Storage for New Gaming Build

[mshecklen]

Have existing Samsung 540 Pro 500 GB... Thinking to add 560 Pro 1T and a M2 Drive... Maybe 512 GB on the M2... Good Set up? OS on 540 with games and data on other drives or OS on M2? Other suggestions? Can I even use an M2 with a Crossfire config say on a HERO VII MB because of space?

 

[failboat]

NVME is great in large capacity. you have to be careful with some of the small ones. they are about the same speed as sata but cost more. samsungs 960 line performance has very large variance between sizes.

I like the idea of optane as cache for a spinning disk. some of the new intel cpus come with one bundled. you could try that and if it's not as snappy as you want after a few weeks of caching then go with the bigger ssd.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds

 

[mshecklen]

NVME is great in large capacity. you have to be careful with some of the small ones. they are about the same speed as sata but cost more. samsungs 960 line performance has very large variance between sizes.

I like the idea of optane as cache for a spinning disk. some of the new intel cpus come with one bundled. you could try that and if it's not as snappy as you want after a few weeks of caching then go with the bigger ssd.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds

Im looking at the Samsung 970 Pro 512gb and the Samsung 560 Pro 1T at this point. Not sure if best config to put OS on M2 but I'm thinking wouldnt hurt and the extra space on the M2 would come in handy over time. And my games on the 560 would be ok ... I haven't built a machine in awhile and The M2 drives are new to me... I also am not sure if I can even use an M2 if Im using a crossfire setup.. ( Room on Mobo and/or too many PCI-E slots used with crossfire )...

 

[failboat]

Skylake or newer has like 40 PCIE 3.0 lanes. 16 cpu, 24 chipset. I don't recommend two graphics. the money is better spent on a single better card.

Don't buy lga 1150 stuff. M.2 is a form factor not to be confused with interface. interface is what matters. That's a PCIE 2.0. Which means it will slow down NVME 3.0x4 ALOT. That gen didn't have great support for NVME boot drives either. a coffee lake i3 outperforms some i7s from haswell so it's not even worth buying old stuff. look at the passmark score on cpubench. single thread increases are probably the most important for gaming. cores and Ghz are not really comparable. transistor count is the only thing remotely comparable across cpus, which isn't published. passmark is a good guesstimate.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

 

[ElectrO_90]

I have both the Pro Nvme and Evo version.
I upgraded from Evo to Pro and what was the difference?
Absolutely nothing in any of the tasks I so, so my conclusion - waste of money for my gaming/cpu needs.
Yes the PRO is on paper technically super fast
Reality = zero difference

 

[mshecklen]

Cool Thank you... Trying to reeducate..... Been 8 years since I build a system. Upgraded some hard drives from raptures to SSDs a few years ago and I've upgraded my video cards twice.. I've been using crossfire setups for 17 years.. I'm running with an I7 980XT / Asus MOBO LGA1366 / 12 GB RAM DDR3 1600 / 2 X Radeon R9 290X 4gb / OS on Samsung 840 Pro 256gb / Games on Samsung 840 Pro 512 gb/ and a ToughPower 1200w power supply...

New build going to be AMD Ryzen 2700X... Asus Hero VII... 32 GB Ram ... GSkill I think.. Using old power supply and Video cards for now and still confused about storage for gaming... with all that sounds like Samsung 970 Evo 512 would be fine for OS and a 860 Pro 1Terabyte for program files would be good???? Or should I just go with 2 860 Pro 1 Terabyte drives???????

I know off topic but after checking with cpu benchmark would it be worth going with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 16-Core Processor instead of 2700xt? For gaming? I wasnt going down that path because I thought 16 core was wasted on gaming but maybe that cpu has other benifits.....

 

[failboat]

Can you link the mobo? the one that came up for me was LGA 1150.

storage for gaming doesn't help in most games. in open world ones you are more likely to load off disk more or ones with loading screens often. I do like SSD a lot. You don't need a lot of storage to increase what is important.

SSD increase sustained and random speeds. random QD1 is the only one that matters.

SLC, MLC, TLC in that order from fast/best endurance to slow/worst endurance. This part doesn't matter alot since consumer use doesn't wear them. in a database server it matters a whole lot. the way that TLC gets good sustained hurts it's random. around 80% of avg consumer reads are random QD1.

NVME protocol is the new faster one compared to IDE or AHCI. NVME has outgrown sata3 so you need PCIE 3.0 x4. most commonly in M.2.

intel optane beats everything on random QD1 by 5x. It's very expensive.
intel is pushing cache heavily. they have 16, 32, 58, 118GB ones. not sure if the software works well with amd.
the next best is NVME SLC or MLC.

On my next build i'm going SSD optane cache with HDD storage, it's way cheaper and most of what I care about will be snappy. plus you don't have to worry about filling up small C drive.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12512/the-intel-optane-ssd-800p-review/5

16GB ram should be more than enough. RAM is super expensive right now. best put towards better gpu.

 

[mshecklen]

Thank you.... rethinking everything...

For now going with Samsung Pro 512 for OS and Samsung Pro 1 T for games while using existing setup... Maybe use NVME for OS when I get new MOBO otherwise sounds like a waste .......

 

[ElectrO_90]

Look at the reviews between PRO and EVO - in SATA there really is no difference unless you want to burn money, then go for PRO