M2 SSD or Sata SSD?

[Raphael Madeira]

Hello everyone,

In a couple of months or so I will be building a new pc workstation for editing and color grading 5K Red footage, mostly in Davinci Resolve.

After a lot of research though I am still undecided on the subject of M2 SSDs like the recent Samsung 960 Pro/Evo.

Are these M2 SSD worth it for my needs? Will I see tangible improvements over using regular Sata Ssd?

Would you advise a minimum size for it to be an effective tool? Will it provide a considerably smoother experience?

Will it make a real difference to real time editing and color grading of full 5K resolution?

Or am I looking at this all wrong and don't even need SSD for these tasks and HDD in Raid configurations are still the go to choice?

Any feedback would be welcome.

Thanks everyone.

 

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

Sata3 maxes out at 600MBps but m.2 nvme can allow speeds many times faster than that.

That said, unless you are currently experiencing storage bottlenecks it's unlikely either would very noticeably improve your experience. Unless you are using uncompressed formats or using many video layers/tracks at once it may not be the best investment. It also depends what you are comparing to. Storage capacity limitations might make switching to ssds a pain to manage as online storage vs a large inexpensive hdd raid depending on your work flow, project sizes, and budget...

 

[L. Langer]

Unless you shit diamonds and piss liquid gold, you won't be using SSDs for your work and if you were going to, you'd be using PCIe SSDs. M2 SSDs are for system OS and software installs and they are locked down to low speeds most of the time with no suitability for content creation, SATA SSDs are for speedy storage/high-capacity and you can use them - if you can afford to replace them frequently - in a RAID array to achieve fast speeds, and PCIe SSDs - the ones that go into that thar PCIe slot on ye olde mobo - are built for super speed and capacity, so they are what the big boys use for content creation - and on network storage arrays - when time is important and money isn't a factor. Overall though, HDDs in RAID are still the tried and true option due to cost and ease of replacement. But I tell you this, once you go PCIe, you'll never want to go back to an old RAID array with HDDs. Of course, you have to have a beastly workstation to begin with to get a lot out of flash storage, so that too is part of the cost.

 

[DJ Meyer]

Unless you shit diamonds and piss liquid gold, you won't be using SSDs for your work and if you were going to, you'd be using PCIe SSDs. M2 SSDs are for system OS and software installs and they are locked down to low speeds most of the time with no suitability for content creation, SATA SSDs are for speedy storage/high-capacity and you can use them - if you can afford to replace them frequently - in a RAID array to achieve fast speeds, and PCIe SSDs - the ones that go into that thar PCIe slot on ye olde mobo - are built for super speed and capacity, so they are what the big boys use for content creation - and on network storage arrays - when time is important and money isn't a factor. Overall though, HDDs in RAID are still the tried and true option due to cost and ease of replacement. But I tell you this, once you go PCIe, you'll never want to go back to an old RAID array with HDDs. Of course, you have to have a beastly workstation to begin with to get a lot out of flash storage, so that too is part of the cost.

M2 is just a connector format. Itself it has no bearing on speed or 'suitability' for content creation.

Some motherboards only support SATA over the m2 connection. Others only NVME. Depends entirely on the board.

And while most people do use an m2 drive ( either SATA or NVME ) for a boot disk, there is nothing stopping you from using a standard 2.5" SATA SSD for your boot disk and then use an m2 NVME drive for cache. It's quite a good setup, actually.

 

[Raphael Madeira]

Happy new year guys!

Thank you for the responses, from what I'm gathering an M2 Samsung 960 Pro/Evo might not be a good investment for a workstation, seems like it isn't very cost effective as of now, maybe in the future.

So allow me to ask a new question, as a content creator who, as far as post-production is concerned, will mostly just edit and color grade 5K Raw footage, what would you guys advise me to go with for work and storage?

Should I go with a basic sata SSD for OS and programs and get a HDD RAID 5 or something similar? Will that be fast enough for edit and color grade 5K Raw in real time? That's what really worries me with getting regular HDDs.

Any type of storage sizes you can advise me for specific functions?

Cheers everyone and again I wish you a Happy New Year!

 

[Les Hillis]

One advantage of using a M2 SSD for an OS drive is that it doesn't use a PCIe slot or SATA3(6Gb/s) connector that you could use for something else. Keeping in mind that, depending on the motherboard, the M2 slot will be sharing bandwidth with one of the PCIe slots.

IMO, 7200Rpm hard drives in RAID mode are still the most cost-effective option for internal storage of project data, simply because of their 4TB+ capacities.

It really does depend on your specific uses and priorities though.

With an M2 socket, a couple of PCIe slots and 8-10 SATA3(6Gb/s) connectors on a modern motherboard, you could probably test them all out and re-adjust your storage as you see fit.