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 Post subject: New M.2 drive on the way
 Post Posted: Tue May 28, 2019 7:29 pm 
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I've had an M.2 drive in my New Egg 'wish list' for a little while and ordered today as I saw the price dropped from ~$76.00 to $64.99.
https://www.newegg.com/western-digital- ... 6820250116
It is a 500 GB unit. It isn't potentially as fast as my system M.2 drive but then my second M.2 port is standard, not Ultra, so it would not make sense to get a drive as fast as my system drive which is in an Ultra port. Could still have gotten faster than this for the standard port but think this a good balance between cost and performance.

I may use the 240 GB SATA SSD that this will replace for all my games which total 65-70 GB.

The new M.2 drive will become my video editing and re-coding drive along with being the recording drive for my software DVR's. I wanted a larger/faster drive for this as I'm starting to get into Blu-ray authoring. Shoot, I have a Blu-ray burner, and software to author, so why not use it? I ordered my first 10 pack of 50 GB Blu-ray blanks along with the M.2 drive. :)

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 Post Posted: Wed May 29, 2019 8:07 pm 
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New thought concerning the new M.2 drive...

From what I have been doing I got stuck on my video conversions being involved with only one drive.

First the thought of putting my games on the older SATA SSD would do nothing but lower performance as the games are all installed on my system M.2 drive which is the fastest in the build and still has well over 200 GB of free space.

I THINK, for my video processing, that I might do better using both the new M.2 drive and the old SATA SSD together. Use the new M.2 drive to hold pending video files that need processed and the read source. Use the older SATA 240 GB SSD as the write to drive. Since I have 32 GB of 3200 GHz. memory it will not be often that a write to a drive is needed until the conversion process is done. I think that this may be a better option.

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 Post Posted: Thu May 30, 2019 1:29 am 
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Check your motherboard manual, some boards you will lose use of some of your SATA ports depending on the number of M.2's in use.


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 Post Posted: Thu May 30, 2019 6:10 am 
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Yes, I will lose a couple of SATA ports by using the second M.2 slot. I have 10 SATA ports and think it will be the last two that I lose.

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 Post Posted: Thu May 30, 2019 9:22 pm 
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Actually, David, let me correct myself. With my ASRock X370 Taichi motherboard I will not actually lose any SATA ports. I will lose the third of three PCIe 16 slots. As this is sort of a 'throw in' slot I'll never miss it. This slot isn't even capable for a Crossfire or SLI link between graphics cards. I can't really think of anything other than video that I'd want for a PCIe 16 slot although I'm sure there are MANY possibilities. The third slot isn't even PCIe 3 but, rather, PCIe 2. I doubt that I'll miss the slot. ;)

I'll be left with 1 PCIe 3.0 x16 slot and 2 PCIe 2.0 x1 slots empty. I don't really see where I'd need more.

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 Post Posted: Tue Jun 04, 2019 3:55 pm 
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Drive arrived today and installed without issue. All 8 of my drives are still there and all is well. :) As said before I lose the PCIe 2.0 16X slot but still have an open PCIe 3.0 16X slot and 2 open PCIe 2.0 1X slots.

Yes, I have 8 drives; 1 SSD, 2 M.2 drives, 3 Spin Drives and 2 Optical drives.

I am not seeing full speed on the new drive but that is due to its port being a standard M.2 Socket (PCIe Gen2 x4) rather than the Ultra M.2 Socket (PCIe Gen3 x 4) slot that holds my system M.2 drive. Still I am getting speeds of almost three times that of the original SSD that this drive replaces.

<edit>
Almost forgot the downside concerning the new drive. It did not come with a mounting screw. I'll have to pull the screw from the other M.2 drive and get one to match. Right now I just have a piece of tape holding it down.

On the plus side in relation to my mother board, I like the way ASRock sets up their boards. I see a lot of review complaints on mother boards as to the M.2 ports being under the video card. On my ASRock board the ports are between the PCIe slots so there is no need to pull the video card to access.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 07, 2019 8:10 pm 
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Just to close this out I decided to use my older SanDisk 240GB SSD as an output drive for my video conversions instead of game installs. This was actually a no brainer as my games are on my system drive which is on an M.2 Ultra port so I'd just lose performance if I moved to the SanDisk. The system drive does sequential benchmark reads of 2875 MB/sec and the SanDisk does around 360 MB/sec. Of course the best game performance would be on the system drive.

Also the SanDisk is the oldest SSD and down to 93% life expectancy. I've had it quite a while so it is still likely it will out live the system but life expectancy percentage isn't just how long it will last. As the life expectancy drops so does performance.

I MAY try switching the new drive and the SanDisk as to source/destination and might even get better performance as the write on a video conversion takes longer than the read. Since I have 32GB of 3200MHz. RAM everything actually involved with a conversion is done in the RAM; only the read and writes involve the drives.

To give an idea as to how this current drive setup works I converted 11 2GB+ MP4 files to DVD format in well under 2 hours. That is fast. :)

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 Post Posted: Sat Jun 08, 2019 5:10 pm 
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Smoking. :D

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 Post Posted: Sat Jun 08, 2019 6:39 pm 
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BillG wrote:
Smoking. :D

Ya, Bill, it is turning out to be pretty quick on the video conversions but the ease of doing the installs has a lot to do with how ASRock sets up their motherboards. Take the mother board on my main system
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E1681315775 ... 6813157757
It has ten SATA ports. On MANY boards I've seen/used the SATA ports are spread all over the board. In this case the ten ports are all in the same place in double rows of five mounted on the edge of the board. It is also nice how they set up the M.2 drive ports. I have seen so many board review complaints about the M.2 ports being under the video card. In my case they are horizontal between the PCIe slots instead of vertical under the video card. An intelligent layout just makes things SO much easier to work with...

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