Question Samsung 990 Pro 2TB for an older motherboard

[Bellzemos]

Hi,

I have Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard with i7-7700K CPU, 32 GB RAM, GTX 1080 GPU and a M.2 NVME 1TB Samsung 960 EVO drive (with Windowos 10 OS on it). The system is over 7 years old and runs great.

However, I need some more space for my work and am thinking about swapping the 1TB 960 EVO with with a 2 TB 990 PRO (and then swapping my budget something external M.2 NVME 1TB drive for backups with the removed 1TB 960 EVO which should be quite faster than the budget drive).

I have 3 questions:
1. Motherboard supports PCIe 3.0, 4 lanes for the M.2 NVME drive slot and the 990 Pro is a PCIe 4.0 drive. Will I get a 4000 sequential read and 4000 sequential write (limited by PCIe 3.0) performance?

2. Will the 990 Pro drive, because of not being utilised to it's max speeds (over 7K sequential read, almost 7K sequential write) run cooler? Meaning that I don't nead a heatsink for it at the 4000/4000 speeds? My old 960 EVO does have (an aftermarket) heatsink on, but it's not near the 4000/4000 speeds (esp write-wise), meaning it's sweating trying to work at it's declared max speeds.

3. Could I run into any problems imaging the 960 EVO drive and then restoring to the 990 Pro drive - or should that work without a problem?

Years later, when I'll have to get a new system, I intend to use the 990 Pro as an external backup drive.

 

[USAFRet]

1. You will only get PCIe 3.0 speed.

2. Maybe.

3. Clone/image from the 960 to the 990? Done properly, should be no problem.


Why the change, though? Except for space, you'll see zero difference.
If it were me, I'd consider just adding a SATA III SSD for the needed capacity.

 

[Bellzemos]

You think I won't notice a speed difference between getting an additional SATA III SSD drive VS swapping my NVME with a faster one? SATA is ~500MB/s while NVME via PCIe 3.0 x4 is ~4000MB/s. I do transfer bigger files, work with VMs etc. Should I really see pretty much no difference? If that is really so, I would buy a cheaper drive, but I is it really so?

 

[USAFRet]

You think I won't notice a speed difference between getting an additional SATA III SSD drive VS swapping my NVME with a faster one? SATA is ~500MB/s while NVME via PCIe 3.0 x4 is ~4000MB/s. I do transfer bigger files, work with VMs etc. Should I really see pretty much no difference? If that is really so, I would buy a cheaper drive, but I is it really so?

Transferring from what to what?

 

[CountMike]

You think I won't notice a speed difference between getting an additional SATA III SSD drive VS swapping my NVME with a faster one? SATA is ~500MB/s while NVME via PCIe 3.0 x4 is ~4000MB/s. I do transfer bigger files, work with VMs etc. Should I really see pretty much no difference? If that is really so, I would buy a cheaper drive, but I is it really so?

You will get speeds of slower drive. NVMe drive will write at speed of reading of SATA drive, and SATA drive speed will also be limited to it's speed. Weakest link always wins. Only one thing may influence write speeds and that's amount of cache memory on the drive it's written to.

 

[Bob.B]

You think I won't notice a speed difference between getting an additional SATA III SSD drive VS swapping my NVME with a faster one? SATA is ~500MB/s while NVME via PCIe 3.0 x4 is ~4000MB/s. I do transfer bigger files, work with VMs etc. Should I really see pretty much no difference? If that is really so, I would buy a cheaper drive, but I is it really so?

If you go with the 990 and you will be moving big chunks of data in and out you might want to consider getting the added heat sink model.

 

[geofelt]

Most of the work done in windows is small blocks one at a time and random in nature.
Glowing sequential benchmarks are done at high queue depths on new drives.
Not to say that one should not get the best. 990 pro 2tb is probably a good idea and with the current sales
you can get one at a discount. If budget is a concern, the 980 will be equally good for you for now.
To answer your questions:
1. Yes, your sequential speeds will be at pcie 3 levels, but your random performance will not be impacted.
2. Heat is generated when doing extended sequential operations. Think virus scan.
The drive will throttle to protect itself until the situation resolves.
The best thing to do with or without a heat sink is to insure that you have some sort of airflow over the drive.
The usual location under the graphics card makes this a bit harder.
3. The Samsung magician ssd migration tool is a good way to move your C drive and expand the space.

 

[Bellzemos]

Thank you all for the answers.

I will be moving some big (couple of GB) files from and to the drive, quite often, also around the drive itself.

1TB Samsung NVME SSD here costs a little less than 1TB Samsung SATA SSD, I'm not even kidding, it's ridiculous. So if I wouldn't be getting the 2TB drive to swap the old 1TB one, I'd probably just add another 1 TB in.

My current drive is at the edge of the mobo. If I add another NVME it will have to go under the GPU.

I'll use Macrium Reflect to do the image and restore it on the new drive, I have good experience with it, I was just asking if there could be any lower level problem, moving from an older SSD to a newer one, but I guess not.

So the question remains, I'm still not sure if I should go with 2TB 990 or is that overkill and what to get instead? I want top speed possible over PCIe 3.0, as cool as possible and a very reliable drive (reliability and longevity is more important than speed).

PS: I've read that 980 drives don't have DRAM, so that impacts speed right?

 

[USAFRet]

PS: I've read that 980 drives don't have DRAM, so that impacts speed right?

The 980 EVO is DRAMless.
The 980 Pro has DRAM.