Are there any potential issues with getting an M.2 SSD for this Clevo N150RD?

Hi guys,

I'm thinking about buying this laptop and I'm considering getting a 512 GB M.2 SSD as the sole drive since I don't really need that much storage. From what I've read I should go with a PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD in order to get the speed increase over a regular SATA SSD.

Since this is the first time I've heard of M.2 SSDs I have a few (probably dumb) questions

1) I assume that the faster read/write speeds are what makes Windows and other software boot up faster and the speed increase I would see is not just simply for copying files from one place to the other?

2) What % speed increase should I realistically expect over a build with just a regular SATA SSD? I know the advertised read and write rates are listed but would I really see up to a 5 fold increase in read rate in reality?

3) Does the processor in this build (i5 6300 HQ) definitely support booting off an M.2 drive? I've read that some CPUs don't support this which would be a big issue if it is the only drive!

4) I've also read about M.2 drives using up the GPU PCIe lanes. I don't really understand this. Does it mean that going with an M.2 SSD would someone throttle the performance of the 960M is gaming or rendering applications? Would this be significant?

5) Any other disadvantages with going down this route? Driver issues?

Any info/advice would be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks!

Mark

 

1-2) I've had PCI-E and SATA M.2 drives, and aside from slightly longer boot times, I've not noticed any significant improvement in my daily usage patterns with the former over the latter. At least not enough to justify the significant price difference. I'd rather have higher capacity over faster performance - I got two 1 TB M.2 SATA drives for well under what a single 1 TB NVMe unit would have cost.

3) A competent retailer (and most Sager/Clevo ones are, including PCSpecialst) wouldn't sell incompatible configurations.

4) That's not going to be an issue.

5) The only potential issue is if you're going to use an operating system other than Windows 10, as 7 and I believe 8.1 as well do not support NVMe drives out of the box. You need to install the drivers separately, which requires a few more steps. There are guides on this forum on how to do it. But again, with Windows 10, it won't be a problem - NVMe drives will install just like normal.

 

Thanks for the reply. I don't suppose you know why you didn't see much of a performance boost when the read and write rates are apparently a few times faster than the SATA drives? It looks as though there is very little price difference between the ~500 GB SATA, M2 SATA and M2 PCIEPCIe NVMe SSDs on this laptop, so I guess I might aswell go for the PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD?

 

Seat of the pants impression in my day-to-day workflow. I couldn't care less about benchmark numbers. If you're doing lots of file transfers, doing 4K video editing, and such, then you'll be liable to see more of a difference. But I don't, so it was far more worth my while to go for the higher capacity, albeit slower-performing drive. In looking at the system you want, it seems that the price difference between SATA and NVMe is less than $100 for the same capacity. That being the case, then going for the faster drive does make sense.

 

I agree with the poster above about ignoring benchmarks and choosing space over speed. SSDs are so fast nowadays you probably won't really notice the performance differences even on a high end machine unless you are running servers or timing your boots to the millisecond. I just went from a MX200 500GB to a MX300 1TB on my main laptop, and I ran some tests our of curiosity. The new drive is consistently 3-5% slower on sustained read/write, but I really don't notice the difference ever, even doing large dd transfers. Maybe it takes 10 seconds longer on a 5 minute transfer, but this has no practical meaning to me. In daily use, something else is likely to be your speed bottleneck, because how often do you copy entire partitions?

Some of the M.2 drives have had more quality issues than other SSDs, but that's something that presents itself quickly so you could easily warranty it. The only thing I really have to suggest if you choose to go this route is use a second drive for RAID mirroring or an old drive for backups, because these super-dense SSDs are great until they are suddenly a brick. That's always true of SSDs, but seems more common with the M.2 format. This post is from an Acer C720 running Linux on a 256GB M.2 drive, but I don't know that I'd put one in my main laptop yet just based on my perception of the reliability.

 

Thanks a lot for the info guys. I think I'll just play it safe and get the Samsung 850 Evo just to avoid any complications! Cheers!

 

Also to add that going for capacity first is more important, the lower capacity PCI-E drives make much less sense than a mid-high capacity SATA model.