Let's talk about sex, baby, let's talk about.. nah, M.2

I really appreciate how you asked a question and then gave all the reasons why your proposed solution is not actually viable for 99% of the population. Saved me from replying.

...oh, wait.

 

Yep, the bigger the drive the faster they are because the controller has more chips to access from what I have read.

Samsung is also coming out with the OEM 961? at 1 TB that is supposed to be cheaper than the 950 PRO and faster as well. The problem is making sure your BIOS will support it, especially if you want to use it as a boot drive.

 

I'm guessing it depends on the particular motherboard manufacturer and how often they release revisions/updated bios. I imagine it would be less of a problem for enthusiast boards.

W10 is supposed to be the bee's knees, especially if you aren't going to use an optical drive as it makes installing straight from USB a snap.

Probably let you know this week or next, when I finalize my purchasing decisions and place the order.

 

So, it's done. Went off with only one minor bump in the road. The system automatically recognized and booted off the USB thumbstick I made from the W10 installer, W10 recognized the M.2 950 Pro as the storage device and installed windows. I didn't need to do anything in BIOS. I didn't have to change any settings, change any settings back and forth, pull out the thumbdrive and reboot the system... none of that.

It just worked. Now, this might be motherboard specific and others might come with old firmware that doesn't allow it and makes you jump through hoops, but my Gigabyte GA-z170-MX didn't.

I will say that the only bump in the road is that this motherboard also comes with the one feature I was trying to avoid (HA! It proved to be 1 of 2 only "issues") and that's a Killer NIC. This means that the W10 install does not have the drivers for that NIC so the system works but there's no internet to download the other drivers that I need because I didn't put an optical drive in this so I couldn't use the software that was supplied with the hardware. Luckily, I've got other computers and was able to download those drivers and move them via USB thumbstick.

Works fantastic. Just got it up Thursday and haven't had too much time to play or benchmark, but I'm typing on it right now!

Oh, the other thing is that the RM series Corsair PSU's come with a connection in the back for "C link" it looks rather important and you get cables for it.... but those cables don't connect to anything on your motherboard. Apparently, you need a digital/analog bridge and cable to then plug it into a USB header. Except, that isn't included and the only company that makes this is Corsair. If you haven't built a PC in over a decade, like myself, and never dealt with modular PSU's before, it's quite nerve racking that you can't figure out how to plug something in. Apparently Corsair includes the entire PSU-Motherboard cable set if you buy the RM1000. Anything under that, they only provide half of the cables you need while also giving you a bunch of outdated cables that you wouldn't need unless you were building a system with hardware from the 1990s.

I was kinda ticked off about that, because I had everything ready to go on Wednesday, but was stumped by this "C Link" PSU cable and it took me the next day to read reviews and watch videos that finally explained that 1) I don't need it and 2) I wasn't crazy, I was actually missing the parts to install it.

Anyway, a total success First time boot, first time windows install, no need to play around in BIOS at all to get everything to work (I had to go into BIOS to turn off the red LEDs that come on, but that's not an operational issue), and the entire system goes from cold start to windows desktop in under 30 seconds.

Yes, under 30 second from when I push the power on button until windows is ready to go. It takes that long for my monitor to heat up and display a signal. Actually, it takes my monitor longer than that.

Here's a link to pictures of the build if you're interested. BTW - I was SHOCKED at how small the 950 Pro is, that's why I included that particular photo.

Cheers! If you have any questions, just ask.

http://imgur.com/gallery/CSBmq

 

That's great in speed increase and price decrease! I'm interested as to why there isn't a further speed increase with the size increase though, as there was from the 256 to 512 950 PRO's.

I thought all SSD's benefited from increasing the number of chips, but those 960 numbers show no difference in read or write from 512 to 2 TB?

I think the X series chipset allows for 4 M2, doesn't it?