Solid State Drives have evolved far better than any HDD, not only that they have become faster but smaller as well. Now that the new Intel 9 Series motherboards (Z97 and H97) are available on the market, featuring M.2 ports for NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor) SSDs, M.2 based SSDs are also coming out one by one. Recently, ADATA’s flagship M.2 SSD, the ADATA SR1020NP Gen2X4 1TB was recently revealed. Check out its features below.
ADATA SR1020NP M.2 SSD is Fast!
The upcoming ADATA SR1020NP features LSI-SandForce 3700 series controller, and has a maximum capacity of up to 1TB of SSD storage. That’s really a huge capacity for a really small drive, attached directly into a motherboard. Also, since it supports PCI Express 2.0 x4 interface, it can reach ultra-fast read/write speeds of up to 1.8GB/s, far more faster than any of the fastest 2.5-inch SATA III SSD can achieve.
Unfortunately, as of today, there is only one motherboard that supports a PCI-E 2.0 x4 interface. Most Z97 and H97 motherboards have only a PCI-E 2.0 x2 interface. The board that can possibly maximize the ADATA SR1020NP’s potential is the ASRock Z97 Extreme6, featuring a special “Ultra M.2” slot. However the technology is not yet perfect, since there is a drawback when you use the Ultra M.2 slot. ASRock’s Ultra M.2 slot will eat another x4 bandwidth that is meant for the graphics card slot or the primary PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot. Meaning, if you use the Ultra M.2, your graphics card will only run at x8 speeds.
But I’m pretty sure that motherboard manufacturers won’t stop there. Most of us are hoping that we will see new motherboards in the coming Computex 2014 that could possibly support and take advantage of the full potential of ultra-fast M.2 SSDs, like the ADATA SR1020NP.
Oh, one other thing is that, don’t expect that these new M.2 NGFF solid state drives to be in a similar price range or priced slightly above the current SATA III SSDs. They are currently really expensive. The Samsung XP941 M.2 SSD 500GB capacity that was also recently revealed is reported to have a whopping $780 price tag.
But I’m pretty sure the high prices of the M.2 SSDs are just temporary and the possibility of these drives becoming affordable in the future is big. Just like the SATA III SSDs, they were very expensive at first and gradually become more and more affordable.
Personally I am really excited about the ADATA SR1020NP M.2 SSD. With this SSD, you can build a system without even using any SATA cables at all. It would be a great solution for Mini-ITX builds as well. Computex is coming fast and I am expecting to see more M.2 NGFF SSDs to be revealed on the said event.
Anyone know when the SR1020NP will be available?
No idea yet. Perhaps in the following weeks to come. I’ll update this once I spotted one.