Review Samsung 980 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Going DRAMless with V6 V-NAND

[hstpctech]

Depends on the specific board and BIOS version.
Some of them can use a PCIe 3.0 x4.
Some, only PCIe 2.0 x2.
Some can boot from a drive in the M.2 port, some cannot.

But, the Z97 boards were released on the cusp of NVMe drives appearing. Support is shaky.

And as evidenced in the above videos...we are deep into diminishing returns.

I have an Intel 660p in a PCIe slot on my Z97 board.
Along with a selection of SATA III drives of varying ages and sizes. (list below)

In theory, the sequential speed of the 660p is almost 4x the SAYA III drives.
In practice, I literally cannot tell. And not just 'feel', but rather timed controlled tests.
My typical use of Adobe Lightroom...zero difference.

I should've asked what's the best M.2 drive Asus Z97 Pro Gamer can use. This system is pretty close to what you got, as the CPU is i7-4770K with 32GB DDR3.

With the upgrade, I was hoping to get a faster typical usage, e.g. faster start-up, apps loading, games loading. From several reviews, I can see Samsung 980 can hold its own in real-world usage, even though it trailed behind in synthetic benchmarks.

My current system is i5-4590 32GB DDR3 with Crucial MX100 256GB. The boot time to desktop is 43seconds. It's one of the reason that made me consider M.2.

 

[USAFRet]

I should've asked what's the best M.2 drive Asus Z97 Pro Gamer can use. This system is pretty close to what you got, as the CPU is i7-4770K with 32GB DDR3.

With the upgrade, I was hoping to get a faster typical usage, e.g. faster start-up, apps loading, games loading. From several reviews, I can see Samsung 980 can hold its own in real-world usage, even though it trailed behind in synthetic benchmarks.

My current system is i5-4590 32GB DDR3 with Crucial MX100 256GB. The boot time to desktop is 43seconds. It's one of the reason that made me consider M.2.

An NVMe drive would shave a couple seconds at most off that boot time.

The big number we see and is always advertised is sequential data transfer. NOT small 4k chunks of data.
At that 4k level, there really isn't a lot of difference between SSD types.

In a current system that could utilize a PCIe 4.0 drive like a 980 Pro, you'd see a small (single digit second) improvement in boot up time vs a SATA III SSD.
In your system....zero.

The main benefit of an SSD is the near zero access time. Which is with ALL SSD types.

 

[hstpctech]

An NVMe drive would shave a couple seconds at most off that boot time.

The big number we see and is always advertised is sequential data transfer. NOT small 4k chunks of data.
At that 4k level, there really isn't a lot of difference between SSD types.

In a current system that could utilize a PCIe 4.0 drive like a 980 Pro, you'd see a small (single digit second) improvement in boot up time vs a SATA III SSD.
In your system....zero.

The main benefit of an SSD is the near zero access time. Which is with ALL SSD types.

I usually skip past sequential numbers and go right for the 4K random read. On 4K synthetics, 980 ranks quite good for me.

Would you suggest a good cheap SATA SSD? I'd consider a bigger boot/apps drive, now that speed is of less importance.

I've been checking out Barracuda Q5 2TB previously, but after your suggestion, I would consider even cheaper SATA drives, the cheaper the better.

https://www.amazon.com/Mushkin-Sour...?dchild=1&keywords=ssd&qid=1622586425&sr=8-19 is the best I have found so far at $175.

 

[USAFRet]

Would you suggest a good cheap SATA SSD?

Samsung 860 EVO and Crucial MX500 are the 2 default choices.

 

[hstpctech]

Samsung 860 EVO and Crucial MX500 are the 2 default choices.

Thank you. I'm still running on MX100, so MX500 sounds better for me, and it's also cheaper than Samsung.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

So is an HDD.

Ssd is FAR superior. I use one on my Xbox as an external drive and it’s far superior for everything

 

[Krotow]

I'm curious how big difference in game texture loading into GPU (upcoming RTX IO + DirectStorage and alternatives) speed directly will affect performance comparison between HDD / SATA SDD / PCIe NVMe SDD. For games with large graphic assets NVMe should win with several times larger level loading speed. Also video encoding and AI calculations. Maybe combined GPU + Chia like cryptomining (sigh) too.

 

[Glock24]

Thank you for the valuable information, otherwise I'd wasted money on that 980.

Out of curiosity, what's the highest M.2 can Z97 handle?

I can tell the difference between a decent SSD and a cheap QLC and/or DRAMLESS crappy SSD. When new probably not much difference, but after a couple of weeks the crappy SSD will be as slow as an HDD. There's a notable performanceddifference, but most importantly, there's a reliability difference.

I've installed hundreds of SSD for other people and for me since around 2012. All Crucial/Sandisk/Samsung/Intel SSDs are still well and alive including low capacity drives. In contrast I've seen several other cheap crappy SSDs like the ones from ADATA and Kingston die after a few months or after a couple of years.