Question New to Anything Newer Than SSD - Seeking Advice for New Build!

[Kirbyarm]

Hello everyone! Yes, that's a lot of New in the title!

I've been doing some research over Google/YouTube on some brief lessons to try and catch up to storage technology these days to try and piece together what's best for my situation and how I can optimally choose a storage solution for my new and upcoming build. First I'll post the build so far (subject to change!):

https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/KZ6jxG

As a footnote, any criticism, suggestions or ideas for the build in general are welcome, even if it's not related to storage directly.

My first question would be about compatibility. I'm pretty sure all 4 of these would be individually compatible with my motherboard of choice, the 'Asus - ROG STRIX Z390-H GAMING ATX LGA1151' but it would be super relieving and bring me a lot of ease of mind if anyone could actually confirm that all 4 of them would in fact work and be compatible with the above system:

-Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 2280 (1 TB)
-Western Digital - Black NVMe M.2-2280 SSD (1 TB)
-Samsung 970 PRO M.2-2280 SSD (1 TB)
-Intel Optane SSD 905P Series (960 GB)

I'm genuinely not sure as I've never heard of M.2 until my friends mentioned it and the board lists '2 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots (support x16, x8/x8); 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (max. at x2 mode)' in specifications yet I'm seeing requirements for PCIe 3.0 x4 or something and it's like hieroglyphics to me with all this new technology.

Which similar performance-classed SSDs would you recommend for a planned system of this caliber? (It can include the above picks I've landed on) Would you choose a different solution? If so, why?

Could anyone please tell me which one is the best at performing without a shadow of a doubt? (Not concerned about lifespan/endurance)

Will these devices be bootable as my primary OS / gaming drive with said motherboard?

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That said, I have a chart that shows the (important?) specifications for 3 of them in comparison, so no optane. However I don't know if this is just someone punching unconfirmed or untested numbers, especially because of the Evo Plus's price being MUCH lower than the Pro's yet seemingly has quite superior performance in every spec except the lifespan. I'm not looking to spend thousands of dollar on 1 TB of space no matter how fast or awesome it is, but I am looking to get rid of the 'storage bottleneck' to the absolute best of my ability on a 1 TB drive for a reasonable price ($500~ range is acceptable) but if something cheaper is genuinely better (looking at you EVO Plus!) then I'd definitely go for it, but I'm new to all of these new technologies and don't want to jump to something I may regret because of not understanding some terrible cons or things I didn't stumble upon in the bit of research I did do.

A note I'll carry over from another discussion:

---Fantastic, now a friend has brought the existence of the Evo 970 Plus to my attention which boasts to have all superior specifications compared to the 970 Pro except for the lifespan of 1,200 TBW compared to the Plus's 600 TBW (which I haven't even gone through 1/8th of my samsung 840 evo SSD's TBW yet after nearly 5 years). So that's on the table now... how would that size up to those of you with experience? Are the specs actually better?

970 EVO Plus - 96-Layer TLC - 3,500 MB/s S Read - 3,300 MB/s S Write - 620k IOPS R Read - 560k IOPS R Write - 600 TBW
970 Pro - 64-Layer MLC - 3,500 MB/s S Read - 2,700 MB/s S Write - 500k IOPS R Read - 500k IOPS R Write - 1,200 TBW
WD Black - 64-Layer TLC - 3,470 MB/s S Read - 3,000 MB/s S Write - 515k IOPS R Read - 560k IOPS R Write - 600 TBW
Intel Optane 905P - 3D XPoint? - 2,600 MB/s S Read - 2,200 MB/s S Write - 575k IOPS R Read - 550k IOPS R Write - ??? TBW

So assuming these statistics are accurate... would that not mean the 970 EVO Plus from Samsung is the absolute best choice even though it's significantly cheaper than the 970 Pro and a 10x cheaper factor compared to the Optane? Why would anyone spend over 2 grand on the optane when it's slower then the other three solutions?

I will appreciate any advice in comparing these components, confirming the suspicions and helping me pick the one that's right for me! Thanks for your time everyone!

 

[Gam3r01]

Based on your listed needs I see no use for an NVME drive, their speeds are really only useful when moving large file sized on a regular basis, between NVME drives (video editing, etc).
For a typical/gaming system, anything more than a SATA SSD goes to waste, there is no performance benefit.

 

[Kirbyarm]

Thanks for the input, Gam3r01. I'm looking to break past the SATA 600 MB/s cap. When I do full organized backups of my data periodically it takes several hours to complete, most of the time I'm just left twiddling my thumbs and waiting for the files to transfer with music going... most of which is dealing which 100,000~+ batches of tiny files that take forever just because of how many files there are. It's extremely time consuming and boring. I'd like to make this less of an issue after enduring it for over a decade and I'm willing to invest in it.

 

[Gam3r01]

Where are your backups going to? Unless you have an equally fast drive as the backup target, the transfer wont speed up.

 

[Kirbyarm]

Perhaps not raw transfer speed no, but to my understanding it will improve copying data within the drive and reading it a lot faster, indexing search queries through massive batches of files when I'm looking for specific ones in my workspace. It'll boot windows faster, make loading-from-disk screens and transitions in games virtually non-existent, I'm sure it will do more too. I use a computer more than half of my day every day, and any help with the slowness of storage will go a long way for me, even if it's only saving seconds here and there.

 

[Gam3r01]

All and all, the benefit wont be nearly as much SSD to NVME as it is HDD to SSD.
But, if you have to have NVME for the marginal, and I mean very marginal performance, I would go with the 970 EVO.

 

[hang-the-9]

Perhaps not raw transfer speed no, but to my understanding it will improve copying data within the drive and reading it a lot faster, indexing search queries through massive batches of files when I'm looking for specific ones in my workspace. It'll boot windows faster, make loading-from-disk screens and transitions in games virtually non-existent, I'm sure it will do more too. I use a computer more than half of my day every day, and any help with the slowness of storage will go a long way for me, even if it's only saving seconds here and there.

Copying data in the same drive is not backups, anymore than moving a table from one side of the room to the other will help you save it if the house burns down. You need that backup to be on a different drive. If you want to spend the money for faster disks, you can find benchmarks of them online already, pick the fastest one. If you want to pick possibly longer lifespan over losing speed, that would be up to you to decide.

 

[Kirbyarm]

I am aware of that @hang-the-9 , I understand that transfers won't surpass the speed of the receiving disks. Transferring is likely the lowest priority in my list of reasons to get a high end storage solution, as explained in my other points. Even if I'm transferring to 2 drives at once, or just 1 drive and still want to do some file copying or storage work within the drive while shoving out 550 MB/s to an external SSD and still have the power to use it fully within the OS unhindered... that's my idea behind this.

Five years ago the storage upgrade was HDD to SSD. Now 5 years later I would like to upgrade to a higher end component replacement for the SSD, even if I might not notice it much, I guarantee you I will notice it!

That being said, I appreciate both of you for your replies, but the questions I asked in the opening post still haven't been answered. I wanted to know out of the above or any suggested alternatives, which performs the best. Also if they are 100% compatible with the motherboard I have chosen.

Thanks for you time, anyone's help is welcome!

 

[Gam3r01]

I addressed your question at the end of my last post.

 

[Kirbyarm]

You did address one of the questions, which was to suggest any alternatives, you did suggest an alternative, Gam3r01. However that is definitely not the best out of that and the ones posted in the original post. There were a few questions there. Apologies if the original post looked jumbled and unprofessional or akin to a text ocean.

In case in your message "I would go with the 970 EVO" meant the 970 EVO Plus, could you confirm if you are stating it performs the best out of all the drives mentioned in this thread or is it just what you would go with?

 

[Gam3r01]

I listed it as the EVO out of your choices, of which there was one EVO.
It offers impressive performance with solid endurance. You wont notice the performance difference compared to the other selected drives anyway.

 

[Kirbyarm]

This is true, between the new drives it'd probably be apples to apples.

Sorry for the confusion, just the 970 EVO is a different component than the 970 EVO Plus, so I didn't understand since you suggested a worse model that I'm not interested in, while 'meaning' a different model.

Getting closer to a Best Answer here! Hurray!

Impressive performance and solid endurance, great, but does it have the best performance out of the all of them? I want to go with the actual best one, unless it's the optane, then I'll go with second best lol

Also, will the 970 EVO Plus be usable as the main OS disk (and thus bootable) by the motherboard Asus - ROG STRIX Z390-H GAMING ATX LGA1151 ? I don't know how these work, I just heard on some videos M.2 sometimes doesn't work with NVMe and that sometimes you have to patch your bios to make it a bootable drive or something like this... I'm just hoping for some peace of mind from the answer to this question.

 

[mdd1963]

Thanks for the input, Gam3r01. I'm looking to break past the SATA 600 MB/s cap. When I do full organized backups of my data periodically it takes several hours to complete, most of the time I'm just left twiddling my thumbs and waiting for the files to transfer with music going... most of which is dealing which 100,000~+ batches of tiny files that take forever just because of how many files there are. It's extremely time consuming and boring. I'd like to make this less of an issue after enduring it for over a decade and I'm willing to invest in it.

The NVME drives are very nice for quick WIndows install times (4-5 minutes!), bootup times, and shutdowns and small file transfers, but, naturally, if copying 300 GB from a very fast SSD to a relatively slow spinning drive, the destination drive then becomes your bottleneck. Last time I imaged about 240 GB via Clonezilla, it still took about 25 min to copy it to a 7200 RPM HGST 4 TB drive....

The decision of whether to spring for an NVME drive was a little more difficult 2 years ago, with 500 GB drives at $250 then, whereas today, they are less than half that, with 1 TB drives often rivaling prices of 500 GB drives even a year ago. I say, unless on a severely restricted budget,...why would one NOT get an NVME drive...as long as that purchase does not force unnecessary cutbacks on CPU, GPU, or RAM! (If you are going to try to save money somewhere, get a decent plain black case from Corsair for $50 , vice many folks blowing $200-$450 on flaming red or orange RGB fiascoes 3 feet tall and 1 foot wide...or blowing $250 on water cooling and achieving nothing on additional overclock over an air cooler.

GOod luck with your build...

The Samsung 970 EVO PLus is awesome...(still love my 960, but, sure would like more than 500 GB sometimes!)

But check the comparison (at THG, I think) with the HP-EX950 just released.....