Purchase Samsung 950 Pro

To purchase the 950 Pro 512 GB click here: http://amzn.to/1NiyFz7
To purchase the 950 Pro 256 GB click here: http://amzn.to/1Niz2d2

If you do not have a x4 slot you may want to purchase this adapter:
To purchase the Addonics M.2 x4 Adapter click here: http://amzn.to/1IEJvCU

Why I Purchased an M.2 Drive

I’ve been using the same system for about 5 years now. I have an ASUS P6X58D-E mother board with an i7 X980 processor, 24 gigs of DDR3 RAM, two solid state drives, and a RAID 0 of three spinning disks, as well as a very nice video card.

Recently I decided to run my system performance juxtaposed to Adobe Premiere while I was working on project. I noticed that my RAID was hanging up every now and then. I also noticed my CPU was maxing out from time to time.

I went ahead and overclocked my CPU and it seems significantly better. But, I still felt the need to do something about my drives.

I’ve long thought about replacing my spinning RAID with a RAID of SSD’s. I started looking into it and I was amazed to find that M.2 has been out a little while now and just one of these could easily out-perform a RAID of SSD’s.

The M.2 used a PCI.E 3.0 slot. Intel makes one that fits in a x16 slot. Samsung’s performs even faster than the intel but it uses a x4 slot. My mother board is too old to have a x4 slot. However, I found a card made by Addonics adapter to fit a x4 m.2 onto a x16 slot!

My PCI slots are 2.0. I figured it would be backward compatible though because my video card is 3.0 and works fine. Sure, there’s a bottle neck there, but at least it works better than any other alternative. I’ve heard the M.2 drives getting 2500 MB/s sequential read/write speeds in a 3.0 slot. In a 2.0 slot like mine they only get 1,400. This is still 5 times faster than my SSD’s and RAID 0!

I’m very happy with this purchase! And I highly suggest anyone considering a faster drive go all in on this!