installed (Blender, Freecad, Krita, Open office, Kicad, Darktable, Scribus, Inkscape, Calibre, Libretro + EmulationStation, Spotify, Chromium, Sublime Text 3, Minecraft) ... and I still have 170GB free XD.

Games are what really eat disks space nowaday. I store all my data on a NAS: photos, videos, source code, 3D models, etc.
 

BirdofPrey

Standards Guru
Sep 3, 2015
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That's exactly it. It's the games that eat all my space, and they don't work as well if I try offloading them to other storage. hell, even in this day and age, there's the occasional game that doesn't like not being on C:/
 

jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
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Feb 22, 2015
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I wonder how many of those PCIe SSDs just have an M.2 stick on an adapter inside the casing.

I think most of them are. It makes sense from an engineering standpoint because you only have to do the hard part of developing the drive once and then just throw it on a simple M.2 PCIe card adapter with a heatsink for the AIC version.
 

iFreilicht

FlexATX Authority
Feb 28, 2015
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one drive

Expect injunction lawsuit from microsoft ;)

there's the occasional game that doesn't like not being on C:/

And, funnily enough, a lot of MS software. Visual Studio needs to be on C:, at least partially, Office 365 doesn't have an option for installing it anywhere else, and if you try to make it work by changing the default installation location in the registry, it flat out doesn't start. That's 15-20GB on my 120GB SSD that I can't get rid off.

Spotify installs into %APPDATA%. It doesn't just store stuff there, it literally has all its binaries in that folder. o_O

Autodesk Software can be installed onto a different drive, but that's not done by changing a single path, all libraries have to be set for that separately, and it also downloads the installation files (close to 10GB for Inventor) to C: and will NEVER delete them itself, so if you're running low on space you can't install it even if there's enough on your second drive.

#cDriveOffenders
 

BirdofPrey

Standards Guru
Sep 3, 2015
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You'd think MS at least would know better. Many of the problems that crop up with each new version of Windows with some piece of software not working properly is actually the software dev's fault for using a bug as a feature, and doing other stuff you aren't supposed to.
You'd think they'd learn to be more flexible given how much crap they've taken for plugging holes.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
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May 9, 2015
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Finally some competition on the M.2 PCIe platform and hopefully 2017 will be the year of U.2 !
 

jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
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Feb 22, 2015
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and hopefully 2017 will be the year of U.2 !

Haha, and here I am giddy with anticipation at the thought of U.2 dying an early death and M.2 taking its rightful place as the next generation of high-performance consumer storage :p

Not that U.2 is bad, but I'd rather see the industry pick one format and stick to it so we don't have a repeat of the Maximus VIII Impact, a great ITX board except for the fact that they ditched a ingenious M.2 implementation (with the riser card) for a U.2 port.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
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Yeah the VIII Impact was a bad design choice, but I believe M.2 and U.2 can coexist on the same board, especially now more PCIe lanes are supplied by the CPU.

U.2 is still the better form factor for easily upgradeable or replaceable storage. But cases should start incorporating backplanes for it so the power and Y-cables are a manufacturer's worry.
 
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