if that's the case it's a better move. work involves a lot of stuff and they are actually inter-related. it will take some time to learn them, before you can see things more practically from different angles, other than from your professional skill sets only. this helps to give much better justifications in a lot of things, and have better results in the end. there are mind barriers along the way, because many things don't simply click if you don't know how to tackle them. just overcome them as you go with open mind. it's not difficult tbh.

haha for common usage and gaming, sata ssd's are actually more than enough. there are good signs about price drop and capacity increase now. believe they will be available at much affordable price very soon.

you can have 2 choices to get a ssd. the first is to get the best premium drive, with a premium price (smaller capacity); the second is to get a mainstream drive, with higher capacity.

for general use, imo mainstream drives are fine already.

of course there is a third choice, get the premium drive with high capacity. it's up to you to decide.

if you have a good budget, you should go for samsung 850 pro. it's the best performance drive for now, with a good 10-year warranty.

yes you can reuse it. it's just like hdd.

do you mean to say pcie version 2.0, or x2 (2-lane) ssd?

in general pcie ssd are faster than sata ssd (depending on pcie version and the number of lanes). the minimal in the market now is pcie 2.0 x2, about 750MB/s. for x4 ssd, with ahci it's about 1 GB/s read/write (pcie 2.0); with nvme technology it can reach over 2GB/s (pcie 3.0).

no, if your mobo and os supports uefi, xp941 can boot without oprom. i am running one with w8.1 uefi and it works with m.2 or pcie slot (my current setup).

however if you don't have either support, yes you need the ones with oprom, like plextor drives.

edit: one more thing about m.2 ssd, there are 2 types of m.2 slot in laptops: sata-based and pcie-based. make sure you get the right one.

This post has been edited by horns: Jan 11 2015, 02:31 AM

oh this one is plextor m6e pcie 2.0 x2 ssd with aluminum heat sink. the current one in the market doesn't have the heat sink.

this one is my target hehe

pcie 3.0 x4 nvme. speed is over 2GB/s read.

you can use this whether or not you have m.2 slot. you can always get an pcie adapter for this. however take note that unlike plextor drives, it's unclear that this one has oprom for booting. if your mobo supports uefi then there will be no problem. just run windows in uefi mode.

well yeah. it needs some plannings by referring to the mobo manual.

it depends on how affordable sas can become. technology can propagate well only when it's affordable and abundant to everyone. sas is around for quite sometimes, but only a few use it in consumer space. of course 12Gb/s is an option in terms of speed, but pcie can run at even higher speed than sas (over 2GB/s, with nvme technology). about disadvantages, there might be some. however like any new technologies, they will go away eventually.

as a user, i want to get things that are readily available and most importantly, cheap. i still think the combo of sata ssd as boot/software/game drives and sata hdd as storage is good enough for personal computing in general. with ram-caching on hdd's, i don't feel any slowness in my current setup.

have you tried look-ups with google? some possible reasons reported were acronis background service (uninstall it), or rst driver issue (reinstall it)

first, pcie ssd is a new technology. i should say ssd technologies in general is still at active evolution stage. as storage, it will take quite some time to become as common and affordable as hdd today. to achieve mass adoption they started by using sata technology.

second, about pcie lane sharing, i think the actual question that needs to be answered is how more pcie lanes can be introduced to the system. evolution of new technologies almost always creates limitations to existing ones, and we cannot expect everything else to stop move forward when this happens, right? it's a good thing you know

currently, the ideal consumer systems to make better use of pcie ssd is x99 systems. these systems have more pcie lanes than z97 ones, so you can get the best of both world. (gpu and pcie ssd; well sort of) (ok yeah i just simplify stuff in order to explain things ) things like 4k videos are highend stuff, that need highend hardware, which brings me to another point: price. new technologies are initially all expensive. like 4k monitors, i don't really expect high adoption in consumer space any time soon. then how do these new products earn the keep in this competitive market? before they can go mainstream, they create limitations to the existing ones, so that other hardware in a system need changes as well in order to stay in the market (while maintaining their price as competitive as possible). all in all, we consumers benefit sooner if not later. all we need is to wait for the right time

by the way to solve the issue about storage bandwidth limitations, i think raid with multiple sata ssd's might be a better solution than to use ultra-speed spindle disks. as for satae, i am not really sure of its success in the future. your suggestion of adopting sas drives makes more sense.

i think there will be a day that nvme ssd supports oprom hehe (maybe by that time you already switched your system to a compatible one lol)

edit: one of the few things that makes me feel thrilled about new technologies like ssd is always the chances that technological spin-offs can happen to other matured hardware parts (most of them have only slow and little or no developments)

again, it's up to you to be early adopters of new technologies. there are risks that you must know (like incompatibility to current systems, and then there are these terrible price tags) if you don't wanna be one, tbh you have nothing to lose. we just need to be aware of these new things and put them into our wish lists if the price is right.

there are always cheaper ways to achieve the same outcomes with existing technologies. matured technologies have one common advantage: abundance. for instance, most of our systems have a lot of sata ports. if that's not enough you can grab raid cards (still affordable). the implementation is not that impressive, but it gets the job done. and it's cheaper.



This post has been edited by horns: Jan 13 2015, 10:34 AM

haha here the price of plextor drives are relatively expensive.

m6p's price is the same as 840 evo?! you're so lucky :/ mlc + ram-caching + 5-year warranty, that's a damn good deal.

it will fit. no spacer required usually.

yes i tried liteon previously. for general use, no problem. the reason why oem drives are way cheaper is because the lack of warranty. other than that, they are all good.

this is boring :/ previously when m5 series was around, i thought plextor had all the potentials to become one of the best options here.

so far i think idealtech sells quite a number of them. smart choice.

yeah as i explained about this before, big capacity thumb drives simply are not up to the speed of a ssd + enclosure. it's relatively cheaper too with this combo.

for now, i just get some oem drives for this purpose. risky, but i don't have any issues with any of them yet.

This post has been edited by horns: Jan 19 2015, 02:20 PM

they are the same ssd (pcie 2.0 x2). item 1 is the bare m.2 drive, while item 2 is the same drive mounted on a pcie adapter for compatibility reasons (so that it can be used in mobo's without m.2 slot)

in terms of speed, they are the same.

This post has been edited by horns: Jan 20 2015, 12:12 AM

you can get it from ramcity.com.au. note that there is a 10% gst 'discount' for international buyers.

as for the price, it's slightly expensive (double of sata ssd's of the same capacity).

Oh crap i forgot to edit that part :/

Samsung announced its external ssd drive already. It's based on an usb 3.0 uasp with msata 840 evo (or 850 evo i didnt read clearly) hehe

This alternative guarantees work well also. Since we have more sata ports than we need hehe

which transcend ssd is this? how's your computing experience with transcend ssd? it looks good enough for common usage. (the write part is slower but i think as long as reads have enough speed, then you should be fine)

plextor's ram-based cache is relatively impressive. although it's not as good as ramdisk, and we don't need that crazy speed for everyday use, it looks better than samsung's rapid and primocache.

nice to reduce os and app load time, read speed is more important. this is a good choice to go for if budget is a concern.

oh they have a not-so-good firmware upgrade process. still, i think it's not a big deal, as long as they can deliver proper updates hehe

ah my comments about plextor's plexturbo was based on speed found on images only hehe

yeah.. maybe all implementations ram-cache with write-back (i think it's deferred write-back) are slower for some reasons. i'm not really familiar with it. for the purpose of ssd optimizations, my personal preference is still write-back.

yes you can verify that from their product flyers. it's slightly faster than sata3 but yeah not really fast hehe

haha we can use pcie slots to access it but it doesn't necessarily use up all of the pcie lanes.

for now, yes. currently this is the better option to get speed and to free up pcie lanes for better use (like gpu sli setups).

it's not just about multiple gpu setups. it depends on the purpose of that rig. there are some pcie-based stuff, like sound, video capture, nic, wifi, and raid/sata/usb/scsi cards, that can be added to the system to cope with needs. pci-e slots can also be used as a means to replace faulty integrated parts of a mobo.

mainstream systems (like 4790k, z97) usually have less pcie lanes than high-end ones (like 5930k, x99).

due to such limitations, different implementations are adopted by manufacturers to assign and distribute these resources that involve lane sharing (that means there are differences in the number of pcie lanes connected to each slot, something like this, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-i...oard,3902.html). it's important to check out the mobo manuals and review sites to know more about this, then plan your rig setup ahead before purchase.

we all know the risks of using raid0. we cannot eliminate them, so just prepare for the worst:

1. use it as a boot/software drive, not storage. normally 2x 256gb should be good and large enough.
2. make sure you can recover from disasters, by keeping the latest system images outside the system. (it's much more time saving than doing fresh installs from scratch everytime)
3. store the data in hdd (non-raid), or nas.


bad power supplies will cause damage in electronics. it's better to use UPS in this case. (it's not just about ssd. every component in your rig will be affected and i don't think you wanna risk them too) laptops are relatively better. they have built-in battery for this purpose.