Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

mavericks7913

Suspended
Original poster
May 17, 2014
812
281
I have M.2 SSD with PCIE adapter and Im quite satisfying with this one. I know that M.2 SSD is much faster than SATA 3 SSD but I dont see any benefits at all. All LR catalogs and files are located in HDD. The speed is extremely fast but I really really dont see any differences between M.2 and SATA3. Did I missing something or it's just meaningless to get faster one?
 
M.2 is the connector / form factor standard. It supports 2 types of protocols, SATA and NVMe. Each has a different connector: SATA has 2 notches in the edge connector, NVMe has 1. So not all M.2 connectors (and motherboards) will support both standards.

Obviously the SATA protocol will only allow up to 6 Gbps (~ 600 MBps) currently, so it won't be much better than a regular SATA port.

However, if you have an NVMe one, that is where you will see the significant performance boost, such as the Samsung 960 EVO which has something like 2000 MBps read and 1000 MBps write.
 
  • Like
Reactions: TheArcher
I have both SATA 2 and NVMe SSD's in my Mac Pro, and while the NVMe is quite a bit faster when measured, it's only a little bit faster subjectively for most things. An I/O intensive DBMS test might finish in 40 minutes on the NVMe and an hour on the SATA SSD, but for most interactive things it's very hard to tell the difference.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.