NVMe vs. SATA SSDs for Gamers

Great find, I feel totally cool with my substandard Intel Nvme which supposedly has the same speed as a sata SSD.

 

"So how come they took the same amount of time? Well, it's pretty simple actually; games simply aren't bottlenecked by storage."

Although I could nitpick about their testing methods, I agree with the overall message they're sharing.

Not only games, but most/all consumer workloads are NOT bottlenecked by storage at all with our current O/S, drivers and I/O testing methods. This video shows that beautifully.

Circa 2009-2010 when the first 'affordable' SSD's began appearing I said the same thing about them vs. the best HDD's of that time (vRaptors...). People laughed. Peeps made fun (of me). No problem!

If you want a fast (or faster...) system (no matter what your workflow/workloads are...) - get the most CPU you can afford and pair it with the fastest and most (capacity) RAM possible and run the latest/best O/S available now (Win10x64 Pro).

The CPU+RAM combo is what does the 'work' in modern O/S' and programs - even in gaming systems.

That's not to say ancillary components aren't needed (like storage and GPU's for specific workloads) - but EVERYTHING gets a boost when the heart and soul of a modern computer is upgraded to a level to as much as you can afford.

 

When games can take advantage of Raid 0 SSD's ill think about NVME as relevant to me.

Otherwise its just a method of saving space on an SFF desktop

 

Thanks for this. Guess i can save myself some money.

 

NVME, useless for gamers in all of it's essence.

Load times in games are practically gone anyways, so there's also that.

 

This thread needs more attention and feedback.

 

Depends on the game. For open world games, SSD is more advantageous. Games like Playerunknown's Battleground is notorious for botching textures unless it's on an SSD. Or just too much lagged "pop-in" of models. Otherwise for other games, where most of it is loaded into video and or system RAM a regular HDD will be fine.

 

Agreed...but SATA or NVMe? When you say SSD, do you see any advantage to the NVMe over SATA, regardless of the game?

 

From my personal, seat-of-the-pants experience, there is little to no perceptible difference in game load times between SATA and NVMe. The latter is useful as a boot drive and if you're doing activities that require a lot of disk access. Otherwise, I would happily trade speed for capacity, hence why I ordered a 1 TB M.2 SATA drive, rather than a 512 GB NVMe, for my 16L13.

 

True. Nvme vs SATA won't matter.

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

 

nvme only seems viable for data access in work-related process'.

gamers are unable to utilize a nvme as you reach the bottleneck that is 1) the games code 2) your other hardware

 

what kills me about NVMe SSDs is how long it takes the motherboard to initialize the NVMe controller. It is pretty sad that my wife's 4 year old Dell Vostro with a Crucial MX100 512GB SSD boots to Windows in 8 seconds from the moment you press the power button to the Windows desktop while my expensive laptop with dual 960 PROs in RAID 0 takes 15 seconds just to start showing me the Windows loading icon then another 10 seconds to reach to the desktop

So yeah, the benchmark numbers are insane, but where do I see the benefit as a user? certainly not in my workflow... maybe if you are dealing with humongous files on a constant basis then yes it will matter going NVMe but as it stands now, the only reason I am using NVMe SSDs is purely because they offer the largest storage capacity.

 

Do you miss your Sandisk Extreme Pro drives? How much can you shave of if yoo change and use single boot drive?

 

thats more of mobo/bios implementation, on desktop side of things with NVMe SSD, they boot faster than SATA SSD. desktop users are all about high end, efficiency, speed and feature. if a mobo takes that long to boot they will get no business from desktop builder.

sandisk had some decent Sata SSDs when they were using sandforce controller, but the new sandisk SSDs like extreme or extreme pro are dying left and right, i own like 5-6 of them and rma like 3 or 4 lol.

 

Save your money, invest what you would have spent on an expensive and hot running NVME PCIE x4 M.2 drive into a 2x larger M.2 SATA drive, or even a 2.5" SSD drive to replace the 2.5" HDD that your laptop came with.

HDD Vs. SSD Vs. NVMe M.2 - Does a NVMe Drive Help Boot Times?

 

Whats wrong with the machine? Boot 36/37 sec with ssd's. Bloat? Aka Tested on MSI?

 

I found video's with longer boot times on SSD too

Who knows, it's the comparison that matters...right?

Same content took longer / same on PCI NVME

I think @Phoenix complained about this as well, it's the initialization delay for NVME on the motherboard.

That's why it's good to look at what the actual benefits are from M.2 PCIE x4 NVME SSD's compared to M.2 SATA SSD's in real life usage.

Most people aren't going to notice the difference of a few seconds longer startup for apps / games, and in game it's even less noticeable - whereas the 6x speed up from SATA HDD to SATA SSD is much more noticeable.

 

A huge amount of people think their new purchased laptops with M.2 PCIe drives are incredibly fast in boot. They do not know that it's Fast Startup in newer Windoze that tricks them

 

That's a negative, had an Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD on my previous desktop, boots slow as a turtle....same thing, takes ages to initialize during POST

That desktop was an Origin PC Millennium with a 5930K CPU overclocked to 4,5 GHz and an ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard.

 

lol whats with the videos you pick rofl. i seriously doubt these guys know what they are doing. ive got reviewers showing me they boot from nvme ssds in under 11 sec, cold boot, no sleep files enabled and all those jazz etc. and then their optane ssd coldboot in less than 8 sec, pretty crazy what they can do when they choose the right mobo with good bios and good storage device.

 

i guess i have to dig through some stuff i got from ssd reviewers for you lol. btw intel's ssd is known for its reliability and steady state performance. also it's 4k random write performance, top notch.

 

Steady state performance doesn’t help very much in boot More for more demanding tasks HeHe
Even the worst ssd trash can boot up your OS quite fast.

 

yes it was super fast once you're in Windows, but before that, it's no faster than an HDD until you boot....

There was a big long thread about this on the Intel Forums then Intel released a firmware update to supposedly fix the long initialization issue during boot but it didn't fix anything really...

 

like my wife's 4 year old Dell Vostro taptop which has a 512GB Crucial MX100 SSD....press the power button, blink your eyes...and that BGA laptop is on the desktop

 

you're right, they dont.

intel's stand point on ssd is that they dont target much consumers, which is why their 750 do so well in 4k writes and steady state as they were originally enterprise SSDs with a bit changed firmware while controller remain the same i think.

though steady state performances will clearly show its superiority when you are doing bunch of stuff on the SSD, like for example if you were to do work while torrent heavily on 750, it will top all other consumer level SSDs, even best some of the better NVMe SSDs.

on the other hand boot is made up of mostly sequential and random read range from 512b to 2MB many different block size, most in range of 4-8K i think so having a right stripe size matters too and thats where sammy's SSD is strong on read because they love overclocking their controller and their firmware is targeted in those area. however with znand coming out from samsung and optane from intel, those things are in the past because it'll get into the realm of ram disk's speed, bout half of it.

 

Western Digital has announced a 2TB SATA M.2 for $639, it's listed on Amazon, but it's currently unavailable.

There's a Western Digital notification option for when it's released

WD BLUE 3D NAND SATA SSD
Capacity 250GB 500GB 1TB 2TB
Form Factor 2.5” 7mm M.2 2280
https://www.wdc.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sata-ssd.html#WDS200T2B0B

Specification PDF:
https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc...ssets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800092-A00.pdf

WD Blue 3D NAND 2TB PC SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s M.2 2280 Solid State Drive - WDS200T2B0B
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073SBW3VD/ref=psdc_1292116011_t3_B01KKZLX46?th=1

 

We offer this upgrade on our website.

 

Sounds great, but will you sell it independently without buying a system?

 

No, they are too scarce to do that now. Newegg and Amazon will have them soon.

 

Thanks. This helped a non gamer also. Was originally planning on getting a small Samsung 960 in a new purchase and a 1tb hdd. Now I will probably get an m.2 sata ssd and spend the savings on upgrading the hdd to an ssd

 

What wasn't definitive about this video? For gaming, yeah, as demonstrated in the initial video, for in-game loading, it's not actually that much data being read off of the drive, hence not really a noticeable performance difference. For everything else, there clearly is, as was demonstrated here, as has also been my experience. I imagine this is given the fact that the random read/write speeds are also significantly faster on NVMe drives, not just the sequential.

The only further discussion I can see being about which specific applications would the results actually be the same for as opposed to most others where the NVMe interface would be faster. Anything I missed?