Choosing the Right SSD for a Skylake-U System

Our Skylake NUC review had a brief section on the storage subsystem performance. The comments section raised a few questions about the inability of SSDs such as the Samsung SSD 950 PRO to achieve maximum performance in the NUC. After some discussion with Intel, we discovered some interesting aspects in the design of Skylake-U systems that have a bearing on the performance of some M.2 PCIe SSDs. These can affect the consumer's choice of SSDs for a Skylake-U system – be it a NUC or an user-upgradeable notebook. In this article, we quantitatively explore various M.2 SSD options for the Skylake NUC. This will help readers in choosing the right SSD that fits their use-case requirements and budgets.