[SOLVED] Do Different Generation SSDs and APUs Work Together??

[monere]

Hi,

I am trying to create a configuration for a new rig that I'll be building in the next few months, and I've settled on the Ryzen 7 5700G APU (Cezanne) as my CPU, and I'm currently looking at various SSDs to try and find 2 of them that will be installed onto my MoBo (which I haven't decided on just yet), but I'm noticing that my APU works only with / supports only PCIe Gen 3 stuff, so I was wondering... would a Gen 4 SSD work with my Gen 3 APU?? Or would the APU / MoBo detect incompatibilities and not even power my computer on or something?

I never understood how (in)compatibilities between all of these components work 🙁

Please let me know if Gen 4 SSDs work with my R7 5700G APU because I don't know whether it's even worth checking the better SSDs anymore if I can't use them to begin with...

Thanks!

 

[Eximo]

PCIe is backwards compatible. They will run at PCIe 3.0 instead of 4.0.

 

[monere]

PCIe is backwards compatible. They will run at PCIe 3.0 instead of 4.0.

that's good news then... But then I'm thinking that I'll be losing money that can be spent elsewhere if I were to go with a Gen 4 SSD for this APU, right?

Also, I keep reading on various sites that the writing speeds of 3GB/s are only theoretical and that the SSD will not write at those speeds in real life. Is this true or not? And if it's true, what are the REAL speeds that I can expect to get from an SSD that has these specifications:

Read 3500 MB/s
Write 3000 MB/s
Random 4KB reading 600K IOPS
Random 4KB writing 550K IOPS

And one more question please. I checked some second-hand SSDs because their price looked very attractive to me, and the people that sell those SSD say that they've pulled them out of a newly bought Laptop, so I was wondering... do these SSDs work for desktop, too, or would I get scammed if I buy them? Do you happen to know this?

Regardless, thanks a lot for clearing up my confusion about the Generational SSDs

 

[Eximo]

Well, those are maximum speeds.

Temperature, and the type of writing can change those speeds a lot. Benchmarks use sequential data. Typical usage would not involve writing of that type. Exceptions would be large single files. Game texture packs, game maps, large videos, etc. A whole bunch of small files will not be able to write as quickly. That is what the Random reading and writing is for, a more typical desktop/OS workload.

I have a PCIe 4.0 drive in a 3.0 system. Mostly bought it for the warranty, but some day I might upgrade my CPU to accommodate PCIe 4.0 (that would be a drop in of an 11th gen chip for me, or an upgrade to a 13th gen or Ryzen 7000 system)


M.2 NVMe drives are a standard type, they work in laptops or desktops.

Be warned some of the drives out there will be M.2 B type, which is SATA. So that would be limited to about 500MB/s.

Buying used is always a risk.

 

[monere]

Be warned some of the drives out there will be M.2 B type, which is SATA. So that would be limited to about 500MB/s.

oh, I didn't know that... Thanks for the heads-up!

Typical usage would not involve writing of that type. Exceptions would be large single files. Game texture packs, game maps, large videos, etc. A whole bunch of small files will not be able to write as quickly. That is what the Random reading and writing is for, a more typical desktop/OS workload.

that's still a win because large files always get pasted the slowest of all files when I back my data up to external drives, so it's still a win in my book

Anyway, questions answered! I'm going to make this thread as solved. Thanks again for helping me figure out the deal with these Gen 3 / 4 components...

Cheers, mate!

 

[USAFRet]

that's still a win because large files always get pasted the slowest of all files when I back my data up to external drives, so it's still a win in my book

Performance is dictated by the slowest device in the chain.

Copying from a fast SSD to an external, the SSD speed is pretty irrelevant.

The external HDD or the USB interface will be the limiting factor.

 

[monere]

Performance is dictated by the slowest device in the chain