Gen 4 slow down because of Gen 3 boot drive?

[Deleted member 24505]

Is this true what this person is saying? Personally i do not think so and just another Steam PC expert.

 

[Blaeza]

I'm definitely no expert, but gen 4 is gen 4, so unless you've got a gen 3 drive in there, you get gen 4 speeds. If that makes sense?

 

[eazen]

It’s nonsense. If the game for example is on the Gen 4 drive it will directly load from there. The OS drive has nothing to do with the game loader. A issue could happen if you have steam on your slower drive and the game on the Gen 4 drive, it would maybe load a bit slower then, but still mainly the Gen 4 drive will be used even in this strange case. Be sure that the apps like Steam, Origin etc are all on the fast drive, then it will only use the faster drive. I have my windows on a older regular ssd and I have most my games on a NVME that is much faster and it works normally.

 

[ir_cow]

umm total BS that a Gen3 is slowing down Gen4. I use SATA as a OS drive still. The only reason I could think that would make Gen4 better as a OS if your transferring data between drives. Still unless your are planning on sustaining 3GB/s it also not a problem.

I have a feeling that person is thinking that everything in the computer drops to the lowest value and isn't independent of each-other.

 

[Dr. Dro]

There's really no bearing in that, unless you exceed available PCIe lane count. Three drives at x4 will require twelve lanes, even if one of the drives operates at Gen 3. Z690 chipset configuration provides 28, of which 24 are usually usable as two tend to be reserved for the SATA controller, plus one each for the NIC and Audio on most motherboards.

This means that a GPU at x16 + three x4 NVMe drives would end up requiring 28 lanes, unless some SATA ports are disabled (most motherboards disable two ports when full NVMe configuration is detected) and/or one of the drives is reduced to operate at x2 speeds.

This is one of the reasons people dread the death of Threadripper.

 

[looniam]

I have a feeling that person is thinking that everything in the computer drops to the lowest value and isn't independent of each-other.

that feeling contagious!

Is this true what this person is saying? Personally i do not think so and just another Steam PC expert.

maybe a question will answer that; would you go to steam for DIY builder's advice?

not that there isn't anyone who knows what their talking about - but unless i have a game specific problem and even that brings out the knuckleheads- i never bother reading/posting there.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Seems the os disk has an awful lot installed on it driver wise to just say the only drive that matters is the game drives speed
nv driver/....

Think you have to refer to why ms is going towards direct storage.

 

[eazen]

Hi,
Seems the os disk has an awful lot installed on it driver wise to just say the only drive that matters is the game drives speed
nv driver/....

Think you have to refer to why ms is going towards direct storage.

That’s not how it works. The game is loaded from the game drive not through the OS drive and the game drive. And DirectStorage has nothing to do with this, DS is a replacement so the GPU can directly load from NVME instead of going through the system with the CPU calculating it before hand. It means, levels can be bigger because of no additional loading times.

 

[mama]

There seem to be a lot of opinions and 'educated assumptions' - no empirical evidence so far.

 

[eazen]

There seem to be a lot of opinions and 'educated assumptions' - no empirical evidence so far.

Not if you know how a file system works, this is basic knowledge. “Empirical evidence” okay this topic isn’t exactly deep.

 

[mama]

Not if you know how a file system works, this is basic knowledge. “Empirical evidence” okay this topic isn’t exactly deep.

'educated assumption' it is then...

 

[eazen]

'educated assumption' it is then...

It’s a educated fact. And if I need to prove this in a tech forum this size, there’s honestly no point to this forum anymore.

You wanna test it yourself? Open task manager on your second monitor, then start the game and observe the usage of the drive the game is on, the faster drive of course. Let’s see how high the usage is compared to the slower drive with windows installed.

 

[Solaris17]

Wow, I can’t believe I read a thread where people were unsure if a disk not in use by software affected the speed of the disk the software in question was installed on.

 

[mama]

The question was whether having a gen 3 OS drive with a gen 4 games drive slows down the system (which I take to mean lower fps and/or load times). Now I don't profess to know. However, my rudimentary understanding says it is possible. Despite what some are saying, the OS drive is operating when a game is played even if it is background functions. My main point is testing can reveal this (one way or the other).

 

[eazen]

The question was whether having a gen 3 OS drive with a gen 4 games drive slows down the system (which I take to mean lower fps and/or load times). Now I don't profess to know. However, my rudimentary understanding says it is possible. Despite what some are saying, the OS drive is operating when a game is played even if it is background functions. My main point is testing can reveal this (one way or the other).

It's not possible. The game is loaded from the game drive and has nothing to do with the OS drive, both are in use, however the OS drive does not impact or slow down the other drive. If you want to say otherwise, you can prove it to me, not the other way around. I have already told you how to test it, this is the most basic stuff.

 

[mama]

It's not possible. The game is loaded from the game drive and has nothing to do with the OS drive, both are in use, however the OS drive does not impact or slow down the other drive. If you want to say otherwise, you can prove it to me, not the other way around. I have already told you how to test it, this is the most basic stuff.

You need to take a chill pill. Having said that, I don't agree that "this is the most basic stuff".

 

[Mussels]

Is this true what this person is saying? Personally i do not think so and just another Steam PC expert.
View attachment 253324

It's steam. Steam is not where technical people go.

the only time SSD's even really slow down is those tiny ass 4K random writes, in which case even SATA is still many times faster than needed

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I kinda knew he was talking crap, but thought I would post it here anyway, at least it shows how much "expertise" there is on Steam.

I know my Gen 3 boot nvme is plenty fast enough, and my Gen 4 SN850's are definitely quick enough and only used for games.

 

[Mussels]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I kinda knew he was talking crap, but thought I would post it here anyway, at least it shows how much "expertise" there is on Steam.

I know my Gen 3 boot nvme is plenty fast enough, and my Gen 4 SN850's are definitely quick enough and only used for games.

I run mixed 3 and 4 as well, i cant even remember which one is which right now - they perform identical for anything except sustained reads or writes (and with only one gen 4 drive, that's a bit hard to use to its max)

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
It's easy to test
Just install a game on the os disk and play
Record the fps and compare it to the gaming disk runs boom post results.

 

[Wirko]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I kinda knew he was talking crap, but thought I would post it here anyway, at least it shows how much "expertise" there is on Steam.

I know my Gen 3 boot nvme is plenty fast enough, and my Gen 4 SN850's are definitely quick enough and only used for games.

Maybe somewhere a system with a weird buggy BIOS exists, in which one connected Gen 3 drive makes other drives fall back to Gen 3. Or fall back from four to two lanes. In any event, it's a special case, not a rule.

 

[chrcoluk]

Not only is it BS, but the typical user isnt going to notice the difference between SATA and nvme, never mind gen3 vs gen 4.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Can Windows actually control PCIe revision, or does that have to be set in BIOS? I know some of the TPU staff have done some PCIe testing, wasn't sure if they could control it through Windows or had to reboot for each test.

 

[OneMoar]

complete horse shit as long a the motherboard/cpu has sufficient PCIe bandwidth it doesn't matter
there are however cases where using both NVME slots can disable one of the pcie slots or sata ports

 

[aQi]

This is not the issue at all. I suggest you put the gen3 x4 drive into the gen3 x4 m2 slot and the gen4 x4 drives to the gen4 x4 m2 slots. The windows will load from gen3 x4 and as far as the rest of gen4 they will be fully working on gen4 speeds. Besides this and contrary you would barely notice the difference between windows loading from gen3 compared to gen4.

But I would highly recommend you use your gen4 x4 m2 slot for gen4 x4 (install OS to this one) that is directly coming from cpu rather then chipset.