I was wondering if I would notice the difference between the nvme and sata on a daily basis for gaming web surfing & running a few vm's? The reason I ask for is I can get a regular sata m.2 for $115 or an nvme $135 which is supposed to have a fancy new Phison E12/Toshiba TLC controller. I'm not even sure what that is but its supposed to be good.
Last edited by rob4001; 01-03-2020 at 11:43 PM.
I've just gone from an 850 Evo to a 970 Evo Plus, not really any difference in day to day use, I was expecting a similar jump to going from a spinner to an SSD but despite the 970 being several times faster, its just not..
If you are running VMs then you might be hitting storage hard enough to feel a benefit from NVMe, or at least when memory starts getting tight. But even then it probably won't be huge.
I did the same. I found uncached speed was a bit better with the 970+, but if your workload was predictable the RAM cache of the 850 more than made up for it (in benchmarks it would often beat the 970+).Originally Posted by [GSV]Trig
$20 over the life of the hardware isnt much, that alone would sway me to the nvme.
Save your money, I noticed no difference going from a Samsung Evo to an Evo 970 Nvme.
Jon
These differences will be most noticeable in sequential read write, like if you save/edit/transfer single files of 20GB each which I sometimes have. However for transfer that also depends on the speed of the media being transferred to/from.
Go with marginal cost thinking as previously said, Nvme will likely be more future proof.
I could tell the difference between an evo 860 and a Evo 970 plus or whatever it is called. But it was just a bit more quicker at booting and opening programs like SPSS and MATLAB which tend to take a while to launch
I don't think we will have something like HDD to SSD unless a new tech comes out which matches RAM speeds. Where SSD's were 10x quicker where it mattered i.e. 4k reads and writes.
About 8 years ago I use to run Windows 7 in a RAM disk and it was like going from HDD to SSD. Back then I found the RAM disk software by soft perfect to be by far the quickest in 4k tests. An nvme drive would have been good for loading that. If you have access to 64GB of RAM I highly recommend having a play to see the difference.
Optane and similar already gets us close to that, but doesn't seem to be really making waves beyond "heck that's expensive". Expensive shouldn't really be a barrier either, going from cassette tape to floppy drive on my Dragon 64 back in the day was amazing but for most users the cost was prohibitive (I was lucky, someone gave be a broken drive that I could repair). Then going from floppy to HDD was similarly expensive at first and yet we all wanted one because it meant we didn't need to change floppies all the time. Since the floppy to hdd upgrade it seems quite evolutionary just going a bit faster and a bit bigger.
I am happily living without Optane, I *could* live without SSD but would rather not, I couldn't go back to stuffing floppies in floppy drives. So I suspect the way that NVMe scales with upgrades to the underlying PCIe bus that they use should mean the standard will be enough for most people for a long time.
... and having said that I am tempted to go get the Dragon out of the loft and see if I can find any cassettes that work (and if I can make it talk to a modern TV through that composite TV interface). I think I have some ROM cartridge games, now that's an 80's storage tech that still makes sense!
When I have to use a computer with a HDD it doesn't feel like living nowadays. At work they buy iMacs for those that want them but they get ones with fusion drives. They are horrible for how much they cost, especially in Windows as then it can't use the ssd cache I believe.
I haven't looked optane up for ages but I believe the 4k reads and writes were only about 100 to 200 MB/s, so better than an SSD but no where near ram which is well over 1000 MB/s in a RAM disk. Are there far better optane drives now?
A quick search brings up this RAM drive example.
https://forums.tomshardware.com/thre...stion.1462708/
We had a Dragon 32 as our first computer, we had one game which came on cartridge which loaded instantly. I remember thinking for years after, why was our old computer better than much newer ones. When lockdown is finished I will have to see if it still works. Good times.
Depending on what you're doing, you may or may not perceive a difference. It's easy to show the difference in benchmarks, or with a stopwatch for some things, but perception is another matter. Storage is so often not the limiting factor nowadays.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/s...me-ssd/13.html
https://techreport.com/review/33950/...-ssd-reviewed/ (scroll to boot/load times)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA
If its for games,I only saw one situation where there was a slight difference,which was hypermodded Fallout 4 with 200+ mods and 4K textures,and that is because peak reads nearly hit 900MB/S at some points. But in gameplay it was only barely noticeable. For image editing including mass RAW conversions to jpgs(tens of gigabytes of pictures),my SATA SSD was not fully taxed let alone my NVME one.
That is the problem with NVME SSDs in general,they really only shine over SATA SSDs when it comes to sequential read/write operations,but one of the biggest improvements with SSDs,is random access. In fact I would argue,what is more useful is the size of the buffer in the SSD and how good write caching works. There are instances QLC NVME drives actually end up performing worse than decent SATA SSDs in sustained operations.
Optane was always supposed to be available in DDR4 compatible sticks that go straight into the motherboard RAM slots. Write performance sucks compared to ram, but no reason why read speeds shouldn't reach parity (or possibly exceed it, DRAM has refresh cycles and destructive reads to work around).
I think part of the problem with hard drives is that programmers are expecting the user to have an SSD these days, and just throw everything at storage at the same time. So rather than avoiding thrashing a HDD to optimise performance you instead maximise threads and just expect storage to keep up with reading and writing to many files or parts of a file at the same time in a way that 10 years ago would have had you labelled as an incompetent programmer. So spinning rust should be more usable than it is, but clearly the world has moved on and they are best avoided.
TBH they got me with the M.2 form factor, and once you are going that route the cost of NVMe vs SATA seems insignificant. It doesn't seem that long ago that I had a full height 5.25in HDD in my system (so the size of two DVD drives, and it was probably 20 years ago) and now I can get more storage than that in something the size of half a stick of chewing gum and no cables to go wrong or mess up airflow.
Last edited by DanceswithUnix; 19-04-2020 at 10:03 AM.
The M2 form factor is actually not that great for NVME drives due to heat,so its more likely to throttle.But not all NVME drives are made alike,so a poor QLC NVME drive is actually going to be worse in sustained transfers than a decent SATA SSD for example. The problem is people look at headline figures,when sustained performance is what you need to look at.
It doesn't help that on many motherboards, the NVMe slot is right under the graphics card, soaking up heat from it.
My mini-ITX one does that,but the other slot is under the motherboard,which means no heatsink or airflow. I don't use it as a result!
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