NVMe M.2 vs SATA SSD

[Renox92]

So, I'm building a PC for my farther. Main usages are: chrome, some Word/Exel work, but mostly games like World of Tanks and Heroes of the Storm (maybe some AAA titles). Putting something like samsung's 950 pro in a system will be great of course, but how noticeable the advantage will be vs sata ssd (like 850 evo)? What exactly will I get for more than double the price?

 

[fredfinks]

eh, its alot, as you said its double the price. Youre paying top dollar for peak performance. At the high end with everything cost ramps up for a little extra performance.
id prefer multiple SSDs than a 950. unless of course youve got a great budget.
if youve compromised on GPU for example do not even consider the 950 ssd.

 

[drtweak]

Honestly unless you are doing hard care read and write intensive stuff like Databases, Video/3D, Editing etc going to NVMe will not give you any benifit. You won't be able to really notice the speed that much since you will be doing basic stuff as it is. Yes games load faster with a HDD vs SSD but you have to understand that the load times on a SSD are already pretty fast and unless you need it to load a few Miliseconds faster save the money, get the SSD, and put more money towards a GPU/CPU

 

[yumri]

Honestly unless you are doing hard care read and write intensive stuff like Databases, Video/3D, Editing etc going to NVMe will not give you any benefit. You won't be able to really notice the speed that much since you will be doing basic stuff as it is. Yes games load faster with a HDD vs SSD but you have to understand that the load times on a SSD are already pretty fast and unless you need it to load a few Milliseconds faster save the money, get the SSD, and put more money towards a GPU/CPU

Good to know but what bout endurance?

 

[drtweak]

For the 950 not sure.

lets just say this though. Is is a Pro series. So the endurance is MUCH higher than the Samsung Evo series.

The 850 Evo can do 82GB of writes, every single day for 5 years straight before you have to worry about failure.

And i think the Pros are almost double of that.

 

[dcohn]

The SM951 comes with a 10 year warranty.

You notice the difference no matter what you do. It is 2.5 times faster than a sata ssd. Agreed it is so fast already that it is harder to notice but copying files is amazingly fast besides compiling etc.

If you have huge Excel workbooks it will certainly improve times if they have some tough pivot tables and formulas.

Again I won't argue because again the other crap is so fast as you stated that these make little difference when used alone on a desktop but when running with 20 in a raid array against a terabyte database on a SQL Server. Holy Shit heaven.

 

[drtweak]

Again I won't argue because again the other crap is so fast as you stated that these make little difference when used alone on a desktop but when running with 20 in a raid array against a terabyte database on a SQL Server. Holy Shit heaven.

Good Golly Miss Molly what in the world are you running for a Terabyte SQL Database O.O

Something like this case here. Yea Running PCIe NVMe will make a WORLD of difference!

 

[saintsfan0990]

Why are m2 slots advertised as supports 10 gb/s over sata III at 6 gb/s when the max on these cards seem to be a quarter of that at 2,500 mb/s? Ive seen these conversion factors before. What are they saying? If I get a pcie nvme ssd and locate that card in a m2 slot on a nvme capable motherboard I am going to bottleneck at 2.5 gb/s regardless?

 

[drtweak]

Not sure where you got the 10gb/s from but also when you read these remember Gb and GB are NOT the same. Gb is Gigabite and GB is Gigabytes.

M.2 NVMe are read up to 2.5 GBps these days. Those are 4 PCIe lane NVMe cards which on a PCIe 3.0 bus maxes out at 4GBps and if it is only a 2 Lane M.2 that is 2GBps

SSD only do about 550 MBps which is the max.

Also remember M.2 can be EITHER PCIe NVMe or SATA III. SO putting in a SATA M.2 is still restricted to SATA Speeds.

 

[saintsfan0990]

Not sure where you got the 10gb/s from but also when you read these remember Gb and GB are NOT the same. Gb is Gigabite and GB is Gigabytes.

M.2 NVMe are read up to 2.5 GBps these days. Those are 4 PCIe lane NVMe cards which on a PCIe 3.0 bus maxes out at 4GBps and if it is only a 2 Lane M.2 that is 2GBps

SSD only do about 550 MBps which is the max.

Also remember M.2 can be EITHER PCIe NVMe or SATA III. SO putting in a SATA M.2 is still restricted to SATA Speeds.

I suppose I am oblivious ti how this all works. But it sounds like to me that you are saying that if I were to buy an SSD for one of the open M@ slots on my alienware model 17 R3 my SSD would be its own bottleneck before the read/write slots of the port itself?

 

[drtweak]

In a way yes. After looking up the 17 R3 it DOES Support a M.2 NVMe but as far as I can tell it ONLY supports the Samsung SM951-NVMe which is a OEM NVMe PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive which you can buy. The Samsung 950 pro does work in some case but seems to need extra work to get it to work.

Also it looks like there they are 2 m.2 slots. One is a x2 and one is a x4, but either way it looks like the max is 10GBps which is where you got that from. Either way you should get a full 2.5GBps read and a 1.5GBps write on those guys in the x4 slot.

The thing is, is it worth spending the money? Honestly no. Yo won't see as big of a difference from it.

The thing is going form Mechinal drive to SSD/NVMe is a night and day difference. Going from SSD to NVMe is not so much. Unless you are running a SQL server or a web server or something that is being HIT every single second with read and write request and you need a long Queue lenght on the drive then going NVMe isn't worth your money. You will NOT much of any Loading different either with windows or games. The only thing you will see if coping a big from from the drive to itself or another NVMe and you more than likely do not have a 10Bbps Nic card plugged into another machine or switch that can even pump that out (Gigabit maxes out at 125MBps and SSD's do much faster than that and any RAID 5/6/0/10 on HDD's will also be faster than that) so going that fast is honestly pointless for a normal end user. Unless you have the money to burn or just want bragging rights just get a M.2 or 2.5 inch 850 Evo or some other SATA M.2/2.5 Drive.