Fatal1ty 970 Performance for M.2/SSD Storage

A 2.5" SATA SSD is simply connected to one of the SATA III ports with a SATA data cable, and a SATA power cable is connected to the 2.5" SSD.

An M.2 SSD is connected to the M.2 slot/port that is located just below the first PCIe x16 slot. If you look at the board and find "ASRock" and "970 Performance", just to the right of that is the M.2 port. You'll see several metal standoffs on the board that are used to mount an M.2 SSD, depending on its length.

There are different types of M.2 SSDs. Some are SATA M.2, and others are PCIe M.2. Then there are two types of PCIe M.2 SSDs, AHCI and NVMe.

You can use a SATA M.2 SSD with your board fine. The new NVMe M.2 SSDs like the Samsung 950 Pro, are not supported by your board. The AHCI M.2 SSDs might work on your board, the only models right now are the Samsung XP941 and SM951, which are only sold by a few retailers. Your board many not support those SSDs.

A NAS bay is Network Attached Storage, and is usually connected to PCs over your local network connections. If your NAS bay has a USB connection, then you could use that. Otherwise you would need a simple network switch box, where you would connect your PC, the NAS bay, and the network connection from your router.

bitac wrote: Thanks parsec for your extensive answer! I've got the Fatal1ty 970 Performance Rev 1.0 and i would like to install now a M.2 SSD (e.g. 256GB Samsung SM 951 - NVMe Version). In February 2016 there was a BIOS update for this board which added NVMe support... (http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/Fatal1ty%20970%20Performance/%3Fcat=Download&os=BIOS) I've got two questions before buying a M.2 SSD: 1. Is it possible with the Fatal1ty 970  to boot from a (NVMe) M.2 SSD? 2. Does the Fatal1ty 970 support the M.2 connection PCI-E 3.0 x 4 ? (or is it maybe restricted to 2x PCIe because of the mainboard chipset?)

You'll need to update to the 1.30 UEFI version that adds NVMe support, and you'll be able to boot from an NVMe SSD.

But FYI, don't expect the M.2 NMVe to be shown in the Storage Configuration screen, it won't be. The only place it will be shown is in the Tools, System Browser screen. This is normal for your board.

Your board's M.2 slot is PCIe 2.0 x4, no current AMD boards support PCIe 3.0, the new Ryzen systems will. Depending upon the NVMe SSD you use, you won't get the maximum large file sequential read speed possible, but overall its performance won't be drastically reduced.

An important question about this, what version of Windows will you be using? If it's Windows 7, that is a problem since it does not have a built in NVMe driver. You must have an NVMe driver or an NVMe drive will not work.

This also depends upon the NVMe SSD being used, the Samsung 950 Pro is the only one that is known to work with Windows 7 without adding an NVMe driver to the OS installation package, or during the installation. Windows 8.1 and 10 have a built in NVMe driver.

bitac wrote: Thank you very much again parsec for answer! :) Yes, I would be using Windows 10 because of better driver support in general. Regarding to your note of PCIe 2.0 x4: So do you think there will a notable speed increase when using a M.2 SSD on PCIe 2.0 x4 (e.g. Samsung 950 Pro or SM 951 - NVMe) compared to using a regular SATA SSD (e.g. Samsung 850 EVO)? And please forgive me my noob question: the speed of the graphics card won't be reduced to x4 lanes when using a M.2 SSD on PCIe 2.0 x4?

A graphics card in the PCIE2 slot will stay at PCIe 2.0 x16, when an M.2 SSD is used in the M.2 slot. The M.2 slot shares lanes only with the PCIE5 slot, which has four PCIe 2.0 lanes assigned to it. Those lanes are not shared with the PCIE2 and PCIE4 slots.

Some users report that they do not notice an increase in performance using an NVMe SSD as the OS drive, compared to a SATA III SSD. That happens usually with older mother boards like yours. Windows boot time can be longer with an NVMe SSD than a SATA SSD, again on any board except the newest Intel boards. Users also report better performance using different NVMe drivers, but the results are inconsistent, some prefer the Microsoft NVMe driver, others say the Samsung NVMe driver is better.

Installing programs is faster with an NVMe SSD. It also depends upon what you do with your PC, if you will notice a performance improvement or not, and the other drives you use. It is difficult to predict how an NVMe SSD will perform in a PC, it depends upon many different factors. I cannot give you a perfect answer regarding performance.

bitac wrote: Mhmm, I'm using my PC a little bit for gaming, sometimes image editing but primarily for office stuff: usually I have lots of browser & PDF tabs open, a large thunderbird email acc and sometimes a few other different programms running... So if you say there possibly isn't a big noticable increase in performance with the NVMe SSD as OS drive compared to my Samsung EVO 850 SATA SSD, maybe I'll better just save the effort and money and leave it for the moment like it is...? So I understand it correctly that the bottleneck is the PCIe 2.0 Version? --> with the 3.0 Version there would be a more significant performance increase when switching to a M.2 NVMe OS SSD compared to a SATA OS SSD? :-)

I did say in an earlier post that the difference between using PCIe 2.0 x4 and PCIe 3.0 x4 will mostly be in the read speed for very large files. The difference will be about 500MB/s, but that will not cause a large overall performance difference.

For example, going from a standard SATA HDD disk drive, to a SATA SSD is a big difference in performance. But going from a SATA SSD to a PCIe NVMe SSD is not the same kind of performance difference or change in performance.

I just don't want you to be surprised or disappointed when the difference using an NVMe SSD is not a big difference than using a SATA SSD. The reason is, for a single user PC, the potential performance of an NVMe SSD is never used. We rarely if ever put a load on it that will show the difference in performance it has compared to a SATA SSD.

It's not a mistake to get an NVMe SSD, but it won't be a surprising difference in performance, given what we do with our PCs.