Should I buy SSD for this rig ?

[R1S8K]

Hi,

For my rig, is it worth buying nvme ssd like the:

1. WD Blue SN550 1TB NVMe Internal SSD - Gen3 x4 PCIe 8Gb/s
https://www.amazon.com/Blue-SN550-1...sd&qid=1586485473&sprefix=1tb,aps,364&sr=8-19

Or buy a sata iii ssd like:
2. WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB Internal PC SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s
https://www.amazon.com/Blue-NAND-1T...qid=1586484845&sprefix=wd+blue,aps,314&sr=8-2


Would my motherboard support the speed of the nvme ssd ?

 

[Zerileous]

Assuming this is for the rig in your signature. The G1.Sniper Z97 (rev. 1.x) does not support m.2 interface. You want a 2.5" SATA drive like the second one you linked. Your system will feel like a brand new machine compared to your HDDs.

To clarify M.2 is a form factor (usually long, skinny board that slots directly into the motherboard). 2.5" is another form factor. M.2 form factor drives can either be SATA or NVMe interface. 2.5" drives are generally only SATA (although other interfaces exist, NVMe is not one of them, and the others are pretty niche).

Regarding NVMe vs SATA, the difference in speed is really only noticeable for large files like 4k or 8k video, so unless you're editing those files it won't have a significant impact on performance. If you do believe that you need the extra speed of NVMe, you can get a PCIe add in card to support those drives.

 

[R1S8K]

Yeah that's what I meant.

I mean the nvme with the adapter vs the sata ssd ?

The price is the same between the two drives + the adapter for nvme which I can find for like 15-20$

But my question, can the motherboard through the pcie adapter get the full speed of that nvme ssd ?

If yes, then 2400Mb/s is of course better than 560Mb/s.

 

[Zerileous]

But it's not really better because the CPU/RAM still has to process those transfers, so as I said, unless 4k/8k video is being used, it wont actually reach a meaningful speed difference.

From the Gigabyte website specifications:

1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCIEX16)
* For optimum performance, if only one PCI Express graphics card is to be installed, be sure to install it in the PCIEX16 slot.

1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x8 (PCIEX8)
* The PCIEX8 slot shares bandwidth with the PCIEX16 slot. When the PCIEX8 slot is populated, the PCIEX16 slot will operate at up to x8 mode.
(All PCI Express x16 slots conform to PCI Express 3.0 standard.)

3 x PCI Express x1 slots
(All PCI Express x1 slots conform to PCI Express 2.0 standard.)

So so if you use the x16 slot you're GPU will go down to 8 lanes at 3.0, and the adapter will be 8 lanes at 3.0. That will be able to handle the bandwidth of the drive. If you use one of the PCIe 2.0 x1 slots no, it will not be any faster than SATA. I can't comment on the specific adapter that you are referring to because you didn't link to it. Mileage may vary. For example this PCIe 3.0x4 card, if placed in your second PCIe x16 slot, and if it performs as advertised, will support the speed of the drive: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082D6RF6S. On the other hand, a card like this PCIe 3.0x1 placed in one of the PCIe 2.0x1 slots on your board will not provide any benefit. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082D6RF6S

 

[dejo]

I personally would still go the route of the m.2 with a carrrier card. That would leave you a better upgrade path in the future

 

[R1S8K]

But it's not really better because the CPU/RAM still has to process those transfers, so as I said, unless 4k/8k video is being used, it wont actually reach a meaningful speed difference.

From the Gigabyte website specifications:


So so if you use the x16 slot you're GPU will go down to 8 lanes at 3.0, and the adapter will be 8 lanes at 3.0. That will be able to handle the bandwidth of the drive. If you use one of the PCIe 2.0 x1 slots no, it will not be any faster than SATA. I can't comment on the specific adapter that you are referring to because you didn't link to it. Mileage may vary. For example this PCIe 3.0x4 card, if placed in your second PCIe x16 slot, and if it performs as advertised, will support the speed of the drive: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082D6RF6S. On the other hand, a card like this PCIe 3.0x1 placed in one of the PCIe 2.0x1 slots on your board will not provide any benefit. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082D6RF6S

Yeah I was searching for videos on YouTube that talks about running nvme ssd on 2.0 vs 3.0. I don't know if I have found any clear results.

But I found this video, it doesn't talk about pcie 2.0 but it even clears that sata ssd in performance isn't that different than ssd on 3.0 slot !!

But it's a compromising decision whether to go with nvme + adapter vs sata ssd.

With the nvme running on 2.0 slot and splitting the bandwidth to 8x for gpu and 8x for the ssd

vs

getting sata ssd and keeping the 16x bandwidth for my 1070 ti

that would be my last decision breaker.

I personally would still go the route of the m.2 with a carrrier card. That would leave you a better upgrade path in the future

Yeah .. hmm you're right. The idea that I would upgrade the rig in the near future !! I don't know, as long as the 4770k + 1070 ti and the rest of stuff are doing so well. My gaming is beautiful, the boot times of games and other things are ok I don't think much of that.

But what drove me to think of upgrading the rig's boot drive is that I bought a new laptop that has an m.2 ssd with of course DDR4 RAMs.

But I was really impressed with the boot time !!

So I thought .. could I really improve my rig too ?!

 

[HankB]

FWIW, I have an NVME card in a Z87 motherboard (in my sig) and it gets similar speed to what is capable in a motherboard M.2 NVME slot. I can even boot from it. Can't comment on the "feel" relative to a SATA SSD. It's several times faster (with a fast NVME SSD) than is possible with a SATA SSD in benchmarks.

 

[dejo]

FWIW, I have an NVME card in a Z87 motherboard (in my sig) and it gets similar speed to what is capable in a motherboard M.2 NVME slot. I can even boot from it. Can't comment on the "feel" relative to a SATA SSD. It's several times faster (with a fast NVME SSD) than is possible with a SATA SSD in benchmarks.

I can boot my p67 2600k with a carrier card. Not sure if that is because of the samsung 950 pro nvme that I use. Some nvme drives I have require a clover boot usb to boot

 

[R1S8K]

FWIW, I have an NVME card in a Z87 motherboard (in my sig) and it gets similar speed to what is capable in a motherboard M.2 NVME slot. I can even boot from it. Can't comment on the "feel" relative to a SATA SSD. It's several times faster (with a fast NVME SSD) than is possible with a SATA SSD in benchmarks.

You can boot from it ! You mean that booting from carrier card isn't a typical thing ? That it could have issues ?

I can boot my p67 2600k with a carrier card. Not sure if that is because of the samsung 950 pro nvme that I use. Some nvme drives I have require a clover boot usb to boot

Well ! I'm really don't have much of an idea of I want to buy. I thought that a carrier card and a nvme ssd should work without any problems. Should I worry of boot issues ? Because I want this ssd as boot drive and carries the important apps but not the games.

 

[dejo]

some of the z97 boards came with m.2 slots. so they are bootable natively, and would expect no issues at all in booting from an m.2 based storage. The z97 boards that I have with m.2 were limited to pcie x2 speeds- still substantially better than sata for absolute speeds. What I can say is that even a cheap sata ssd is faster booting than any hdd that I have used, and in boot times is similar to m.2 boot speeds. If boot speeds are you desires, any ssd will be close. If you use large files- I could see having some benefit to m.2. My thoughts are that m.2 are smaller and require no wiring and are the best current protocol we have- so would guess the most future proof interface you can use

 

[Zerileous]

I wouldn't worry about the x8 harming your GPU performance https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2488-pci-e-3-x8-vs-x16-performance-impact-on-gpus.

TBH the card seems like a lot of hassle for the same effective performance, but if you want to go for it, then try it.

 

[caddi daddi]

My 2 cents,
#1, the only time you will see anything in nvme drives is in boot times and video editing, for most of us it's just bling, and that's fine, as long as we understand it's just bling.

 

[HankB]

I can boot my p67 2600k with a carrier card. Not sure if that is because of the samsung 950 pro nvme that I use. Some nvme drives I have require a clover boot usb to boot

I'm surprised by that, but I was also surprised that I could boot my Z87 based system from an NVME drive in a PCI-E adapter card.

You can boot from it ! You mean that booting from carrier card isn't a typical thing ? That it could have issues ?.

My understanding is that booting from an NVME drive in an adapter card in a Z87 system is not supported. I put a card in that system (swapped out of a laptop and bootable, of course) and the Z87 system happily booted from it. I even went so far as to disconnect all SATA drives just to verify it could boot from the NVME drive alone and it did. I believe that booting from NVME on Z97 is supported but if that's an issue, it might be worth looking into further.

 

[R1S8K]

I'm a bit afraid of the m.2 version as my first experience with it from my Dell gaming laptop i7559 that has a 256GB m.2 that came with it.



then within a short time that ssd failed so I had the idea that these devices are prone to fail anytime.

then I bought a seagate hdd and also my other hdd in my rig also are good.

I encountered some issues with my 1st WD blue HDD when I built my gaming rig but the HDD didn't got failed 100% and I was able to install a new windows in it and it still rocks.

 

[R1S8K]

OK, I think this would be a good upgrade than the current 3.5" 1TB WD blue 7200rpm HDD.




Still not sure but I don't want to compromise any gpu speed even tests showed that there aren't that significant drop in performance and this point also drives me to think about the nvme again.

So I may in the final decision get the adapter and the nvme of 1TB and keep it in case I upgraded the motherboard and the cpu. But also I'm not thinking of upgrading any of them because my new laptop has a last gen i7-9750 and gtx 1660 ti which is quite beautiful setup.

And my gaming rig is running all my games with no issues so why I would upgrade it.



Edit:

wow it won't be in stock until May 28, 2020 !! but the 500GB is in stock.

500GB actually enough for my windows + office and several important apps as I install other big programs like simulators and games on the other HDDs.

 

[Zerileous]

SSD reliability has increased a lot. I would not worry about that at this phase.

 

[R1S8K]

I thought of that too but I wanted just to mention this problem I had.

But also I somewhere heard that nvme or the m.2 isn't very happy with a lot of storage write/read processes. Could you correct me in that ?

 

[Zerileous]

That has more to do with the type of NAND flash than the type of interface. Both of the drives you are looking at use 3D NAND. It is similar to what Samsung uses on their flagship drives (V-NAND). I don't know a lot about it, as I'm more familiar with the TLC or QLC, but here is a little overview: https://gigabytekingdom.com/types-of-nand-flash-memory/. It also gets confusing because some drives are marketed as 3D TLC NAND.

At the end of the day for a consumer who is going to write a file to the drive, and leave it there for months or years, with the exception of some small temp files, none of us are likely to exhaust the maximum writes of any modern NAND flash. For a server or cache drive that is moving files around constantly this is a concern. Could also apply to say a production workstation that is importing lots of video files, processing them, dumping the raw footage into a cold storage somewhere and uploading the finished product and starting over. But for general gaming and desktop use, it's not a concern.

 

[dejo]

I would venture to say that any ssd is an upgrade over any hdd for performance. Some of the dram-less models can suffer under certain circumstances- barring those- all ssd are better than hdd to my eyes

 

[EarthDog]

I thought of that too but I wanted just to mention this problem I had.

But also I somewhere heard that nvme or the m.2 isn't very happy with a lot of storage write/read processes. Could you correct me in that ?

Everything fails.

That said, a 970 evo for example, has 1,200 TBW. Do the math on how many GB /day that is...

Also- https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/

Yes, when they fail it is more or a black and white thing, but writes and reliability are not an issue.