The Building Of A New Beast (Phase III)

Well the delivery services are certainly keeping me on my toes with this project blog! Here I was expecting parts to be scattered to all four corners of the world and yet one after the other they seem to be dropping through with relative ease, a couple even in advance of their original ETA! The latest to appear is one quarter of the brain department, one half of the storage. Say hello to the result of more passive/aggressive costing and swearing.. the Samsung 960 EVO 250Gb 2280 form factor M.2 Nvme SSD (rolls off the tongue so easily doesn't it..).

This behemoth undoubtedly exists in my project thanks to the three year project span. Originally I was quite content to settle for a couple of Western Digital or Seagate hard drives, even as SSD's began to creep into the market place to challenge their speed limitation. Various models from various companies reared their heads, most notably Samsung's 2.5" 850 EVO SATA SSD range, with a recognised competitive edge in performance and reliability. Whilst I think it can be argued nowadays that manufacturing has improved to the point that the market doesn't feel quite as desperately distinct as it once did, Samsung have held their own and on paper the 850 EVO continues to prove to be a stubbornly relevant contender. What I didn't anticipate was both the emergence and significant drop in price for Nvme SSD's, to the point that the long cherished 850 EVO with its £85 price tag became overshadowed very recently by the 960 EVO's £114 price/performance backhand. This cousin to their own industry leading 960 PRO stick certainly isn't lacking in performance. In fact I might question the value of the PRO range beyond bragging rights, or a demand for absolute performance irrespective of cost.

So why Nvme? For all its speed SATA has a fundamental 600Mb/s transfer speed limit, perfectly adequate for the typical 100-150Mb/s performance of regular hard drives. SATA SSD's, whilst blisteringly fast with their typical 500Mb/s speed upwards, do still hit that limit. Nvme on the other hand uses the PCI lanes on the motherboard for conversation, the result being that this little bugger sports write/read speeds of up to 1.5Gb/s and 3Gb/s respectively! These figures are no idle "peak music power" marketing boast either - for a change, tests seem to show that they do indeed reasonably meet the criteria.

So often decisions about PC hardware fall into categories of "need" or "want" - you "need" a CPU or motherboard, versus say the "want" of that three-way SLI stack of Titan Xp's or that £10,000 custom PC set up. In this case it seems to be a no-brainer, with a leap and a half in performance for an extra measly £28. Of course the cost per gigabyte of Nvme SSD technology vs conventional hard drives is still in its infancy, but it's getting better. It's for certain that 250Gb is enough for my current needs, with adequate room for the operating system and a few programs. I'm currently running on a 320Gb mechanical drive for everything - operating system, programs, documents, the lot! To help out with storage of larger files and general media I've sensibly elected to retain a mechanical drive in the design (the second half of the storage department).. but I'm getting ahead of myself.