SSD - 2000MB read vs 3200MB

[aubycek]

Hey folks, I am deciding between two SSDs:
Samsung SSD 960 EVO (M.2) - 250GB (MZ-V6E250BW)
-3200mb/s read, 1500mb/s write

WD Black (M.2 2280) - 256GB (WDS256G1X0C)
-2000mb/s read, 700mb/s write

It'd be mainly used for games and OS on it. Would I see the difference between those two? I know 1.2Gb/s difference in read is a lot, but I don't know, maybe there is some sort of cap, where you wouldn't see a difference between 2gb/s and 10gb/s read.


Those two compared here, side by side:
https://www.span.com/compare/WDS256G1X0C-vs-MZ-V6E250BW/60962-59581

 

[SoggyTissue]

at the speeds m2 work at, i would rather look at price > speed. but i guess if you really need a loading advantage in games, speed is king.

 

[JamesSneed]

For gaming and OS both are complete overkill. I have a Samsung 960 Pro for my OS/Game drive and its marginally better than my old SATA SSD in most cases. You will not notice a difference. If you measure game load times you might be able to record less than 1 second difference but that would be about it.

 

[joex444]

Put it this way: if you have 16GB RAM and a 10GB game, with the Samsung 960 you could load the entire game files into RAM in ~3.1s and the WD Black would take ~5.0 seconds.

Now realize that (a) games don't load that way and (b) reading 10GB is typically more than most people do in one big batch and (c) even that worst case scenario is still only 1.7 seconds real-world difference...

That "cap" you're alluding to is the fact that as you double read speed you cut the read time in half, however a 50% decrease isn't necessarily noticeable when the initial time wasn't much. Consider, eg, a 10GB read request with a 100MB/s drive. It would take 1000s, or about 20 minutes. With 200MB/s it's just 500s, less than 10 minutes. With 400MB/s it's 250s - just over 4 minutes. With 800MB/s you save another 125s. But let's go back and look at what happened: increasing it from 400MB/s to 800MB/s, that's an increase of 400MB/s but it only saved 125s. When we added 100MB/s from 100MB/s it saved us 500s, which is 6x as much time savings. So it's not a "cap" it's just that you're reaching an asymptote.

At 2GB/s you're already at the point that you don't have much time to save. Consider, for example, that you could read an entire 256GB drive at 2GB/s in about 2 minutes. What's the point of reading at 3.2GB/s which only cuts it down to 1 minute 20 seconds?

That all said... the WD Black is a huge and noticeable improvement over SATA-III SSDs since it quadruples the SATA-III SSD read speeds so a 4 minute read on SATA-III would only be 1 minute on WD Black NVMe.

And, lastly, keep price in mind. The 960 EVO is a superior drive and is only about 11GBP more expensive so we're not talking about huge differences here. Though, realistically, you should read the benchmarks for those particular capacities since IIRC the 960 EVO only actually reaches 3200MB/s read and 1500MB/s write on the 500GB/1TB model since the 250GB model has fewer NAND chips.

Realistically the only thing that actually matters is the QD1 and QD2 sequential read speeds and 4K random read speeds anyways. The 2GB/s and 3.2GB/s numbers you're quoting are at very high QD which you simply can't reach outside of a very high I/O workload like a database server serving Google or Facebook.

 

[rgd1101]

look at the review "PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance", it not the 250gb, but you get the idea
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-black-pcie-512gb-ssd-review,4924-2.html

 

[aubycek]

Thanks for the response guys. Also, is it true that M.2 SSds (PCIe) in general run very hot, causing throttling?

 

[rgd1101]

Thanks for the response guys. Also, is it true that M.2 SSds (PCIe) in general run very hot, causing throttling?

It might, depend on where you put it and your case air flow, but that usually only for testing, doing heavy load. for gaming and general OS, probably be ok