X370 motherboards - how many NVME drives without bottlenecking?

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andantecantabile

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I'm looking at an AMD AM4 motherboard and would like to use 2 NVME drives, but I can't figure out whether I can really get the benefit from them.

We can use the ASRock Killer as an example:
https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370%20Killer%20SLIac/index.asp

There is 1 Ultra M.2 (PCIe Gen3 x4 & SATA3) and 1 M.2 (PCIe Gen2 x2 & SATA3). As I understand, the "Ultra M.2" is suitable for an NVME drive such as Samsung 960, whereas the other M.2 slot will bottleneck drives of that standard.

However, this motherboard also has 2 PCIe 3.0 x16. I am thinking I can use one of them for my graphics card, and then use the other (with an adapter) to install a 2nd NVME.

Is my interpretation accurate?
 
Solution
popatim
Consensus on serveral threads is use a sata SSD for boot & programs, a single nvme for your projects, and a fast HDD for storage (raid ok here).
With NVMe drives there no longer is a need to have separate drives for "scratch", previews, exports,or, anything really. Newer NVMe drives are out, and are coming out, that have 1TB capacity to ease storage concerns. Your source footage needs to be on the fastest drive for best performance and one NVMe drive will provide that. Users can now use conventional SSDs to backup, or, archive projects, original footage, and other source material. Even cheaper, large "enterprise level" spinning hard drives may be used for this task. The good ones offer 4,6,or even 8 TB capacity at a decent read and...
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popatim

popatim

Titan
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Populating the second GPU slot would drop your GPU into x8 mode according to the motherbd's specs
-AMD Ryzen series CPUs
- 2 x PCI Express 3.0 x16 Slots (single at x16 (PCIE2); dual at x8 (PCIE2) / x8 (PCIE4))*


Aside from outstanding benchmarks, whats thepurpose of two nvme drives instead of one large one, esp when you consider that they are no faster then a sata SSD in most real world usage...
 
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andantecantabile

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I guess I assumed one drive for OS and programs and one drive for projects and scratch disk would be a good idea. It's recommended by a lot of people who use Premiere/After Effects and similar programs, but of course, a lot of those people are not necessarily computer experts and might be recommending something that offers a theoretical 1% speed advantage or something like this.

I can also say that 2 500GB Samsung 960 EVOs actually cost slightly less than a 1TB (at least currently on Newegg)
 
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popatim

popatim

Titan
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Dec 2, 2009
38,905
980
135,890
Consensus on serveral threads is use a sata SSD for boot & programs, a single nvme for your projects, and a fast HDD for storage (raid ok here).
With NVMe drives there no longer is a need to have separate drives for "scratch", previews, exports,or, anything really. Newer NVMe drives are out, and are coming out, that have 1TB capacity to ease storage concerns. Your source footage needs to be on the fastest drive for best performance and one NVMe drive will provide that. Users can now use conventional SSDs to backup, or, archive projects, original footage, and other source material. Even cheaper, large "enterprise level" spinning hard drives may be used for this task. The good ones offer 4,6,or even 8 TB capacity at a decent read and write speed of over 200MB/sec when they have a 128MB cache on board.
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andantecantabile

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Thanks a lot popatim. Your info about x16 and x8 PCIe based on populating the 2nd slot was really useful, and I like the solution of one SSD, one NVME, and one spinner, especially if a 3rd SSD for scratch is not really necessary with NVME speeds. Actually I already have an extra SSD sitting around (potential OS Drive), and this solution might allow me to do a proper build using a cheaper motherboard than X370 as well, which I suppose would free up cash for a 1TB NVME for example. Anyway good work, really useful.
 
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