Question SSD Upgrade Advice

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xdudu99

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Nov 23, 2018
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Im currently using a KINGSTON SA1000M8240G PCI3 as a boot drive (1500 Mb/s Reads/800Mb/s Writes, 100000 iops). Ive recently upgraded to a pci4 platform and im wondering if i should upgrade.
I dont have large bandwidth needs, im mostly seeking improved load times for programs/games, boot time, overall system latency improvements, but some of my research was inconclusive with some indicating that a jump to pci4 nvme wouldn't give any noticeable difference while others suggest that it would feel like the jump from hdd to ssd.
Im not pretending to spend a lot and only want a 1tb drive that will be my boot. I already have a 2tb sata that i can't fill, so capacity is not something im worried.
My system is already pretty optimized for DPC latency (latencymon averages at 2 to 10 ns) but im feeling more and more windows struggling to open some programs. The worst offender recently was a folder on my boot drive taking 10 seconds to load, an the folder is barely 200mb. I dont know if its possible that drive health is the problem, but is at 82% according to smart.

Not gonna specify a price range because it doesn't really translate to Brazil. Besides that, SSD pricing is highly unstable right now, with premium options cheaper than budget ones depending where you look.
Some options i found in my price/performance range were:
- WD Black Sn850x
- Samsung 990 Pro (while the most expensive, there currently are some deals in my country making it closer to the Sn850x pricing)
- Crucial P3 Plus
(980 pro and 970 evo plus are currently more expensive than all other options lol)
While not needing the absolute max bandwidth from pci4, if the pricing is close ill probably choose the faster one, if the IOPS are good enough too.

My specs: Motherboard:
ASUS B550m TUF Gaming Plus Wifi II
CPU : Ryzen 7 5800X3d
GPU : RTX 3070 Galax SG OC


TLDR: Is upgrading from a "old and slow" PCI3 NVME ssd to a PCI4 good one gonna have measurably higher performance in day to day and gaming? (Especially tarkov load times and pagefile stutters) If yes, then should i upgrade to a maximum IOPS scenario or bandwidth is more important after a certain threshold? Thanks in advance
 
xdudu99 said:
but some of my research was inconclusive with some indicating that a jump to pci4 nvme wouldn't give any noticeable difference while others suggest that it would feel like the jump from hdd to ssd.
Click to expand...
This is mostly correct.

The move from HDD to SSD was massive.
Between different flavors of SSD? Not so much.

Having said that, I'd still upgrade to a larger, newer SSD.
240GB is rather slim. And I'm not a fan of Kingston anyway.

Any of your 3 mentions would be a good choice.
 
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USAFRet said:
This is mostly correct.

The move from HDD to SSD was massive.
Between different flavors of SSD? Not so much.

Having said that, I'd still upgrade to a larger, newer SSD.
240GB is rather slim. And I'm not a fan of Kingston anyway.

Any of your 3 mentions would be a good choice.
Click to expand...
Its slim because it was my primary ssd for 7+ years if i recall correctly lol. 240gb at the time was expensive.
Which one of the 3 should i go for? Im mostly between the 990 pro (175 USD aprox) and the sn850x (130 USD aprox). the difference between the 2 in USD seems huge, but in R$ its not really that much, considering im planning on keeping this drive for as long as it lasts too. My main question is: Is the 990 pro that much better? From what ive researched, its supposed to be the best customer grade PCI4 SSD
 
xdudu99 said:
Its slim because it was my primary ssd for 7+ years if i recall correctly lol. 240gb at the time was expensive.
Which one of the 3 should i go for? Im mostly between the 990 pro (175 USD aprox) and the sn850x (130 USD aprox). the difference between the 2 in USD seems huge, but in R$ its not really that much, considering im planning on keeping this drive for as long as it lasts too. My main question is: Is the 990 pro that much better? From what ive researched, its supposed to be the best customer grade PCI4 SSD
Click to expand...
Hard to go wrong with the Samsung.
 
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I agree with above and as far as SSDs go Samsung is really good. At least my experience tells me so, not that other brands are bad. Main known brands have many good models.

I have 3 Samsung SSDs (2 SATA and one M.2) and the oldest SATA one is a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB which has worked for over 2100 days (had it almost 8 years now) as a system drive and has 18TB written to it (that's 72 times over the whole capacity) and remaining life (albeit theoretical) is 92%.

EDIT: I fogot to mention what @geofelt said. The migration tool is a very usefull feature too. I used it to migrate my Windows installation from a HDD to the 840 Pro and it went smoothly. When it finished just rebooted, changed boot drive in BIOS and saved and that was it.
 
Last edited:
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As a ssd fills up, performance and endurance will suffer.
But, that point is closer to 90% full.
I like the samsung ssd devices for upgrading your C drive.
Samsung offers a ssd migration tool that moves your C drive to one of their devices.
App and instructions here:
semiconductor.samsung.com

Tool & Software Download | Samsung Semiconductor Global

Download various software related to your product, including Samsung Magician, designed for use with Samsung's memory products, and find related information.
semiconductor.samsung.com semiconductor.samsung.com

Do not be much swayed by vendor synthetic SSD benchmarks.
They are done with apps that push the SSD to it's maximum using queue lengths of 30 or so.
Most desktop users will do one or two things at a time, so they will see queue lengths of one or two.
What really counts is the response times, particularly for small random I/O. That is what the os does mostly.
For that, the response times of current SSD's are remarkably similar. And quick.
True, faster sequential speeds are better.
But, in a test comparing sata, m.2 and pcie based devices, these experts could not tell the difference:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA
 
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Ok, it finally arrived. I've used acronis true image to clone my old ssd and instantly the performance is night and day (i knew something was off with my old ssd). Booting windows takes half as long, opening programs feels much snappier, even loading into streets on tarkov (offline) took 12 second less. I know its not hard evidence, but from the launcher to opening AND closing the game, everything takes a lot less longer. To my surprise even the menus are faster. Tarkov is crazy like that. One other thing that amazed me was the frametimes while traversing streets. Going from the mall to pinewood was always visible on the frametime graph on rivatuner, but now its noticeably better. It didn't improve the framerate, but it feels (and the graph proves it) less stuttery. Overall pretty happy with the purchase.

I've ran crystal diskmark for comparison, just to see if would pick up any problems with my old drive, but everything was working like spec. What i've gathered from the whole thing is that first gen nvme is significantly slower on some day to day tasks than a good pcie4 drives.
Old:
https://imgur.com/P9TO3Vl
View: https://imgur.com/P9TO3Vl

990 Pro:
https://imgur.com/LkPucOL
View: https://imgur.com/LkPucOL
 
xdudu99 said:
Ok, it finally arrived. I've used acronis true image to clone my old ssd and instantly the performance is night and day (i knew something was off with my old ssd). Booting windows takes half as long, opening programs feels much snappier, even loading into streets on tarkov (offline) took 12 second less. I know its not hard evidence, but from the launcher to opening AND closing the game, everything takes a lot less longer. To my surprise even the menus are faster. Tarkov is crazy like that. One other thing that amazed me was the frametimes while traversing streets. Going from the mall to pinewood was always visible on the frametime graph on rivatuner, but now its noticeably better. It didn't improve the framerate, but it feels (and the graph proves it) less stuttery. Overall pretty happy with the purchase.

I've ran crystal diskmark for comparison, just to see if would pick up any problems with my old drive, but everything was working like spec. What i've gathered from the whole thing is that first gen nvme is significantly slower on some day to day tasks than a good pcie4 drives.
Old:
https://imgur.com/P9TO3Vl
View: https://imgur.com/P9TO3Vl

990 Pro:
https://imgur.com/LkPucOL
View: https://imgur.com/LkPucOL
Click to expand...
Congratulations, your comparison looks great, seems like you made a great choice.
 
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