Humour me, 'Fast' PCI-E 4.0 M.2 Drives...

[keef247]

Right so TLDR, building my first rig since a 2008 era q66 stepping 1st gen quad core... I've had mac's since but all are circa 2008-2012 retrofitted with sata3 ssd's... This will be my first 'modern' pc with a m.2...

I've got a B550m pci-e 4.0 m.2 motherboard...

Now I was going to splash out on either a 2 or 4tb 7300/6800mb/s 'fast' m.2 drive for it... This rig will ONLY be turned on for gaming, nothing else.

I thought sweet it'll boot super fast and loading times in games should be rather snappy - now I've recently heard this isn't the case?

Am I better off just getting a 3500mb/sec m.2 instead and saving myself a third or more off the price? The price doesn't bother me but I would be VERY angry if I literally don't gain anything and think I have when I could of just got a 'slower' m.2?

Any feedback is welcomed!

Ta!

[DanceswithUnix]

There is a difference, just not massive.

The change from hard drive to SSD is huge.
SATA to M.2 is noticeable but not all that great. I just upgraded my Linux work drive from SATA to M.2, but only because I needed the space.
I can just about feel a fast vs slow M.2 drive, it's pretty subtle.

But you will only gain in loading times at start and between levels. Once the game is running it is in ram, unless you didn't buy enough ram

So maybe that's the basis of what you heard. There should be zero difference in frames per second once the game is running. How much the loading time jars on your gaming experience will decide on whether you want to spend the extra.

I've got WD Black 750 and 770 drives in this home machine now. My old motherboard means I'm not getting the full speed out of the 770, but they are still quite fast enough for me.

[keef247]

I was planning on getting the m.2 next month when funds allow and the rest of the build end of this month, so I could just borrow one of my sata3 ssd's for ze time being till end of next month...

So you can safely say I won't loose any performance/fps playing for a month with a sata3 then?

So would you bother going for a 7XXXmb/s m.2 or just go for a 4500mb/sec cheaper m.2?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would get a decent TLC drive with DRAM cache. It's quite clear that some of the "badly optimised" recent AAA UE4 based titles,are using huge amounts of VRAM,because they were designed with the very fast SSDs in consoles in mind. I suspect the SSDs are used as a dynamic VRAM buffer,and it will be on MS to try and improve SSD integration on PC.

But,when it comes to speed - get a drive which shows consistent read/write performance(large buffer) and does not overheat very quickly. I would take an SSD which has longer term consistency over one which is quick for a shorter period and overheats,or runs out of steam.

[MrJim]

I've got PCI4 & PCI3 nvme M.2 SSDs as well as SATA3 SSDs in my system, & I must admit I'm hard pressed to tell the difference between them in terms of speed. But then I'm not doing any workloads that really hammer them in terms of reads & writes. DRAMless SSDs do tend to slow down a lot if they're doing lots of heavy writes, & likewise, drive endurance might be important to you under similar circumstances. These days I tend to go for capacity over outright performance when looking for an SSD, up to a point.

[AGTDenton]

So would you bother going for a 7XXXmb/s m.2 or just go for a 4500mb/sec cheaper m.2?

I would go for long life, warranty & a reliable brand over top speed.
The faster you go the more cooling you might require.

My PCIe 4 NVME runs at 10c higher than my PCIe 3 NVME on load - but well within acceptable limits, but that could be wildly different depending on overall case & cooling design.
And in reality, I don't notice any speed difference between them. Not to mention PCIe 3 should be cheaper.

[keef247]

Cheers guys, I might just get 2x2tb pci-e 4.0 fast ones as that's still cheaper than a single 4tb fast boi. and then I can hackintosh the 2nd drive being all amd haha. We know I love a mac/hackintosh.

[Percy1983]

Personally I am running 3.0 drives on a 4.0 board but at the time of purchase the price difference was massive, if buying now I wouldn't strictly get one or the other. Having a quick look at the crucial P3 vs P3 plus I would take the plus as its a small premium with a small potential advantage. Likewise not worth my time/money to 'upgrade'.

But I would take a 3.0 with dram over a dram less 4.0 etc if buying now.

[DanceswithUnix]

I was planning on getting the m.2 next month when funds allow and the rest of the build end of this month, so I could just borrow one of my sata3 ssd's for ze time being till end of next month...

So you can safely say I won't loose any performance/fps playing for a month with a sata3 then?

So would you bother going for a 7XXXmb/s m.2 or just go for a 4500mb/sec cheaper m.2?

If it's SATA vs not playing, then SATA every time But in your shoes I would partly give the SATA drive a go to see what the worst case SSD was like to play with. It should be fine.

I went for a slower 2TB drive vs a screaming fast 1TB drive. The size is more useful to me than saving half a second on loading, and the price difference wasn't so great.

Cat has a point that games optimised for the latest consoles may be expecting to grab textures off SSD. But as we are on a PC, we get more ram to smooth things. More VRAM on the GPU means it doesn't need to swap textures so much. More system ram means the OS can provide some of the textures from cache rather than having to hit the storage.

But, fundamentally, 4500MB/s isn't slow and there are bargains to be had out there. I recently built a PC for my mum. She's surfing facebook and playing Wordle with a 1TB WD SN770 because it really wasn't significantly different in price to a much slower drive!

[Saracen999]

... She's surfing facebook and playing Wordle with a 1TB WD SN770 because it really wasn't significantly different in price to a much slower drive!

And therein lies the aspect of 'performance' that I find so damn hard to get my bonce round. So, so much depends on what you're doing.

I remember having the "speed v. size (capacity)" argument years years ago when SSDs first came out, and people were buying very expensive (per GB) 40GB(-ish) drives "because it boots so much faster". And if you're an engineer or system builder/tester and are rebooting all day long, then great. But I turned my PC on first thing, went and made a coffee, came back about 5 minutes later and the PC was booted, waiting. Did it take 2.5 minutes as opposed to 12 seconds? Dunno, but probably. How much of MY time would the SSD save? None, on boot. And on that machine, all I did really was basic WP, accounting, and a bit of browsing the web. The CPU was sitting in idle probably 98% of the time, and the HD was laying at it's feet, snoozing, like a dog in front of a nice fireplace.

It's the same logic now. How fast is an SSD? Read or write? Sequential or random access? Large fies or small files? Volume of data larger or smaller than cache? Is there any cash. Even on gaming, what type of ganing, where are the bottlenecks and for how long? Eliminatng a 0.5 seond delay once every 30 minutes is going to make, in real terms, about 0.000003% difference to your productibity, if than, and I'd guess will be barely detectable even in most games.

And I'm supposed to be able to determine which drive to buy based on spec sheets? Not a prayer.

I'm currently looking at a medest-spec (PCIe 4) 4TB drive at about half the price of the really fast drives. Well first, the laptop it's for s PCIe 4 itself, s a PCIe 5 drive is pointless (unless it's moved to a 5th Gen machne later) but compared to similarly priced faster drives of half the capacity, I'm kinda thinking "4TB in the hand now, versus 2TB in the bush, later", if I can mangle a metaphor.

Horses for courses, always.

Of course, money no object, okay, buy the biggest, bestest, fastestest everything. But not many of us can, and not feel the wallet-pain.

[cptwhite_uk]

One of my best PC upgrades so far has been the first SSD I ever bought, a 60Gb Intel. It wasn't just about boot time, but more about general system responsiveness. It made a massive difference, like I'd justed skipped 1 or 2 generations ahead with the general performance of the PC. It cost £180 and I had no regrets.

The situation is different now though. Going from a 2.5" SSD to even the fastest NVME - Lets say 7000Mb/s, yes it's noticable, but in practise the time saved is marginal in general use.

3500 Mb/s is perfect acceptable for all systems (high end Gen 3 / mainsteam Gen 4)
5000 Mb/s is probably where you'll find the sweet spot for price/performance (upper mid end Gen 4)
7000 Mb/s is the current mainsteam high end, and you'll pay 50% more for it (high end Gen 4)
10,000+ Mb/s is the current gold standard (Gen 5)

[Saracen999]

One of my best PC upgrades so far has been the first SSD I ever bought, a 60Gb Intel. It wasn't just about boot time, but more about general system responsiveness. It made a massive difference, like I'd justed skipped 1 or 2 generations ahead with the general performance of the PC. It cost £180 and I had no regrets.

....

Oh sure. I wasn't suggesting there was no point to the early SSDs. Lots of things were .... snappier. Responsive, as you say.

My point was more that given what I was doing, they made no sense, nt at that price/MB. For instance, much of my work back hen was rviewing stuff (on another machine). The system I was talking about, other than for boot, was largely for writing up the reviews. i.e. text entry. Also, running my accounts software, which was never demanding. And if entering text, it was 'think, type, think a bit more, type' etc, none of which benefitted from snappiness because by far the slowest bit was me.

On another system, much more was going on, including Photoshop (or earlier equivalent like Micrografx Picture Publisher), and a lot of scanning, at up to A3. On that machine, fie sizes wee such that i needed capacity more than otherall resposiveness. Ideal would have been HD capacity and SSD performance, but at HD or near-HD prices. Now, we're fetting much closer but still, even a cheap 4TB SSD isn't much different in cst to a 12TB or even 18TB HD. I have 48TB in my NAS (about 35TB space) and doing that, no, for my home machine in SSD is still a non-starter in SSD, but most of my machines do have more modest SSDs, and they dropped even more in price/TB over the last year or so, largely.

Horses for courses, still. Just different horses, and different courses.

[keef247]

If it's SATA vs not playing, then SATA every time But in your shoes I would partly give the SATA drive a go to see what the worst case SSD was like to play with. It should be fine.

I went for a slower 2TB drive vs a screaming fast 1TB drive. The size is more useful to me than saving half a second on loading, and the price difference wasn't so great.

Cat has a point that games optimised for the latest consoles may be expecting to grab textures off SSD. But as we are on a PC, we get more ram to smooth things. More VRAM on the GPU means it doesn't need to swap textures so much. More system ram means the OS can provide some of the textures from cache rather than having to hit the storage.

But, fundamentally, 4500MB/s isn't slow and there are bargains to be had out there. I recently built a PC for my mum. She's surfing facebook and playing Wordle with a 1TB WD SN770 because it really wasn't significantly different in price to a much slower drive!

Yeah I can get the system a month early if I borrow one of my current sata3 drives for a month then get the m.2 pci-e 4 drive next month...
So will see what the crack is, might as you say just go for something around 4500mb/s but the extra in price doesn't bother me too much I'm more just after the capacity like you say if it's not going to be noticeable above that read/write speed gaming.

As that's all this will be used for, I have macs for everything else.

[Percy1983]

Seems the Crucial P3 Plus 4TB can be had for around £200 at the minute, looks great for the money.

[keef247]

Nice one mate, just found that... Hopefully it's still that price end of next month then I'll grab one

[DanceswithUnix]

Dug out a couple of graphs from ssdreview

Note the SN570 is a pretty cheap drive. PCIe3 only and rated about 3500MB/s
Now I think they've been sloppy here and mixed results from two different review PCs. But even with that advantage the Crucial T700 which is rated as a read speed of 12400MB/s doesn't even manage half the loading time.