[SOLVED] Evo-970 M2 barely faster than a SATA SSD copying multiple files? WTH?

Mugsy

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May 12, 2004
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I built a new X570 based PC with Ryzen-3 3100 cpu and 500gb Samsung EVO970 M.2 drive plugged into the motherboard as my boot drive (64bit Win10 Pro.)

But I noticed that when reading/writing multiple files, my M2 is (almost) no faster than my extremely old SATA SSD (before a BIOS update this morning, it was actually slower!):

Crystal Disk Mark 6 benchmarks my M2 as substantially faster than an old SATA SSD in the same machine:

Corsair ForceGT 120gb SATA SSD Sequential Write: 481.4 MB/s
Samsung EVO970 500gb M2 drive Sequential Write: 3328.2 MB/s

Copying a single 2gb MP4 produces the expected (fast) result:
o SSD to SSD: 0:13
o M2 to M2: 0:02

But copying a folder containing 53,161 files/folders (31.2GB):
o SSD: to SSD - 5:30
o M2 to M2 - 5:02

If copying ONE (large) file to/from the same drive is nearly 7x faster, shouldn't copying thousands of small files produce better than just a 9% improvement? :??:
 
Solution
its cause it is 1000's of little files, try zipping them and try that.

the controller has to do a lot more moving files around with many files compared to a few
https://superuser.com/questions/151...eed-get-decrease-while-transfering-large-data

If you really want to see an NVMe drive go slow, try transferring 80 TB of MP3s from one to another.
Thousands of small files to transfer and keep track of.

So forget numbers from SSD/NVMe read/write speed reading programmes, the real world isn't anywhere near as fast.
The $120 250GB 970 Evo has an advertised sequential read speed of up to 3400 MB/s (200MB/s faster than the 250GB 960 Evo) and a sequential write speed of 1500 MB/s which drops...

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
its cause it is 1000's of little files, try zipping them and try that.

the controller has to do a lot more moving files around with many files compared to a few
https://superuser.com/questions/151...eed-get-decrease-while-transfering-large-data

If you really want to see an NVMe drive go slow, try transferring 80 TB of MP3s from one to another.
Thousands of small files to transfer and keep track of.

So forget numbers from SSD/NVMe read/write speed reading programmes, the real world isn't anywhere near as fast.
The $120 250GB 970 Evo has an advertised sequential read speed of up to 3400 MB/s (200MB/s faster than the 250GB 960 Evo) and a sequential write speed of 1500 MB/s which drops to 300 MB/s once the 13Gb of SLC cache has been exhausted (this is similar to the sustained write performance on the 960 Evo)...

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/9vy5yly3

your drive has 18gb of dynamic cache before it slows down. The bigger the drive the more they have. The 2tb drive has 96gb of cache before it slows down. and when you move data on same drive, its going to be slow (but not as slow as if it were a hdd). The more you fill the drive, the smaller the dynamic cache is.

the benefit of nvme is the speed you can read data, the write is nice too but I don't know if the nand on NVME is any better than that on SSD if it comes from same place. I expect Samsung uses same nand on all ssd. So the speed they write once its on drive may be similar.

wonder what results are like if you copy between them, from ssd to nvme and back.

All my mp3 live either on a cloud server on on my 3tb hdd, nvme just for big files.
 
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Solution

Karadjgne

Titan
Ambassador
Read and write is 1 thing, demand is something else. Cpus take a certain amount of time to process a file, and when it's done ask ram for the next file. The drive then fills the empty spot with more data, either requested or probably wanted.

With small files like what games use almost totally, that's a lot of files in and out of the ram, but only when the cpu demands them. Otherwise they sit around and wait. How fast the drive can get them to the ram is almost immaterial as they are last in line, others are already queued ahead of them. End result is nvme and Sata get pretty equitable performance in reality that's not representative of a benchmark.

With large files like movie edits etc, that 1 file is so large it leaves a ton of room in the ram spare, and the ram needs to fill it now, not next week, because the cpu will demand another file asap. This is where transmission speeds of nvme really excel over Sata, it fills the ram faster, so the ram isn't waiting on the drive, cpu isn't waiting on the ram.

Windows has a bunch of large files, as well as small files, this is why nvme generally boots a little faster than Sata. Installs are faster because the cpu is dealing with larger CAB or zip files and unpacking them, not a bunch of unpacked small files in transmission.

Benchmarks like CD only tell you what the drive can do or is supposed to be doing, not what the pc is doing with the drive.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
main difference i found going from ssd to nvme was boot times are instant now compared to 40 seconds or so on sata. True, its on different computers as well. but nvme are 5 times faster than sata and it shows in some places.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
"copying a folder containing 53,161 "

  1. Copy/paste within the same drive
  2. 50,000 files

In those instances, a top tier NVMe will be seen to be not much faster than a typical SATA III SSD.
Now...do that same thing with those files on an HDD, and see the massive difference. :hot:
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
i don't want to think about how many actions that transfer on 1 NVME of 50k reads and 50k writes would be. besides the obvious, its more complicated that just saying 100k

well, that is point. Would it be faster to read from ssd to nvme or other way? just curious if there is a difference. I don't have an ssd in this pc besides the nvme
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
i don't want to think about how many actions that transfer on 1 NVME of 50k reads and 50k writes would be. besides the obvious, its more complicated that just saying 100k

well, that is point. Would it be faster to read from ssd to nvme or other way? just curious if there is a difference. I don't have an ssd in this pc besides the nvme
Almost certainly no difference for either direction.
Not enough to notice, anyway.
SATA -> NVMe
NVMe -> SATA

You'd need a stopwatch to tell.
And the number of times you'd actually do that procedure....just let it run. It will be done when its done.