M.2 SSD or PCIe? For gaming rig

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It's build time again. My last build used the highly rated (at the time) 1TB Samsung pro SATA SSD. But it's too slow and mama is complaining.

I chose not to use the other styles of hard drive as they were still in their infancy then.

Need at least 2TB and preferably more. Need it fast too. Suggestions please!
 
how can that ssd be slow? you dont list the model.. what is the rest of the computer?


Theoretically you shouldnt notice much of a difference between the 32.99 256gb kingston to a 2000MB/S 970evo

Does the computer support nvme M.2 ?

FWIW I'd get a 970 EVO m.2
 
Storage space was the last real bottle neck of computers. Get the fastest technology you can afford. The only people who still prefer platter hard drives are broke guys living in their moms basement that bittorrent a million things they will never watch or listen to.
 
Originally Posted by skyactiv
Storage space was the last real bottle neck of computers. Get the fastest technology you can afford. The only people who still prefer platter hard drives are broke guys living in their moms basement that bittorrent a million things they will never watch or listen to.


I still prefer a HDD for storage. I have a 500GB Evo 860 SSD in our main PC, with a WD Black 2TB HDD for all of the big files, such as photos and videos. The OS (program files), download, documents, and video game files are all on the SSD, so the HDD doesn't see a ton of action on a daily basis, so I feel pretty safe with the HDD containing our more-precious files in the looooong term.

My laptop came with a 500 GB Evo 850 M.2 drive, with a Hitachi 1TB HDD

My wife has a single 1TB Evo 860 SSD

All are screaming fast

Granted, only my wife's laptop has started to fill up to capacity (she's not great about backing up...); whereas, our other SSDs are far from their 500GB capacity, as are the HDD's.
 
970 Pro NVME m.2 in 500GB+ size is without rival unless you want to spend over $1k on some of the fancy Intel stuff. Samsung 970 Pro

But, to get to 2TB in that method, you would need a different drive (970 Evo fits the bill), since "most" motherboards do not have two m.2 slots built in.

The 1TB 970 Pro should be used to house your games, and use your existing 1TB for all your other stuff. That's what I would do!
 
How could that drive be too slow ? I would check your SATA connections and make sure your getting a full 6 gbps- it might be downshifting or your sata adapter may not be rated at 6 gb, so check that. Samsung is still considered the class leader, but Western Digital SSD are very good, Intel is good but pricey, Crucial are decent. I am building a AMD rig for the wife-unit and elected to reuse the Samsung EVO 1 tb ssd to save money: her current Dell SATA only is rated for 1.5 gb so that is a bit of a bottleneck. One thing that has found its way to Windows PC is automatic tiered storage. AMD premium motherboards give you a license for StoreMi , where you combine SSD and rust disks in a single volume and let the software migrate your files based on frequency of usage. I am going to give that a try for her new system. StoreMi is a OEM version of enmotus Fuzedrive, which is available for Intel mb directly from enmotus. I have a similar solution on a Marvel storage controller and it works well.

Put a copy of Crystal Diskmark on your system and make sure your getting 400-500 MBps read throughput. If not, then something needs a tuneup
smile.gif
 
I have the same ssd cujet, with an i7 4790k, with 32gb ram. A beast when I built it. But, technology never stops. The 1TB 970 evo, in a 4x M2 slot is the ticket right now. I have an M2 slot on my Asus 97a, but only 2x speed. A complete upgrade including new 2080ti, is about $3500. I'll be waiting a while.
 
M.2 is just a form factor and physical connector definition.

An M.2 SSD can be either PCIe (NVMe) bus or SATAIII. A SATAIII M.2 SSD will usually disable a SATA port when populated.

Also, don't forget that a PCIe (NVMe) SSD will consume PCIe lanes so make sure your CPU supports enough PCIe lanes and that you have some available.

A NVMe SSD would provide the best performance. Some of the Samsung ones can hit 2000/1800 MB/sec read and write respectively.
 
Originally Posted by skyactiv
Storage space was the last real bottle neck of computers. Get the fastest technology you can afford. The only people who still prefer platter hard drives are broke guys living in their moms basement that bittorrent a million things they will never watch or listen to.

No I have 2TB of video from GoPro. I dont need SSD for that. I just have RAID 5 on a Adaptec 6805 card.
 
This reminds me of the old car adage: "How fast can I go? Well, how much money do you have?"

Existing SSD hits the limit of the SATA interface, hence PCIe 3.0.
The interface has overhead also, so the next jump is persistent memory.
For now, all I can do is read about it:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/07/persistent_memory_whirlwind_is_spinning_up/

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/30/samsung_launching_zssd_attack_on_intel_optane_drives/

...It says the [Samsung] SZ985 and [Intel] P4800X compete in the "premium SSD" market, defined as an SSD with more than 550,000 random read IOPS and latency lower than 20μs.
 
These days, if possible in the computer(and that's not really a question/problem in your build) I will always choose PCIe over SATA.

Most "cheap" SSDs these days will saturate a SATA III connection at least in sequential read(non-sequential read and all write operations are where drives start to show their differences).

If I were building...and for me the only thing I'd likely even "build" now would be another Mac Pro 5,1, I'd go with an Evo 970 NVMe drive in the largest size I could budget/afford(BTW, I know there's at least one other Mac Pro 5,1 user here-the latest firmware patch under macOS Mojave enabled full native support of NVMe).

With that said, I agree with others that you may have other issues if you Samsung Pro is slow. Yes, drives have improved in the last few years, but even low end SSDs still feel fairly fast to me in day-to-day use even when running at SATA II speeds. I'd make sure TRIM is operating properly, as that is one big thing that can really kill the performance of an SSD over time. I don't begin to know how to do it in Windows, but once you've made sure TRIM is enabled, there should be a way to do a mass force trim. In *nix systems, you generally boot into single user mode and run FSCK...I've worked on Macs where someone installed an SSD without enabling trim(it required a 3rd party tool for non-Apple SSDs up until very recently) and the drive had bogged down to worse than typical platter drive speeds. Enabling trim and then FSCKing it a few times brought the performance into line with where it should be.
 
Originally Posted by KrisZ
Since it's a gaming rig, an SSD running on SATA connection should not be a bottleneck for gaming.


That's just the point, the game plays fine, with no real glitches or video related problems. But when it's time to go to the next level/chapter/task, the SSD is the bottleneck as it takes too much time to load. The thing came to a loading crawl when the 1TB drive was full. A known problem with the Samsung.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted by Cujet
But when it's time to go to the next level/chapter/task, the SSD is the bottleneck as it takes too much time to load. The thing came to a loading crawl when the 1TB drive was full. A known problem with the Samsung.


It's always been the rule that you never let an SSD go above somewhere around 80% full. They must have free blocks to work correctly.
 
Originally Posted by Cujet
Originally Posted by KrisZ
Since it's a gaming rig, an SSD running on SATA connection should not be a bottleneck for gaming.


That's just the point, the game plays fine, with no real glitches or video related problems. But when it's time to go to the next level/chapter/task, the SSD is the bottleneck as it takes too much time to load. The thing came to a loading crawl when the 1TB drive was full. A known problem with the Samsung.

Not just Samsung, I mean you should leave EVERY drive with 15-20% free space.

Manage your space better and you'll have more acceptable results...which I guess would be the point of a 2TB drive. But is there a reason you're stuffing everything onto an SSD and not using a 2nd drive to store bulk data?
 
Your no-cost path to speed is to secure erase your current drive, reinstall OS and game, and continue, leaving a lot of free space.

Your next cheapest path to speed is buy another 1TB SSD and move some stuff to it (beginning with the swap space).

Next cheapest is to buy a 2TB SSD and migrate everything to it. Samsung has a free data migration tool (free if you use it with their SSD). This will probably be better I/O than the above. Your 1TB SSD is probably out of free blocks and is struggling to create free blocks every time you write a page. It's having to do a read, erase, write.
 
Originally Posted by spackard
Your no-cost path to speed is to secure erase your current drive, reinstall OS and game, and continue, leaving a lot of free space.

Your next cheapest path to speed is buy another 1TB SSD and move some stuff to it (beginning with the swap space).

Next cheapest is to buy a 2TB SSD and migrate everything to it. Samsung has a free data migration tool (free if you use it with their SSD). This will probably be better I/O than the above. Your 1TB SSD is probably out of free blocks and is struggling to create free blocks every time you write a page. It's having to do a read, erase, write.


Samsung Magician was awesome for the three transfers I performed using it. It also makes over-provisioning very easy to do!
 
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