Question Samsung SSDs for gaming: 970 vs 860, SATA vs M.2

[pstepanas]

I thought this would be so much easier, but I just can't find any concrete information. Any specific help would be enormously appreciated.

I want to put a Samsung EVO SSD (either 500GB or 1TB) into a new desktop gaming system. I cannot find the information I need to choose between three options:

1. Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2
2. Samsung 860 EVO M.2
3. Samsung 860 EVO SATA

Questions:
a) Will I notice any difference in speed between the three options? What are the numbers?
b) Is there a reliability/lifetime difference between the three options? What are the numbers?
c) Will an M.2 drive disable a SATA port on the motherboard? Just one or more than one?

I currently believe the answers to these questions to be (with very low certainty):
a) The list is from fastest to slowest, but I can't find any numbers. Is the difference 10% or 500% or 1%?
b) Samsung lists 1.5 million hours MTBF for all three, but the reviews seem to suggest the SATA option will last 10 times longer than the M.2 options (using a measure I don't recognise).
c) M.2 locks out 2 SATA ports on the motherboard, whereas SATA just uses a normal SATA port.

This has become really frustrating, and I honestly don't know why it's so hard to get good information. Please help.

 

[USAFRet]

2 & 3 are the same speed and technology, SATA III. Just a slightly different package.
The 970 is an NVMe drive, and thus 'faster'.

Use of a drive in the m.2 port, either the 860 EVO (SATA) or the 970 EVO (NVMe) may disable one or more SATA ports on the motherboard. Which ones depends entirely on which specific motherboard you have.

Now...the real question is...which one.
This depends on your use and the rest of the parts in the system.
The 970 EVO is 'faster', but in a LOT of use cases, the speed is not justified by the extra cost.
Don't be dazzled by the benchmark numbers. That is only an indicator, and does not really translate into user facing performance.

In one use case, the 970 may be 5 times faster. In a different use case, in the same PC, maybe only a couple of percent.

For instance...
A Honda Civic with a top speed of 110mph, and a Corvette with a top speed of 160mph.
The Corvette is the obvious faster, and should be chosen, correct?
But not if you're just commuting to work, limited to a road with a 65mph speed limit, and you need to carry 4 people.

 

[SkyNetRising]

1. Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2
2. Samsung 860 EVO M.2
3. Samsung 860 EVO SATA

Questions:
a) Will I notice any difference in speed between the three options? What are the numbers?
b) Is there a reliability/lifetime difference between the three options? What are the numbers?
c) Will an M.2 drive disable a SATA port on the motherboard? Just one or more than one?

a) Slight difference in boot up times between 970 evo and 860 evo. Huge difference in benchmarks. In real usage scenarios - not so much.
860 Evo is the same hardware. It can be either in M.2 or traditional 2.5" form factor. Other than that, there's no difference between #2 and #3.

c) This depends on motherboard. Read technical specification of particular motherboard.
M.2 sata drive almost always disables at least one sata port. M.2 nvme drive may or may not disable 1 or 2 sata ports.

 

[USAFRet]

Let's consider boot time as an indicator.
My system with a 500GB 850 EVO takes ~30 seconds to boot up.
Lets assume that an NVMe drive like the 970 EVO is 3 times faster tha the 850 or 860. You'd expect a 10 second boot time, right?
Wrong.
It would be 20 seconds vs the current 30 seconds.

The first 15 seconds off booting up is simply the BIOS doing its thing. Then the OS and drive takes over.
So the current 850 EVO is responsible for 15 seconds of that full 30 seconds. 3 times faster is 5 seconds.
15 + 5 = 20 seconds.
30 seconds vs 20 seconds is not the huge difference the benchmarks would suggest.

It's way more complicated than that, but this is the general concept.

 

[pstepanas]

Very nice. Thanks to both of you.

Turns out, I was assuming the 860 M.2 was NVMe/PCIe. It's not.

My key benchmark is for gaming. I can see the difference running Diablo III from my current SSD (OCZ-Agility3) vs HDD (WD Black). But D3 is hardly pushing a modern system.

This thread says games will not load any faster with NVMe. I have to assume that includes mid-game loading (which is the real killer). If so, it's hard to justify NVMe.

What about Reliability/Endurance?
This article suggests a standard 860 EVO has an endurance of "Up to 2400 TBW", while every M.2 device is under "800 TBW". What's going on here?

 

[USAFRet]

In current consumer use, endurance is not a real concern.
I have 6 SATA III SSD in my current system, no spinning drives. 5x Samsung (840/850/860) and a 1TB SanDisk. The 2x 840 EVO going back to Nov/Dec 2014.

All 6 combined read as 62TBW, total. Not even 1/10 of that 800TBW number.
I am absolutely not concerned about any of them wearing out due to too many write cycles.
And I make no concessions to avoiding writes to the drive. I use the system exactly I would as if there were spining drives. This is just way faster and quieter.

For a game machine, I fully agree that the NVMe is hard to justify.
HDD vs SSD? Absolutely go to the SSD.
SATA SSD vs NVMe SSD? Not so much.