512 nvme or m.2 1tb ssd

Hey boys and girls.

Tough call for me here. So I want to defer to the professionals. Chime in, or feel free to comment on which you'd choose - help me make up my mind before I go for a clean install.

Basically have a notebook on it's way that I will mostly be using for photography as a hobby and light editing.
To my surprise it came with a 512gb 961 nvme. I was planning to use a 1tb mx300 m.2 I had lying around to good use.

I'll be shooting in RAW so space might get eaten quick with only 512gb on the nvme- so 1tb on the Sata M.2 would be preferable. However, I'd appreciate being able to view back pictures and enjoy a low response times - I'm just not sure if the benefits of a 961 come into play here or not.
If there's no real difference in performance for such a light work load with the notebook having a i7-7500U CPU then it's pretty clear which way I should go.

From experience I've historically not noticed much difference if any in NVME vs SSD Sata for OS snappiness / Gaming, however have never taken note in the context of simple photo viewing / light editing.

Like I said, tough call. Thanks in advance for your replies.

 

For short burst disk IO NVMe is the best because you want to transfer/copy as fast as you can.
The downside I noticed on MVMe is the temps. NVMe and M.2 SATA are 10C apart. So m.2 SATA will be cooler when you are transferring massive files for longer duration.
For light editing you won't notice any difference in PM961 and MX300.

 

Thanks for your reply. It's mainly for read performance. I don't mind about big transfers or even small ones. Mainly just being able to open and view images nice and snappy.

 

For Reads NVMe simply wins hands down. For writes I'd still go for MX300.

 

Yeah it's such a tough call. I might just have to do a clean install on each drive and see if my experience is lackluster going from a NVMe to a Sata 3.

 

If that was my taptop and I had to choose only one, I'd go for the bigger SSD any time of the day. Plus the SATA SSDs boot much faster as they don't require the NVMe controller to be initialized during boot up. The difference you will experience cannot be noticed other than in benchmarks. These days, all SSDs are snappy enough IMO. I know it's a very tough call but if it was only 1 to choose out of the two, I'd go for the bigger SSD every time. those raw videos/photos will eat up your space like nobody's business.

 

So explains the increased boot time. In task manager it shows 6 seconds.
On Linux I use SATA SSD boots everything in 3 seconds.

 

I wonder if the boot times are related to the installed CPU?

For example, I'm now using an i7-7820x (28 PCIe lanes) and using the two M.2 NVMe's tied directly to the CPU. Boot loader runs in about 1 second, and choosing an OS is about 2 seconds until log in on Windows or Linux.

 

Well, it hardly depends on cpu,(as far as its not too old).
Even the crapiest CURRENT gen cpu will boot fast AH.

 

Yes they are fast, but I was really getting at the CPUs / Chipsets which tie NVMe PCIe lanes directly to the CPU. This is what is kicking so much a##. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but at this time, only mobos and cpus on the x299 and z370 chipset allow NVMe to bypass the PCH.

 

The CPU is not the problem, the NVMe controller initialization is what's causing me the boot penalty.

Example, on my wife's 4 year old Dell Vostro which has a Crucial MX100 512GB SSD. when I press the the power button, by the time she's on the Windows desktop, I would still be waiting for me to see the MSI Logo splash screen on my laptop. Once the Windows loading circle animation starts it's fast, the problem is the initialization takes forever. This was the same on my previous Clevo laptops as well and the same on my Origin PC Millennium Desktop PC which had an Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD

 

Platform differences perhaps? The mighty mini's boot times from when the BIOS message is cleared away to actual Windows or Linux log-in is about 3.5 seconds.

 

boot penalty came from mostly bios/OS. cpu are already so fast, SSD you may benefit more with higher 4k read/write for boot, but ultimately it is the firmware/software thats limiting it. Win10 RS2 has amazing boot time paired up with optane, OS itself needs to be re-written. most of the stuff i do in windows are still only using 1 cpu core and it sucks.

@TBoneSan

https://www.eteknix.com/samsung-show-off-8tb-nvme-ssd-ces-2018/ this would solve your issue. except that it may not fit

 

Wondering what you ended up using in the end?

I would use the fastest SSD with the biggest capacity that doesn't unnecessarily slow down my workflows (at these capacities external storage is always required... NAS highly recommended for your RAW + finished files...).

See:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/samsung-sm961-ssd-256gb-512gb,review-33601-3.html

See:
https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/storage/crucial-mx300-review/7/


With external storage as a given (for your RAW workflow) the capacity of the SSD becomes moot after a certain point (being able to hold the projects is all that is required...). The fastest SSD then becomes the 'winner' in my books.

Of course; that is after the O/S, software and CPU and RAM is maxed out too (I hope you have => 16GB RAM and a true QC cpu with the most advanced software to power your workloads on Win10x64Pro).

Thanks in advance for updating this thread.

 

@tilleroftheearth thanks for your interest bro. I ended up going with the 1tb. Mainly because I needed the computer to be able to work independently of any NAS/External storage for unspecified periods of time - more of a playing it safe scenario. After setting up the machine and a few old archives I've already used around 280gb. So I think I've probably made the right choice, the OS is snappy enough and reviewing RAWs images thankfully met my more optimistic expectations.