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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

Watching the space I wouldn't call this next gen storage. Well. The storage is OK but the way most systems work there is no perceptible difference between an NVM m.2 drive and Sata for most regular use cases (i.e. everyday use, not server or a simulation rig). This might change in future with stuff like DirectStorage.

The truly "next gen" performance was Intel's Optane 3D XPoint, but that is ludicrously expensive.

And even then it's like boot from SSD 12 seconds at $130 dollars vs Optane 10 seconds at $1200.

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I'm very surprised to see it often mentioned that NVMe M.2 vs SATA ain't noticeable. Because when I switched from a SATA to a Samsung 950 Pro (5 years ago) and latter on to a 970, it was a gigantic speed boost. The difference was, to me, very noticeable. Now I'm a software dev and do compilation and sometimes "work with files" but it's neither a server nor a simulation rig. Just a "normal software dev" setup.

Now I do stuff like doing grep (well, ripgrep really) on an entire home dir, compute often hashes of files and things which may not be considered "regular use cases" but which I think are still "regular" or at least semi-regular when doing software development.

To me PCIe 3.0 x4 (or now 4.0 x4 I guess) NVMe M.2 vs SATA is day and night.

> I'm very surprised to see it often mentioned that NVMe M.2 vs SATA ain't noticeable.

Here is loading times for windows and some blind tests:

https://youtu.be/V3AMz-xZ2VM

https://youtu.be/4DKLA7w9eeA

Your personal experience could be down to several factors.

For example - wear of your devices, how much your SSD was occupied, drivers, other components being updated as well, etc.

What SATA Drive were they testing?

Early SATA SSD has performance consistency problem, QD1 not as fast, etc.... they were way faster than HDD, but not perfect.

NVMe started off with controller that has already been fine tuned, hence comparing them to SATA SSD tends to be a lot faster. Now if you have similar controller on NVMe and SATA you might only notice the difference in the video. But the context still matters.

The most important difference between m.2 and sata is two less cables cluttering up your pc =)

And the much higher temperatures (if your M.2 is an NVMe). Could anyone knowledgeable explain why NVMe tend to get much hotter than SATA under similar conditions? I've been testing mine with not more than 400-500 MB/s and it quickly gets to 60°C+, while the old 840 Evo doesn't get above ~45°C (running a very similar synthetic workload). I would've guessed the opposite: the fully enclosed SATA drive should get much hotter.

Why do you care? The critical temperature on a retail 970 Pro is, IIRC, 84C, and is almost impossible to hit.

Mostly out of curiosity. Higher temperatures also put additional stress on flash memory, and I tend to run my hardware into the ground (I'm still using a 50GB Intel SSD from 2010), so there's that.

I'm not sure if I count, but I suspect two things. Heat dissipation and controller complexity. NVMe controller might be more computationally heavy and so they might emit more heat*.

But assuming that NVMe and SATA SSD controllers emit the same energy, it makes more sense that NVMe would be hotter.

Think about it. If you throw a ball of high heat meat would it cool faster if it was connected to a large body of water (SSD with its chasis) or a small body of water (NVMe small piece of plastic that is the NVMe)?

Another thing to check if your NVMe either has proper thermal pads placement and/or if the air from the front coolers is reaching it.

> NVMe controller might be more computationally heavy

Which is ironic because NVMe was supposed to be more efficient and doing less work because it's design wasn't bound with SATA&spinning assumptions and controller doesn't need to handle pcie-SATA conversions since it's directly connected to the bus etc.

Not sure about yours, but on my motherboard, it floats - other than the connector on one end and the screw on the other, there is no heat sink, and it just doesn't mass very much.

m.2 cards can sink a pretty surprising amount of heat through the connector and the standoff. But case makers can also provision for cooling m.2 cards. Components on m.2 modules are permitted to be 1.2-1.5mm high. My Intel NUC cools the m.2 device through a flexible thermal interface to the system's main cooler (that also cools the CPU). This works extremely well.

One problem with m.2 is the spec would permit a module with the controller on the bottom where it would be difficult to cool. But I think so far nobody has been dumb enough to ship one.

Well a 2.5" drive has a much larger surface area from which the heat can dissipate.

There's also the location of the temperature probe, it doesn't need to be much further away from the heat source to register drastically lower temperatures in either case.

Fully enclosed SATA has a much larger surface area to radiate heat.

It helps in these detailed areas of discussion to be precise.

m.2 is a form factor, or really sort of a family of form factors.

SATA and NVMe are protocols and interfaces. In m.2, there are 12 key indexes. Drives use indexes B and M. m.2 support both NVMe and SATA. NVMe drives for m.2 are keyed at index M. M.2 SATA drives are keyed at B or often both B and M.

m.2 supports SATA and NVME, sometimes but not always in the same slot. For NVMe speeds, you need an NVMe drive. Those come in PCIe x2 and PCIe x4 at PCIe 3.x and PCIe 4.0 revisions of the standard. The drive and slot must both support this. m.2 SATA 3 drives don't have two cables to them like a 2.5" SATA 3 drive usually does. It goes in an m.2 slot that supports SATA and is keyed appropriatly.

m.2 also has various lengths: 40mm, 60mm, and 80mm. Some drives are up to 110mm and many boards provide for that. The "2260", "2280" and so on are drive sizes, 22m by the length.

m.2 also supports non-drive cards like GPS, Bluetooth, WLAN, WWAN, or NFC.

Another, earlier than m.2, standard allowed drives with a SATA interface on a card with no cables. That was known as mSATA.

precise and thorough!

> The storage is OK but the way most systems work there is no perceptible difference between an NVM m.2 drive and Sata for most regular use cases

As a developer I would just have to disagree.

After using NVMe SSDs for a while, using SATA SSDs suddenly feel like I’m on spinning rust plates.

To me it’s a night and day difference.

You don’t buy optane for faster Boot times, you buy it as a render cache.

My point wasn't that you would use or don't use it for render cache, but that it's what next-gen SSD would look like and that even it wasn't that impressive.

But yeah, you generally use Optane either as render cache or for non-volatile RAM. Or a ridiculously fast SSD drive.

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