Does a faster NVMe make any difference?

[SPDIF]

As long as they need this kind of cooling... At the moment I'm more then happy with my PCIE4.0 SSD's. I hope Samsung make them more efficient then the other's on the market, with less heat.

 

[outpt]

the only time i can tell any difference is in moving files from one drive to the other.

 

[SPDIF]

Yep here the same, then you see the difference. But an SSD is not made to copy or move files every day... And for that few seconds longer with PCIE4.0, well...
If you have to move or copy every day, then you are better off with the old platters, so you don't use the life of your expensive SSD's NAND.

 

[A Computer Guy]

Yep here the same, then you see the difference. But an SSD is not made to copy or move files every day... And for that few seconds longer with PCIE4.0, well...
If you have to move or copy every day, then you are better off with the old platters, so you don't use the life of your expensive SSD NAND.

As a storage device SSD is definitely made to move and copy files every day. Some of course being better than others. There is no need for anyone to be apprehensive in using their SSD storage device as long as one has one has accounted for the use case and endurance of their device.

 

[SPDIF]

Some days sure, surely not every day, for that this type of memory is to expensive and short life. Then you could invest in optane.
Or as said old platters who don't care to copy TB's every day.

 

[freeagent]

Or as said old platters who don't care to copy TB's every day.

They care.. I have a 1TB spinner sitting at like 70% health. It spent most of its days in my moms old Inspiron laptop. I only give it power now and then as it has some stuff I value But I have that stuff copied a few times on other HDD's, and a copy for myself on NVMe.

 

[SPDIF]

Oh yes that laptop platters, but i use here Helium filled platters, these don't care for that at any way. It goes a lot slower, but no problem for me. I save my expensive NAND for store and read files or OS boot. They move files at a rate between 250 to 300MB per second, not so bad for old platters.

Although the new SSDs are faster, the old hard drives are far from being written off... If money is no problem, then surely use SSD, or Optane who will cost you a kidney...

 

[JWNoctis]

I think right now SSD speed in consumer space is in that no-man's-land, where there are more than fast enough - or way too much more than fast enough with PCIe 5.0 drives - for disk drive type workloads where the bottleneck is mostly somewhere else. I think I see >4GBps speed on my PCIe 4.0 drive just one or two times, and not often even in file copy, outside benchmarks. It really does put things in perspective, when this thing has more benchmarked bandwidth than the PCIe 3.0 x8 interface of the GPU of my previous setup.

Yet they are still far away from RAM-like bandwidth, for the kind of workload where iterating over large datasets is necessary. Not that there's much of that yet in client space.

One could only hope that developers will begin to take better advantage of these, now that the capability is definitely there. Optimize how large assets are loaded even more, maybe.

 

[SPDIF]

I am very curious with what Samsung will come soon... A 1080 Pro maybe?

 

[Wirko]

I'll get a pcie 5 drive when samsung releases it's flagship for it. Until then, they are all knock offs.

Great... Samsung spends a year and a half examining Samsung knockoffs, then launches THE original Samsung, which does weird things at first, but after a couple months and a couple FW updates, everything runs fine. Is that what you mean?

I am very curious with what Samsung will come soon... A 1080 Pro maybe?

Great... Samsung spends a year examining 1080 Pros at Ali, then launches THE original 1080 Pro, which looks exactly the same, but has Samsung written on it. Sellers at Ali then notice improved sales. Is that what you mean?

 

[jarablue]

Great... Samsung spends a year and a half examining Samsung knockoffs, then launches THE original Samsung, which does weird things at first, but after a couple months and a couple FW updates, everything runs fine. Is that what you mean?


Great... Samsung spends a year examining 1080 Pros at Ali, then launches THE original 1080 Pro, which looks exactly the same, but has Samsung written on it. Sellers at Ali then notice improved sales. Is that what you mean?

I guess what I am saying is I'll wait until Samsung releases their flagship gen 5 nvme. Nothing else.

Thanks.

 

[Wirko]

I guess what I am saying is I'll wait until Samsung releases their flagship gen 5 nvme. Nothing else.

Thanks.

Others have already come close to maximum possible gen 5 sequential speed, and no one did or will improve random read speed significantly. The superior product is going to be the one that emits less heat. It could be Samsung or it could be someone else.

 

[chrcoluk]

Do you have an Optane?

Dont own one no, although I could probably borrow one.

 

[LabRat 891]

Dont own one no, although I could probably borrow one.

IMHO, 'having around' at least 1 58-118GB P1600X is well worthwhile. ($25-65) [Multi-ISO, OS install drive w/ drivers, utilities, and benchmarking tools in a 10gbps or better USB-NVME adapter, comes to mind]
NtM, Even the much-slower (and dirt cheap, $5-10) '16GB' (13-14.4GiB) M10 Optane Gen3x2 M/B-key drives, install Windows/OSes the fastest I've ever seen (even over USB 2.0).

If one has an esp. old system w/ an extra PCIEx1 slot, you can use cheap Optane M10 modules on WinXP64 and newer, for pagefile, etc.
The relatively affordable P1600Xs make stupid-fast boot drives on the earliest NVMEboot supporting boards, too.

My point:
Optane is very performant and useful even, for those that think a mere 13-110.26GiB NVMe drive is 'useless' as a main boot drive.

Note: Intel themselves market the P1600Xs as Cache or OS boot drives.

Intel Reveals Optane SSD P1600X: Entry-Level Boot & Caching SSDs

Intel's Optane SSD P1600X are designed for boot, caching, and logging workloads.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Speedyblupi]

I'll get a pcie 5 drive when samsung releases it's flagship for it. Until then, they are all knock offs.

I don't think it's worth waiting for Samsung specifically, just for any good PCIe 5.0 SSD with a reasonable price.
A few years ago the 970 Evo was easily the best high-end SSD, but now we've got proper competition in the high-end from other SSDs like the SN850X and Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, which are just as good and usually about the same price or cheaper than the 990 Pro; and much cheaper SSDs which are barely behind, like the S70 Blade, KC3000, and NV7000.
But still, I agree that PCIe 5.0 SSDs are effectively knock-offs at the moment. Most of them aren't much faster than high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs, even in sequential bandwidth; and the ones that are are so much more expensive and less efficient that it's just not worth it. It was the same with PCIe 4.0 - early PCIe 4.0 SSDs didn't beat the 970 Evo consistently, and Samsung fully deserved their reputation as the best SSD option back then (IMO at least until the Hynix P31 came out).

Some days sure, surely not every day, for that this type of memory is to expensive and short life.

This isn't really true. Data is constantly shuffled around on an SSD as the controller tries to optimise access times and balance load. They're also used for caching of data in RAM.
SSDs aren't designed to have their data rewritten as often as RAM, of course, but it's still a very important part of how SSDs operate. This is why SSDs are usually rated for a TBW of hundreds of times their capacity. Even if you don't modify every file hundreds of times, the SSD will still wear out eventually.

 

[AleXXX666]

Here's some solid real-use-relevant testing from W1zzard
Game Load Times:

Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB Review

Samsung 990 Pro is the company's flagship M.2 NVMe SSD. Compared to the 980 Pro, it comes with an improved controller and more modern flash. Our review confirms: this is the fastest PCI-Express 4.0 drive you can buy right now, beating the competition from WD, Phison and Solidigm.

www.techpowerup.com

Windows Startup Times:

Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB Review

Samsung 990 Pro is the company's flagship M.2 NVMe SSD. Compared to the 980 Pro, it comes with an improved controller and more modern flash. Our review confirms: this is the fastest PCI-Express 4.0 drive you can buy right now, beating the competition from WD, Phison and Solidigm.

www.techpowerup.com

If you have specific needs, it may well be worth it. If it's just for 'general' and 'gaming' use, you probably won't actually notice a bit of difference.

For day-to-day use, and 'seat of your pants' feel, faster Rnd4Ks will be the biggest impact.
So, If you really want to feel a difference in an NVME upgrade, go Optane.

Optane 1600X 118GB - Lots of CDM benching and some thoughts

These CDM benchmarks of the P1600X were made on a clean Win 11 Pro 23H2 install for the first run. Then as a second step, to sort of parallel the conditions in which W1zzard tests these, I filled the drive furthermore to about 80% capacity to rerun all tests – twice. It’s not like I went into...

www.techpowerup.com

Beyond that, purchase by application/need. If no specific usecase, then buy 'best bang for buck'.
Many NVME drives w/ DRAM cache are nearly indistinguishable in 'seat of pants' and day-to-day 'normal use' performance.

Which, is why I have
a P1600X 118GB on the CPU M.2,
a Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1TB on the X570 M.2
and
4x Solidgm P41+ 2TBs in a QNAP QM2-4P-384A ASMedia PCIe Gen3 switch-equipped NVMe expander in my X570's x4 slot.

I've had the Rocket 4.0 and P41+ as boot drives, before. The Optane is faster for that use.
Sure, the Rocket 4.0 'benches' the fastest of the lot but, only in raw short-term throughput.
Cache Exhaustion being more noticeable/coming up sooner on the DRAMless QLC P41+ v. the DRAM'd TLC Rocket 4.0.


PS:
(At least on desktop) M.2 drives need not be constrained to the M.2 slot.
Passive adapters (M.2 to PCIe x1 and x4 slots) are very affordable and common.
View attachment 345403View attachment 345404

Conversely, U.2 and other 'server' standard NVME formfactor-interfaces are readily adapted to M.2 and PCIe x4.
View attachment 345401View attachment 345402

So, if it were in budget (<$400)... a 1.5TB Optane 905P for boot drive, could still connect into your CPU-connected M.2 slot.

LOL. In gaming scenario you are very likely to see a difference.

 

[lexluthermiester]

They care.. I have a 1TB spinner sitting at like 70% health. It spent most of its days in my moms old Inspiron laptop. I only give it power now and then as it has some stuff I value But I have that stuff copied a few times on other HDD's, and a copy for myself on NVMe.

To be fair, HDD's have MUCH more write endurance than even MLC based NAND.

 

[wolf]

I've yet to see many games make a large difference with a high end pci-e gen 4 m.2 vs a sata SSD, but the firmer should age well in terms of games requiring fast streaming, and m.2 to m.2 file copies are wildly fast.

 

[SPDIF]

Fwiw, as long that you need active cooling for a SSD to work i opt out... For the same price you can install a big resistor in your PC that just does the same as PCIE 5.0 SSD's, Burn up energy...

Knowing Samsung they will come out with something very power efficient, more then other's. As for now i'm good with my PCIE 4.0 SSD that only has small passive cooling on them.
Even if they come out soon, i'm not gonna replace my PCIE 4.0 SSD's without a good reason to do so. Just for a booting time for 2 seconds shorter, it's not worth the money and the power they use.

If you’re a PC gamer looking to upgrade to PCIe 5.0 drives, I’d say save your cash right now and grab a more affordable PCIe 4.0 drive. If you use a PC for a combination of gaming and professional tasks, then it might be worth looking at PCIe 5.0, but really, it’s only content creators and professionals that should even be considering these drives right now.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Fwiw, as long that you need active cooling for a SSD to work i opt out...

Same here. If it can't run without cooling, an SSD is not going in my system. This is mostly due to lack of space on many motherboards but also because I don't feel like it should a requirement.

 

[remixedcat]

How good is this drive:
WDC PC SN520 SDAPNUW-512G-1006 (20110006)

That's the one on this precision 3550 laptop

my inspiron has BC901 SK HYNIX 1024GB

 

[kapone32]

That's exactly why i stay away from PCIE 5.0 at moment, needs active cooling... Power hungry, very inefficient. Again a extra ventilator... I'm good with my PCIE 4.0 drives now.
Soon we need HVAC compressor cooling in every PC.

And hardly see the difference between them, so yeah...

Does it though? I have 2 MP 700s in my system and they work fine.

 

[SPDIF]

Does it though? I have 2 MP 700s in my system and they work fine.

Fortunately, that should still be the case

 

[iameatingjam]

I have the 970 EVO and I just ordered the 990 PRO.
Do you think that I'm going to see any difference?

You're most likely to see differences when transferring files. And probably not much elsewhere. That being said, I myself, really care a lot of about file transfer speed. Nothing frustrates me more than SSDs advertised as blazingly fast, drop down to totally unacceptable lows once their burst period is over. Thats why the spec I care about most is sustained write. But also, there's not a lot of people like me so..... that might not be relevant at all.

 

[SPDIF]

This is promising new's, Samsung to follow this way for sure.

Not saying i will replace my new PCIE 3.0 SSD here when they come out. At moment they serve me very well and enough speed. But it is a good step in the right direction.
I don't feel the need right now to have always the newest technology in your computer for nothing.
I only replace my new PCIE 3.0 SSD when i need to for some reason. At moment they are fast enough for what i do.

Silicon Motion's PCIe 5.0 SSD controller is finally coming in Q4 — low-power SSDs will leverage SM2508

Silicon Motion's SM2508-based SSD can achieve a 14.9 GB/s speed at around 7W.

www.tomshardware.com