M.2 SSD faster than 2.5 inch SSD ?

[spellweavergeneziso]

I currently have Samsung 850 EVO 2.5 inch SSD and I have installed Windows, games (and mods for games) installed on it. Would my computer gets faster and would my loading times in games improve drastically if I buy new M.2 SSD which reading speed is 6 times faster?

I am asking this because I play games with mods a lot, and they are all stored at drive where games are installed. They sometimes present over 10 GB of textures/sounds that needs to be loaded when playing.

Samsung 970 EVO : read 3400 MB/s, write 1500 MB/s
Samsung 850 EVO : read 540 MB/s, write 520 MB/s

 

[rgd1101]

m.2 is a connection type. they can support faster PCIE interface (970 evo) or sata interface (850 evo)

2.5 inch connection only support sata interface (850 evo)

And only help with load time.

 

[feelinfroggy777]

There are SATA III m.2 SSD's, and they will be the same speed as your 850 EVO. The 970 pro, is a NVMe M.2 SSD, and it will be faster than the 850 EVO.

But it really depends on the use case. I switched from a 850 EVO to a 960 EVO and could not tell a difference and I mostly game on my rig. Maybe it booted a second or two faster or a load time was a second faster, but it did not take very long to begin with.

 

[rgd1101]

from you other thread http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3759095/fast-data-drives-cpu-gpu.html
you only have z97 motherboard. only about 1/3 the speed.

 

[luckymatt42]

Going from sata SSD to PCIe SSD will NOT "drastically" improve your load times (like going from a regular HDD to an SSD did).

The PCIe drives really excel at large sustained transfers (think Gigabyte movie files, not Megabyte game textures), not really random reads/writes that happen during gaming.

Best guess for gaming maybe an increase of 5-15%.

 

[spellweavergeneziso]

from you other thread http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3759095/fast-data-drives-cpu-gpu.html
you only have z97 motherboard. only about 1/3 the speed.

MSI factory info says that all their MoBos that support M.2 PCIe, are able for speed up to 32 GB/s, so I don't know why you say my board can only handle 1/3 of that M.2 SSD speed, if I got you right.

I've just read a comment on one shop - a guy switched from my exact 850 EVO to 970 EVO M.2 SSD and the speed of his system improved drastically.

Maybe you don't have experiences with mods and how they work, or just some games with 50+ GB size, but when I switched from HDD to SSD, my loading times in games drastically improved and so they should in case of getting M.2 instead of SSD which is really slow compared to M.2 I am planning to buy, anyway I will see if there is an improvement or not.

Thanks all for advices. I didn't expect so many of em. 😀

 

[feelinfroggy777]

Maybe you don't have experiences with mods and how they work, or just some games with 50+ GB size, but when I switched from HDD to SSD, my loading times in games drastically improved and so they should in case of getting M.2 instead of SSD which is really slow compared to M.2 I am planning to buy, anyway I will see if there is an improvement or not.

Don't expect the kinda performance jump you saw going from HDD to SSD. It does not work like that. Those 6x read and write times that you see for the 970 pro does not improve load times. Those read and write times are for data transfers. So if you are moving large amounts of data from one drive to another is where you see the big performance jump. When gaming you are not moving large amounts over data over drives. Even downloading a game from steam will be the same speed because your internet connection will be the bottleneck.

The NVMe drive wont speed up load times by 6x. You are probably looking closer to 10% bump, if that. So with a 10 second load time, you are saving 1 second.

 

[feelinfroggy777]

Also, I read your other post and the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 only supports PCIe 2.0 x2. Which is 25% of the bandwidth of the 970 pro PCIe 3.0 x4. I would not buy a NVMe drive for that board.

See M.2 section in specification:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMING-3/Specification

 

[spellweavergeneziso]

Also, I read your other post and the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 only supports PCIe 2.0 x2. Which is 25% of the bandwidth of the 970 pro PCIe 3.0 x4. I would not buy a NVMe drive for that board.

See M.2 section in specification:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMING-3/Specification

Good point and yes, I understand then it wont get every action 6x faster 😀 But trust me I know which situations I am talking about.

So, as my MoBo supports older version of PCIe slot, you think that I won't even be able to achieve those speeds ? I don't mind unless it will fit into my MoBo so I can use it. I am planning to upgrade next year or 2 years so that M.2 SSD will come handy in the future.

 

[spellweavergeneziso]

Also, I read your other post and the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 only supports PCIe 2.0 x2. Which is 25% of the bandwidth of the 970 pro PCIe 3.0 x4. I would not buy a NVMe drive for that board.

See M.2 section in specification:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMING-3/Specification

So I checked specs : M.2 port supports M.2 PCIe module up to 10Gb/s speed

😀

 

[feelinfroggy777]

Also, I read your other post and the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 only supports PCIe 2.0 x2. Which is 25% of the bandwidth of the 970 pro PCIe 3.0 x4. I would not buy a NVMe drive for that board.

See M.2 section in specification:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMING-3/Specification

So I checked specs : M.2 port supports M.2 PCIe module up to 10Gb/s speed

😀

Hence, rgd1101's comment of 1/3 the speed.

 

[spellweavergeneziso]

Also, I read your other post and the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 only supports PCIe 2.0 x2. Which is 25% of the bandwidth of the 970 pro PCIe 3.0 x4. I would not buy a NVMe drive for that board.

See M.2 section in specification:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMING-3/Specification

So I checked specs : M.2 port supports M.2 PCIe module up to 10Gb/s speed

😀

Hence, rgd1101's comment of 1/3 the speed.

But, I do not udnerstand what did he mean by that 🙁 1/3 speed of what?

 

[USAFRet]

from you other thread http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3759095/fast-data-drives-cpu-gpu.html
you only have z97 motherboard. only about 1/3 the speed.

MSI factory info says that all their MoBos that support M.2 PCIe, are able for speed up to 32 GB/s, so I don't know why you say my board can only handle 1/3 of that M.2 SSD speed, if I got you right.

Direct from your board specs:
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMING-3/Specification
"1 x M.2 Key M Socket supports type 2280/2260/2242 storage devices in both PCIE Gen2 x2 & SATA mode*"

You are absolutely not going to get the full performance from an NVMe drive. At all. Ever.

 

[feelinfroggy777]

Also, I read your other post and the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 only supports PCIe 2.0 x2. Which is 25% of the bandwidth of the 970 pro PCIe 3.0 x4. I would not buy a NVMe drive for that board.

See M.2 section in specification:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMING-3/Specification

So I checked specs : M.2 port supports M.2 PCIe module up to 10Gb/s speed

😀

Hence, rgd1101's comment of 1/3 the speed.

But, I do not udnerstand what did he mean by that 🙁 1/3 speed of what?

You are only going to get 1/3 the speed of the 970 pro because the motherboard does not have enough bandwidth to support that NVMe drive. It can only run 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0 and the 970 pro uses 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0.

Actually, by my calculations it would be worse than 1/3, it would be 1/4. PCIe 3.0 has twice the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0. So 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0 = 1 lane of PCIe 3.0. So the 970 pro on your board would only be using 1 PCIe lane where it is rated for 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes.

In short, wait to get a NVMe SSD till you get a more modern board.

 

[spellweavergeneziso]

Also, I read your other post and the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 only supports PCIe 2.0 x2. Which is 25% of the bandwidth of the 970 pro PCIe 3.0 x4. I would not buy a NVMe drive for that board.

See M.2 section in specification:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMING-3/Specification

So I checked specs : M.2 port supports M.2 PCIe module up to 10Gb/s speed

😀

Hence, rgd1101's comment of 1/3 the speed.

But, I do not udnerstand what did he mean by that 🙁 1/3 speed of what?

You are only going to get 1/3 the speed of the 970 pro because the motherboard does not have enough bandwidth to support that NVMe drive. It can only run 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0 and the 970 pro uses 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0.

Actually, by my calculations it would be worse than 1/3, it would be 1/4. PCIe 3.0 has twice the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0. So 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0 = 1 lane of PCIe 3.0. So the 970 pro on your board would only be using 1 PCIe lane where it is rated for 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes.

In short, wait to get a NVMe SSD till you get a more modern board.

Okay, thanks for advice.