SSD placement

[telepman]

Hello,

I'll be buying an AM5 board and the one thing I can't figure out is would it be ok to place an SSD below the graphics card. The board I'm eyeing is MSI X670E Tomahawk, which has a PCIE 5 m.2 slot above the graphics slot and 2 PCIE 4 m.2 slots below it. Right now I have 970 Evo plus so when I buy a gen 4 or gen 5 SSD the 970 Evo will go to the slower slot, but is the heatsink provided enough to keep the temps low enough? Like, can it prevent throttling? I have 7800XT which pulls close to 300W, so it must be pretty hot down there.

 

[EarthDog]

I know the GPU may be 300W, but are you transferring large files while (what I presume to be) gaming? I wouldn't worry about it too much unless you frequently transfer large files, especially while the GPU is under significant load.

You should be fine.

 

[mackerel]

As long as the case has good airflow around the GPU it'll be fine. Basically the air temperature will be far below the GPU temperature if fresh cooler air is getting to that area.

Saying that, I did manage to cook a SSD that way because I didn't check airflow. Left GPU running continuously until the OS died. File errors all over the SSD, which could be fixed by wiping it. When I later checked logged peak temp was about 10C above its rated max. Oops.

 

[telepman]

I do have 2 14cm intake fans at 1000rpm that came with the case (Define R5) and 1 Noctua NF-A14 pwm as exaust, so I guess I'm good. I'm mostly gaming, and I still have 2 250GB sata SSD's that I use for downloads and pagefile. I'd buy a 2TB sata SSD if I could find one with good TBW warranty, but whatever. I'm surprised that there is almost no info available about m.2 SSD placement, temperature tests, etc. since m.2 is so popular now.

 

[EarthDog]

I'm mostly gaming,

Generally, you aren't beating on the drive during that so it won't throttle.

and I still have 2 250GB sata SSD's that I use for downloads and pagefile.

Why is the pagefile not on C:\ drive? Long gone are the days where moving your pagefile matters (platters/HDDs). Let that thing sit on your OS drive (presumably your fastest drive). Zero point moving it. If you're worried about space/growth, set a static size (mine is at 2GB).

I'd buy a 2TB sata SSD if I could find one with good TBW warranty, but whatever.

What does this mean? What are you looking for/is a good warrnty for you? Most modern, quality drives are 5 years and 1,200 TBW......... which you won't come close to over your lifetime, nonetheless the life cycle of the product.

 

[telepman]

Generally, you aren't beating on the drive during that so it won't throttle.


Why is the pagefile not on C:\ drive? Long gone are the days where moving your pagefile matters (platters/HDDs). Let that thing sit on your OS drive (presumably your fastest drive). Zero point moving it.


What does this mean? What are you looking for/is a good warrnty for you? Most modern, quality drives are 5 years and 1,200 TBW......... which you won't come close to over your lifetime, nonetheless the life cycle of the product.

Maybe I'm being too conservative, but I wanted the m.2 drive to last me as long as possible, so to have less data written on it I moved the pagefile to the Kingston sata drive I had laying around.
As for warranty, 600tbw per 1tb sounds good to me. Now that I googled it I see Samsung offers it for 870 Evo, so I it's definitely an option, although in my country it's priced the same as 970 Evo+.

 

[EarthDog]

Maybe I'm being too conservative,

Writes on SSDs haven't been an issue for 99.99% of home users for several generations of drives. Feel free to keep it on C:\your fastest drive without worry. You'll upgrade the device before writes take it out.

 

[Kenrou]

I've been using a 960 Evo 1tb for games and torrents for almost 4 years to the day, and Samsung Magician says it's still at 95%, you'll be fine

 

[mackerel]

Different people might have different usage profiles but if it helps to reassure, following are some SSDs and my usage history on them:
Samsung SM951 512GB: Bought 2015 for my then main system 6700k build. Main OS drive and general use. Can't find a rated endurance for it, but I've logged 72 DW on it which is nothing on a MLC drive.
Samsung PM951 256GB: Bought July 2017. Used as OS drive in my dedicated VR system. 97% life remaining.
Optane 900p 280GB: Bought November 2017. Main OS drive in my 8086k main system replacing the 6700k system. 97% remaining.
Samsung 980 Pro 2TB: Bought May 2021. Was boot+game drive on my TV connected system until I moved it to OS drive on my current daily driver which does everything. 98% life remaining.
Crucial MX500 1TB: I own several of these so I can't be sure how old this specific one is. Game/video editing storage. 99% life remaining.

Original drive use cases as listed above. They are now used as secondary storage in my main system apart from the 980 Pro which is the main OS and general drive.

 

[Woomack]

Just a quick answer to the main question. If you use a 2-3 slot and a higher wattage graphics card, then Install the main/OS/game M.2 SSD above the graphics card. If you install it below and under a large graphics card heatsink, then the graphics card will heat up the SSD and expect throttling during higher activity. There are exceptions, but mainly DRAM-less SSDs.

About TBW. In the last months, I replaced 2x MX500 1TB SSD in the client's small server. Both had 20% life left after working 24/7 for over 3 years (SQL server and some other stuff). You can't come even close to that in a gaming PC.

 

[Evilsizer]

reading this thread reminded me of this video from linus

 

[Woomack]

I wasn't watching the video, but in general, it's the same as with the OS ... all important data lands in RAM, so we mainly see the difference while loading all the data - in short, the most important is the reading speed and random low queue reading. Once everything is loaded, then it doesn't matter so much. However, there are games that load something quite often and usually smaller files. Since low queue random read isn't so much different between various (at least faster series) SSDs, it doesn't really matter what SSD is in use. You can live with a couple of seconds more while loading the game. However, when SSD is throttling, it sometimes limits the performance a lot and gets "hiccups" while reading. In most cases, throttling causes a 10-20% performance drop. Sometimes, it causes SSD to act weird.

 

[Evilsizer]

I wasn't watching the video, but in general, it's the same as with the OS ... all important data lands in RAM, so we mainly see the difference while loading all the data - in short, the most important is the reading speed and random low queue reading. Once everything is loaded, then it doesn't matter so much. However, there are games that load something quite often and usually smaller files. Since low queue random read isn't so much different between various (at least faster series) SSDs, it doesn't really matter what SSD is in use. You can live with a couple of seconds more while loading the game. However, when SSD is throttling, it sometimes limits the performance a lot and gets "hiccups" while reading. In most cases, throttling causes a 10-20% performance drop. Sometimes, it causes SSD to act weird.

right and the people in that video thought the SATA drive was the faster ones. i thought this might be due to ACHI calls, granted i do not now how the others work. could the achi calls make the sata drive seem faster vs the others? it was more about day to day usage and gaming comparison. not a heavy work load user comparison.

 

[Woomack]

right and the people in that video thought the SATA drive was the faster ones. i thought this might be due to ACHI calls, granted i do not now how the others work. could the achi calls make the sata drive seem faster vs the others? it was more about day to day usage and gaming comparison. not a heavy work load user comparison.

Higher series M.2 SSDs have lower access time, 2x higher low queue random read (like for single-threaded operations), faster cache, and are directly linked to PCIe, so there is no other "gate" like in SATA. Unless someone is using an M.2 SSD that can have faulty firmware, then there is no way that SATA is faster.
What is somehow true is that top speed and the most expensive SSDs are advertised as the best for gaming, and they're not really faster than some cheap series. New budget DRAM-less but still gaming series are pretty much the same as the highest series.

 

[magellan]

I had a Crucial MX200 M.2 SATA SSD that I put right underneath my overclocked 1080ti that I used for readyboost and my swapfile under Windows 7. Within a year the SSD was dead. Since my only M.2/NVME slot was right underneath the 1080ti I ended up selling the RMA'd MX200. I'll never put a M.2 NVME SSD underneath a GPU again. I don't see how it's possible to get any airflow over something underneath a large, high power GPU (and I had two 127mm fans strapped to my 1080ti).

 

[Woomack]

I had a Crucial MX200 M.2 SATA SSD that I put right underneath my overclocked 1080ti that I used for readyboost and my swapfile under Windows 7. Within a year the SSD was dead. Since my only M.2/NVME slot was right underneath the 1080ti I ended up selling the RMA'd MX200. I'll never put a M.2 NVME SSD underneath a GPU again. I don't see how it's possible to get any airflow over something underneath a large, high power GPU (and I had two 127mm fans strapped to my 1080ti).

The same story is with some sandwich-type M.2 heatsinks on ITX mobos. 2x higher series M.2 SSD on Strix Z690-I Gaming or MSI Z590I Unify = 70°C+ for most of the time (so throttling for most of the time). If the heat is the issue, I recommend using DRAM-less SSD with Maxio controllers. They run at ~40°C and up to 50°C under extended load. I mean something like Predator GM7, TeamGroup MP44, and some more. They still go up to 7.4GB/s and have pretty good random bandwidth. Patriot VP4300 Lite was on sale recently. It also runs like a high series PCIe 4.0x4 SSD and is DRAM-less / able to go up to 50°C with no heatsink.
From the new series, I recommend the Crucial T500 as it runs cool and is pretty much a top-performing M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD. I said earlier, but it performs better than the PCIe 5.0 10GB/s SSD and slightly worse than the PCIe 5.0 12GB/s series. I mean in general usage, gaming, and random operations. It's worse in peak sequential read/write, but it doesn't matter much as it barely ever occurs out of synthetic benchmarks.