joex444 :
Hard drive performance barely even show up on the results when we show throughput performance. The reverse happens in the latency tests, the HDD lines are so long you can hardly see the NVMe performance.
The point didn't seem to be to compare SSDs vs HDDs for synthetic benchmarks like I/O, work load, or sustained read/write tests. It's obvious they're on two different scales, separated by orders of magnitude. I think the point was the service time benchmarks in applications which showed that there's a non-measurable performance difference between a 6Gb/s capped SSD and these NVMe drives, even in RAID0. Knowing what an example HDD performs like under those tests would demonstrate real-world performance difference in SSDs and HDDs, motivating HDD users to upgrade to SSDs. It could also essentially illustrate that for those metrics, it doesn't matter what SSD you have so long as you have one.
Also as far as "RAID is a touchy subject" it's worth noting here that the R stands for Redundant. RAID0 offers no redundancy, it just tries to store half of each large file on one disk, and the other half on the other disk (or thirds if you have 3 drives, etc). The use of RAID 1, 10, 5, or 6 is well understood to not be motivated by performance. And users of RAID0 will see faster read/write speeds, but it is really most useful in copying files (but the target/source needs to be able to keep up; a USB3.0 external drive won't benefit from a RAID0 NVMe SSD host/destination).
Also given that Z170 routes the PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots through the chipset and therefore via DMI, it would be interesting to compare this to an X99 platform with 40 PCIe lanes where the M.2 slots are attached to the CPU directly. First I'm not 100% sure something like that exists, but if it does it would be a very interesting comparison to see if the DMI interface is slowing anything down, particularly as NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 RAID0 should top out at 64Gb/s (I think this may be 8b10, so 6000MB/s), well beyond the 3000MB/s or so peak that these tests showed on the Z170 platform.
yes i was referring to the real world benchmarks. im well aware than iops on a hdd top out at something like 1000~ seek time is somewhere in the range of 8ms to 45ms (benching my hdds after they are used puts it around there) and average speed puts it somewhere along the lines of 100-120mbps, however in real world performance you would expect a ssd to load a game 500% faster, but in many cases its less than 50%
(just as a quick note, the reason i went from hdd to ssd wasn't because of boot time, because i always thought this was the dumbest metric to measure a drive by, because really, i reboot my computer every... well current uptime for me is 34 days, 8 seconds or 2 minutes given that is pointless, but what made me move to ssd was when i found out how hard my hdd was getting hammered for use, it took a 120mb read write drive and drove it down to 700kb at most... that was what made me switch)
also, toms, just for the sake of another benchmark that people probably aren't thinking of, you should load up a game that relies on streaming textures max out the frame rate as much as possible without sacrificing any texture detail, and wildly shake the mouse around, Rage comes to mind as one where i could see pop in if i move the mouse fast, i had that installed on a hdd, my brother did it with an ssd, we both saw pop in, for me it was tolerable even on a hdd, but for him... even on the ssd he couldn't deal with it, this would be at the very least an interesting benchmark as it seems games are going more and more tward streaming all the textures opposed to loading them all.
also, this forum isnt letting me quote or reply to you, so ill add it manually
I game a lot and i have 850 Pro in 256 GB capacity. You don't really need that much space for games if you keep only 2-3 games installed at once. I play one game at a time, when i finish i just uninstall it. What's the point of saving it on PC if i will not play it again ever or at least for a while.
i personally have a 120gb ssd for boot, that i installed all my programs too, and any program like steam, i move off all the bulk of the data not needed for booting the program off the drive and symbolically link it, this was a system i put in place before steam allowed you to choose the directory you wanted to install to. of my 120gb drive, only about 8-26gb of free space is left depending on how big the page file expands, assuming that i got a 256gb drive or a 512 that has barely any space for games on it as it stands considering how many come out requiring 20-60gb of space (steam preload of gta5 required 120gb), and going forward with the move to try and make 4k a thing, we are going to see games bloat even more, star citizen if i remember right requires 100gb for install, or they are targeting 100gb when all is said and done. an ssd for games just seams ludicrous given how big games are going to get and as of now, how much ssds cost, granted fitting one game on a larger ssd you get for boot will be a viable option.
that said, the way i install games and play them is more along the lines of i have an itch i need to scratch, i keep several racing games from sims to to arcade on just because if i feel like i want to play a specific kind of game i can without waiting an hour or so for the game to download, or other games that are very large like gta5, where yea, i may not want to play the game for several months, but when i do i can. the only genre of game i dont like is real world sports and real time strategy (i hated the old games where i could dump a half hour into a map, build my army for the goal only to be told "nope, that's not what you are building tward anymore, your build is now useless" and all that time i spent in the game is now for nothing.) and the amount of games i have to keep on hand for whenever i get the urge to play a certain genre is fairly large.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram