Question Which NVMe drive for what

[Bellzemos]

Hi,

I have a Samsung 960 EVO 1TB NVMe drive in my desktop PC (i7-7700K, Asus Z270-A, 32 GB, GTX 1080, Win10).

I have another NVMe drive, Intel 660p 1TB, as an external drive (via USB), which I use to store system backups.

I will buy another NVMe drive (probably a Samsung 990 PRO 1TB), which will become my main internal drive (OS and stuff) and will replace the 960 EVO.

I have a couple of questuons I hope you can help me with:

1. Which of the two old NVMe drives (660p and 960 EVO) should work better as the external backup drive (system image backups, writing files up to 500 GB on the drive), in a small metal enclosure? And the remaining of the two drives would then be used as the second internal drive (which will be used for testing system images by restoring them in a VM, on that second drive).

The 660p has so far worked fairly slow as the external backup drive (the motherboard supports USB at 10 Gbps - I've tested with CrystalDiskMark and the 660p actually reaches up to ~9 Gbps). But the 660p has a small cache that gets filled up quickly and then the large image files are written very slowly. Also, the external metal enclosure gets so hot that I can barely hold it in my hand. Would the 960 EVO perform better as the external backup drive? In that case, I would use the Inte 660p as a secondary internal NVMe drive. So, would this make more sense than having the 960 EVO as the secondary internal drive (which is what I originally intended), what do you think?

2. Thermal pads - is it OK to remove a used NVMe thermal pad and use it on another NVMe? It seems as if it was glued to the drive in the the external enclosure. If it can be removed, should I then use the old thermal pad on the new NVMe drive or should I get a new thermal pad (if so, which one/what kind)?

Thank you!

 

[USAFRet]

1. How are you doing these backups?
Going to the 660p (I have one, internally) should be no issue.
I suspect your external enclosure is the issue.

 

[Bellzemos]

1. I'm using Macrium Reflect to do system images of my internal Samsung NVMe drive's partitions, via USB, to the Intel 660p in the external enclosure. Written image file sizes range from ~50 GB to ~500 GB. The speed should be near 10 Gbps but it's going up and down during the process, reaching 3,7 Gbps at most.

 

[USAFRet]

1. I'm using Macrium Reflect to do system images of my internal Samsung NVMe drive's partitions, via USB, to the Intel 660p in the external enclosure. Written image file sizes range from ~50 GB to ~500 GB. The speed should be near 10 Gbps but it's going up and down during the process, reaching 3,7 Gbps at most.

My nightly Macrium Incrementals go to an HDD folder tree on my NAS.

Each drive, individually, takes only a minute or two.

For a full drive Image, it depends on the slowest device in the chain.
The drive, or the USB interface, or the cable, or the source drive and system....

There wouldn't be a lot of difference between the 660p and the 970.
Certainly not enough diff to fret about.

 

[Bob.B]

Hi,

I have a Samsung 960 EVO 1TB NVMe drive in my desktop PC (i7-7700K, Asus Z270-A, 32 GB, GTX 1080, Win10).

I have another NVMe drive, Intel 660p 1TB, as an external drive (via USB), which I use to store system backups.

I will buy another NVMe drive (probably a Samsung 990 PRO 1TB), which will become my main internal drive (OS and stuff) and will replace the 960 EVO.

I have a couple of questuons I hope you can help me with:

1. Which of the two old NVMe drives (660p and 960 EVO) should work better as the external backup drive (system image backups, writing files up to 500 GB on the drive), in a small metal enclosure? And the remaining of the two drives would then be used as the second internal drive (which will be used for testing system images by restoring them in a VM, on that second drive).

The 660p has so far worked fairly slow as the external backup drive (the motherboard supports USB at 10 Gbps - I've tested with CrystalDiskMark and the 660p actually reaches up to ~9 Gbps). But the 660p has a small cache that gets filled up quickly and then the large image files are written very slowly. Also, the external metal enclosure gets so hot that I can barely hold it in my hand. Would the 960 EVO perform better as the external backup drive? In that case, I would use the Inte 660p as a secondary internal NVMe drive. So, would this make more sense than having the 960 EVO as the secondary internal drive (which is what I originally intended), what do you think?

2. Thermal pads - is it OK to remove a used NVMe thermal pad and use it on another NVMe? It seems as if it was glued to the drive in the the external enclosure. If it can be removed, should I then use the old thermal pad on the new NVMe drive or should I get a new thermal pad (if so, which one/what kind)?

Thank you!

Put a couple of plastic pens under the ext case to create an air space see if it makes a temp diff of the case.

 

[Bellzemos]

I've tried lifing the ext case in a similar manner but it didn't help.

In my case it seems that the slowest part of the chain is the 660p. I'm not 100% sure if it's the tiny cache (but it's what I suspect) or the heat when saving a big image file on it.

I've read that a DRAM-less NVMe would generate less heat, so maybe I should get a 980 EVO for the external backup drive and stick the 660p in the motherboard as the secondary drive?

What about the thermal pads? Anyone ever re-used those?

 

[BFG-9000]

960 EVO 1TB may be slightly faster than the 660p 1TB over USB, but note the power specs:
660p 1TB is Peak: 4.0w, Avg: 2.3w, Idle: 0.68w while the
960 EVO 1TB is rated Typ. 5.7w, Idle : 0.04w but SSD Review measured 6.1w peak and 1.186w idle so with 50% higher power consumption would require better heatsinking than your external enclosure provides

It's usually OK to reuse a thermal pad if it hasn't torn or deformed

 

[USAFRet]

I've tried lifing the ext case in a similar manner but it didn't help.

In my case it seems that the slowest part of the chain is the 660p. I'm not 100% sure if it's the tiny cache (but it's what I suspect) or the heat when saving a big image file on it.

I've read that a DRAM-less NVMe would generate less heat, so maybe I should get a 980 EVO for the external backup drive and stick the 660p in the motherboard as the secondary drive?

What about the thermal pads? Anyone ever re-used those?

1. How long does this backup take?

2. Why are you doing a full drive backup all the time?

3. The write speed of the target drive (660p vs 970 EVO) is but one small part of the chain, and likely not the most important part.

 

[Bellzemos]

1. Depends on the size.

2. I'm not, I'm often doing differential images.

3. Declared sequential write speed of 660p is 1800 MB/s, so I can't be happy with it's real peak performance which is in my case ~450 MB/s. It should be at least ~1000 MB/s.

960 EVO 1TB may be slightly faster than the 660p 1TB over USB, but note the power specs:
660p 1TB is Peak: 4.0w, Avg: 2.3w, Idle: 0.68w while the
960 EVO 1TB is rated Typ. 5.7w, Idle : 0.04w but SSD Review measured 6.1w peak and 1.186w idle so with 50% higher power consumption would require better heatsinking than your external enclosure provides

It's usually OK to reuse a thermal pad if it hasn't torn or deformed

True, but I think that heat is not the real issue here, not sure though.

Now I don't know if I should leave everything as is and just buy a cheap 1TB NVMe to use as the secondary internal drive.
Or buy a pricier/better drive which will replace my 960 EVO and then try with EVO in the external enclosure....

 

[USAFRet]

3. Declared sequential write speed of 660p is 1800 MB/s, so I can't be happy with it's real peak performance which is in my case ~450 MB/s. It should be at least ~1000 MB/s.

#3. I expect the USB interface and enclosure is the issue. NOT the 660p drive speed.

 

[Bob.B]

I've tried lifing the ext case in a similar manner but it didn't help.

In my case it seems that the slowest part of the chain is the 660p. I'm not 100% sure if it's the tiny cache (but it's what I suspect) or the heat when saving a big image file on it.

I've read that a DRAM-less NVMe would generate less heat, so maybe I should get a 980 EVO for the external backup drive and stick the 660p in the motherboard as the secondary drive?

What about the thermal pads? Anyone ever re-used those?

Take the enclosure apart and expose the ssd to air see if it makes a diff.

 

[Bellzemos]

I will try that and test, thank you guys. I have another question.

I can see that I have Samsung NVMe driver v2.3 in the Device Manager (the driver is not the latest version).

I've read that the new 990 PRO drives don't use Samsung NVMe drivers anymore, but Microsoft's. If I install a 990 PRO alongside the old 960 EVO (which uses the Samsung NVMe driver), should I then delete the Samsung driver and have the Microsoft driver - or should I leave the old Samsung driver installed - or...? What would be best/proper?

Thanks.

 

[Bellzemos]

Anyone, please?

 

[Bellzemos]

Hello,

to answer my own question (maybe this info comes in handy to someone with a simiar situation), someone who will install a second Samsung NVMe in the same PC (on the same motherboard), one older drive using Samsung driver and one newer drive using Microsoft driver.
I had 960 EVO drive, using Samsung NVMe driver and I imaged the drive for backup, then installed 990 PRO in it's M.2 slot (and moved the 960 EVO to the second M.2 slot) and then restored the image to the new drive. When I tried to boot (into Windows 10) from it, it froze at the Windows loading screen (circling white dots under Windows logo). I tried a couple of times, waited for a long time, alwas the same - always had to press the power button to force the PC to turn off.
Then I booted into Windows safe mode and uninstalled the Samsung NVMe driver. After that it booted OK into Windows. I later reinstalled the Samsung driver, so now 990 PRO uses MS driver and 960 EVO uses Samsung driver.

Now to the other thing. My system is a bit older (i7-7700K, Asus Z270-A, 32 GB, GTX 1080, Win10), I have latest BIOS version, dating back to 2018. The 960 EVO is reaching great speeds on the system and 990 PRO even better (for what PCIe 3.0 allows), except for the random write speed - it's way too low.
I'm very happy with sequential read and write speeds and random read speed, but not random write. Is there any way to optimize the random write speed?
4K alignment is OK, Trim is enabled, overprovisioning is set to 10%, Windows power settings are on max. Both, 960 EVO and 990 PRO are on the same system (both have latest FW) - and 960 EVO has way better random write speeds than 990 PRO - why?