Shuttle XPC SH170R6 Barebone Desktop review - Performance M.2 PCI-E SSD Storage Performance

M.2 PCI-E SSD Storage Performance

Aside from its naming I am pretty stoked about M.2 as I have checked out what it can do and immediately got excited. I think M.2 will be wider adopted than SATA Express this year because it is easy, handy, transferable to any M.2 ready PC and it doesn't need complex RAID setups. That brings small form factors add-in SSDs to our PC platform at blazing fast speeds. There is an abbreviation for that, NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor). It is not just that though, SATA3 has not been amongst us for that long, but the SSDs evolved in a very fast manner, making SATA3 already a bottleneck for current generation SSDs as SATA3 SSDs end at roughly 570 MB/sec in terms of read/write performance. 
 

Above the an NVMe M.2. SSD seated into the slot

M.2 PCI-E SSDs are merely small form factor SSDs that communicate over your PCI Express lanes, giving it 10 Gbps of bandwidth, eliminating SATA3 bottlenecks. The cool thing with this motherboard is that is gets increased bandwith to 32 Gbps by using a x4 PCI-Express links provided by the chipset. We use the new NVMe Samsung 950 Pro, which isn't shy in performance, no Sir:

M.2 PCI-E links directly to your PCI-E lanes and with NVMe PCI-Express x4 Gen 3.0 compatible M.2. SSDs it uses an interface with so much bandwidth. You can expect performance in the 2200 MB/sec range with such products. This Samsung M.2. NVMe 950 PRO can handle a maximum sustained data read speed at 2350 MB/s and the top write speed is at the 1000 MB/s marker.