Gadgetory

excellent my question for you guys today is do you like really really fast storage if you do you should like this video okay it was a pretty poor attempt but today's video is really all about MDOT 2 also known as next-generation form factor although that's getting to be a little bit passe and what it can do for you and your computer and just to mix things up I'm going to combine this MDOT to tutorial with a quick review of a new drive from a data that is the a data SP 900 and the m2 2280 version so for new Intel platforms that launched in 2014 we're seeing a new type of form factor connection between permanent storage and your computer now there's MDOT 2 which is what we're going to be talking about today there's also SATA Express those drives are really hard to come by as of the making of this video so I'm going to focus on MDOT 2 will save SATA Express for a different video now if you currently have a drive connected to your computer chances are it connects via serial ata that's been a standard that's been in place for some time and SATA is actually pretty easy it's pretty straightforward because both the connector and the protocol for communicating between the driver 2 computer both called SATA or serial ata the only confusion may be with serial ata is that we went from revision 1 to revision 2 to revision 3 basically get us more bandwidth each time and we're stuck right now with SATA revision 3 that gives us 6 gigabits per second of bandwidth that's available for connected drives to use to communicate with the rest of the computer now to talk about m2 we need to distinguish between two important things there's the connector or the physical plug that connects a drive to the rest of your computer and there's the protocol which is a standard for the digital communication between the drive and the rest of your computer let's start by talking a little bit about the m2 connector itself it has a width first off and there's different widths that are supported 12 millimeters 16 millimeters 22 millimeters and 30 millimeters although right now the most common one that I've seen is 22 millimeters then we also have different lengths that can be supported as well aside from the width you'll also notice two notches on the edge connector these are referred to as keys and the m2 spec has a list of potential notch locations that correspond to different types of devices that can be connected e keyed m dot 2 slots will fit new wireless cards for example but fortunately SSDs will primarily use the B and M keys at least right now most of the SSDs I have seen actually come with both B and M keys available on the edge connector which eases compatibility concerns since they'll fit both B and M key m2 slots so are a data SP 900 here is a 20 to 80 M to drive which means it's 22 millimeters wide and 80 millimeters long there are also different lengths determined by the m2 spec and the most common ones that I've seen are 30 40 to 60 80 and 110 and depending on your motherboard or notebook you might have support for different lengths installation of m dot 2 is actually really simple if you've ever installed an Esso dim in a notebook before it would be very familiar you just pop it in in much the same way and a single screw will secure the card in place an top 2 can support devices using two different protocols and here's where some confusion comes into play you have the SATA protocol on one hand that we've been familiar with and using for some time you also have the PCI Express protocol a PCI Express has actually been in use for some time for storage devices and you can get devices such as this Oct Revo drive that connect directly to the PCI Express slot on your motherboard and that allows you to use this for really really fast storage and get around the SATA bottleneck the difference here is it hasn't been natively supported yet native support means it will have better compatibility and will also get to ditch that nasty boot delay that happens when an option ROM loads like it does with the OCZ Revo drive now an M 2 SATA Drive as opposed to PCI Express is gonna have the same available bandwidth as a standard SATA Drive that's 6 gigabits per second for Gen 3 current implementations of m dot 2 PCI Express on the other hand are currently Gen 2 by 2 so PCI Express Gen 2 by 2 is the connection and that gives you 10 gigabits per second of bandwidth so 40% more than SATA and more available bandwidth means that drives that are faster are going to be able to perform faster now the really cool thing about m dot 2 PCI Express drives is that there's a lot of room for future growth so whereas right now we have Gen 2 by 2 eventually we will see Gen 2 by 4 or Gen 3 by 4 for example all the time giving you more bandwidth of course we're going to eat fast SSDs to actually take advantage of that so now that we've talked a bit about m2 and let's move on to our review portion of the ADATA SP 900 m2 2280 drive i tested this drive in an AZ rock killer z97 motherboard and that has support for both PCI Express as well as SATA and two drives for the SSD we have a Sam force SF 2281 controller this is a solid controller and it's actually much more reliable than previous generations of sand force controllers fortunately does require compressible data to really perform it likes compressible data but not quite so much for incompressible also this is a special version of the SF 2281 sand first has work so magic with it that lets you actually use 100% of the drives capacity so this is why it's a 256 gigabyte Drive and now a 240 gigabyte Drive then and that 880 is using here since this is kind of a mid-range SSD is mlc asynchronous which is a little bit slower than synchronous NAND this also has a three year warranty and it's got support for all the important SSD things that you would want like trim support and dev sleep or device sleep to save power when your device is not in use it's available as a twenty to forty two or a 20 to 80 form factor M to variety drive and there's also a 2.5 inch variance of a SP 932 now the performance of the SP 900 is I don't want to say disappointing here it's just the same it's still a serial ata drive it's still using the serial ata protocol even though it's an MDOT two connected drive so we're going to see the same peak performance here as we see on a regular serial ata drive and this is also going to show these slightly slower than the fastest SSDs currently available performance that we would expect from a mid-range stand force SF 2281 Drive with asynchronous NAND flash memory it's easily going to keep up with comparable SATA SSDs I was able to hit all of the advertised numbers on the box in my benchmarks and of course we're going to see getting outpaced here by the Plex store m6e which is a PCI Express Gen 2x2 drive which gives it additional bandwidth that the SP 900 cannot take advantage of so to summarize my review of the ADATA SP 900 I would like to point out that anyone who is jumping from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD is going to see a vast improvement in their day-to-day computing experience the response time is there and the speed is there to give you just a much more my computer is already always ready for anything I throw at it kind of feeling now I think there's a niche that this Drive will really fit in specific and that is folks who already have a notebook or laptop that has an MDOT two SATA slot already built into it and is ready for an upgrade that in my opinion is what this drive is really built for and fortunately there's actually quite a few notebooks out there that fit that bill that includes the Lenovo ThinkPad x1 carbon gen 2 the msi gs70 nee Vaio duo 13 and vaio pro 13 just to name a few so if your notebook is ready for this drive I think it's a great upgrade now for other folks who might be considering something like this in particular for your desktop users out there myself included I would say that well if you have an MDOT to PCI Express slot in your desktop for example well you just you can't use this drive period if you have a slot that has a hybrid solution that does serial ata as well as PCI Express like our asrock motherboard did I would recommend waiting and going with an MDOT 2 PCI Express solution I won't drive that I would love to recommend assuming it lives up to the hype and it actually is released to market and my friends at a data can actually 71 hi if you're watching this friends add a data and that drive is the forgive me SR 1020 NP and the benefits of that drive is its PCI Express Gen 2 by 4 and it features the newest SandForce SF 3700 series controller which I think is going to be pretty awesome once we can get our hands on it of course but that is all for this video guys thank you so much for watching leave me a comment in the comment section down below let me know what's next generation storage drive you are most looking forward to whether it be m dot 2 SATA Express or some other fancy drive connection types that I have no idea even exist yet don't forget to thumbs up button tool are you down there we'll see you all very soon