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  • Impulses - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    Interesting... Not in any rush to upgrade my SM951 but I'm glad U.2 is making inroads... One those M.2/U.2 adapters started showing up it seemed inevitable, it's a shame Samsung hasn't jumped on it.
  • etamin - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    I'd be interested in seeing a comparison between NVMe drives over CPU PCI-E lanes vs chipset PCI-E lanes vs U.2 on chipset PCI-E lanes. Will the DMI be limiting at any point?
  • LukaP - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    Only in benchmarks really. These super fast drives dont really offer any noticable speed improvement over something like an 850 Pro anymore (and no, booting in 3.9 seconds instead of 4 doesnt count).

    Where the DMI will become limiting in a generation or two (assuming intel doesnt do something in the mean time) will be workloads that are dependent on large sequential transfers, like media storage. But then again, PCIe 4.0 is coming, and with it, faster DMI. (or just add more lanes to the DMI link and voila.
  • amnesia0287 - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link

    it depends what you are doing. For your basic boot system drive, sure. But there is a MASSIVE difference if you are leveraging NVMe drives for virtualization. You can run a LOT of VMs off an NVMe drive without really slowing down too much.

    Not to mention for SAN replacement applications such as Storage Spaces Direct where NVMe drives function as a cache for all the disks underneath them.

    Fortunately, DMI is only an issue for boot drives.
  • extide - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link

    U.2 drives are no different than other PCIe SSD's that are add-in-cards or M.2 -- just a different physical form factor -- so really there are only 2 test cases -- PCIe SSD's on CPU lanes vs DMI lanes.
  • evancox10 - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link

    There may be some second order effects that come into play. For example, an add-in card might have more area and thus better thermal dissipation.

    But ignoring issues like that, yes they should be identical.
  • ddriver - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    Impressive figures, but the brand has been known for cheap garbage, and I mean the bad aspect of cheap. Also the numbers - overly broad - "up to 3 GB/s" could mean a lot, especially in that capacity range... and no prices... meh.
  • ltcommanderdata - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    Are U.2 drives backwards compatible with SATA Express? The device side connector on U.2 drives can mechanically fit the device side connector of a SATA Express cable. With the Z170 now supporting PCIe 3.0 from the chipset, the 2 GB/s from PCIe 3.0 x2 may bottleneck sequential reads from the fastest drives, but should be plenty for sequential writes and random read/writes.
  • extide - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link

    Yeah so I guess it's a matter of if the pinouts are different -- because it's just PCIe in both cases under the hood -- so maybe you'd need an adapter in the worst case. I have heard of using SATAe ports for front panel USB ports and stuff (basically using it as a raw PCIe and putting a USB controller on it) so I am sure it could be done. It would definitely add some life to those ports that ended up on SO many mobo's.
  • epobirs - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link

    ASROCK makes a package to give you two USB 3.1 ports up front, one of them Type C. I've installed one and it works fine but it can be tricky to secure it in some cases intended for toolless installs of optical drives and similar form factor items. It makes a very nice way to exploit an external SSD with SATA being the limiter rather than USB 3.0, as would be the case on most existing PCs.

    Connecting a U.2 drive to a SATA Express port would be a real waste. The bandwidth is so much less than intended and not all that great an improvement over SATA due to the lack of native support. If the U.2 drives were both low cost and backward compatible, it might be worthwhile but I neither is the case AFAIK.
  • extide - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link

    SATAe is just 2 lanes of PCIe so it can be up to half as fast as U.2 -- which is still pretty fast, and even a 950 Pro would have trouble maxxing out 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0 very often.
  • valinor89 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    Is that label right and SATA 2.5" is a form factor indepedent of the connector or someone screwed up?
  • zodiacfml - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    I do feel that U.2 won't make it.
    We have seen M.2 drives with single sides at decent capacities. The capacities will become even higher and cover most client/consumer devices soon. By volume, they will become cheaper as it becomes mainstream.
  • amnesia0287 - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link

    There are still limitations to M.2 drives just in relation to thermals and PCB spacing. That said, U.2 will probably still be superseded by OCuLink within the next couple of years. It's a much nicer/more manageable/smaller plug.
  • extide - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link

    U.2 may not catch on much in the consumer space, but it will definitely catch on in the server space. Think about it -- there is a need to have tons of drives on a server, and have them be hot-swappable -- a connector like U.2 along with drives in their traditional form-factor (ie not just PCIe or M.2 cards) is essential to making that happen.
  • Jay77 - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link

    At least they are putting out a drive, it looks like Micron has cancelled its NVMe consumer drive. It's disappeared from the Ballistix website - with out comment.

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