Confused on the M.2 drives

[Bok]

Based on my experience of SSD drives - I've gone through a bunch of Samsung Evo's, WD and a few others and the Intel's have been flawless so far. In fact they've lasted 5x longer than any other. I did get them from a a friend at Intel.

Anyway, on that mobo, the spec sheet that I linked seems to indicate m.2 x 4 - why does it only support one ?

With a PCI 3.0 riser what would be the speed of the m.2 drives there ?

Basically I'm looking to see what is the fastest drives I could put in that. I need 3 or 4 SSD drives at the fastest speed possible, Right now, I don't absolutely need RAID as I flip between two and would just replace as needed if one failed, the 3rd one is for 'static' tables where RAID would be beneficial but speed is not essential.

Of course with 128Gb Ram I would also put most of the stats DB in memory anyway.

Hope this makes sense

[John P. Myers]

Anyway, on that mobo, the spec sheet that I linked seems to indicate m.2 x 4 - why does it only support one ?

Because there just aren't enough PCIe lanes available to support more. The fastest m.2 using PCIe 3.0 lanes would be around 3500MB/s, so if you find one that fast, that's as good as it gets.

[Bryan]

Based on my experience of SSD drives - I've gone through a bunch of Samsung Evo's, WD and a few others and the Intel's have been flawless so far. In fact they've lasted 5x longer than any other. I did get them from a a friend at Intel.

Hope this makes sense

My son-in-law is an engineer at a large company that makes chips. One of their product lines are controllers for LARGE storage arrays (racks of many SSDs). In order to stress test their chips they hammer the hell out of the SSDs. He has said that the Intel's longevity/reliability far exceeds any other brand. Intel is the only brand that his company will allow to be purchased for installation into internal computers. On their test racks they use all vendors.

[John P. Myers]

Based on my experience of SSD drives - I've gone through a bunch of Samsung Evo's, WD and a few others and the Intel's have been flawless so far.

If you're looking for endurance, EVOs, WD, etc. are not the way to go. They use TLC NAND which is cheaper, but the endurance tanks. You want Samsung PRO or any other m.2 drive that uses MLC NAND. Any drive that is considered enterprise class should also be MLC be default. SLC is the best you can get as far as endurance goes, but i'm not sure that is even made anymore because it was just too slow and took up quite a bit of physical space. If you come across a QLC drive in your searches, you'll want to avoid that as well. They have worse endurance than TLC, but will have an even more attractive price.