How much faster are NVMe drives?

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Anthony_195

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How much faster are nvme drives,m.2, u.2, and especially PCIe drives? Are the PCIe drives faster when gaming or booting the system/opening apps. If I get a PCIe drive will it be much faster then a SSD? Also if I use a raid array will that be substantially faster. What’s the fastest storage setup outside of high price Optane SSDs. Will raid give me big performance gains? Or would PCIe drives be more cost effective for faster speeds over 2 similar price sata SSDs in raid? What’s the fastest method of storage for gaming and general use(booting and loading apps). I’d be curious to see the “price is no factor” “balls to the wall” option for “fastest storage possible”, too just for sake of it. But I’m most interested in something affordable and realistic but still fast of course. Also I’m using a Mechanical HD ☹️
 
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geofelt
Today, pcie drives are faster in sequential operations. Perhaps 5x faster than sata based drives.
Sounds good??? but the truth is that the small random times at low queue depths are about the same for all current drives.
That is what windows does most.
Same thing for raid-0. Synthetic benchmarks look wonderful, but that is not what the real world does. Bad idea.
m.2 is a size format. About like a stick of gum. It has no performance impact.

Upcoming, perhaps next year will be optane based drives with random performance perhaps 10x what we see today.

Buying today, look more to buying a quality drive that will perform as advertised.
Samsung evo and Intel would be at the top of my list.
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Theoretically, at a high level:
PCIe x4 /M.2 > U.2 > M.2 SATA /SATA3

No two drives are necessarily equal though, with their controllers (among other things) playing a factor in real-world speed.

In real-world uses, outside of benchmarks, you're not likely to notice any substantial difference between any other options and a decent SATA3 SSD.
I'm talking <5 seconds difference in boot/load times, provided you're looking at a solid SATA3 SSD like an 850 EVO.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Storage: Samsung - 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($94.99 @ B&H)
Total: $94.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-16 18:34 EST-0500

"Fastest" possible, is going to be something like 2x 960PRO's (NVME) in RAID + an Optane module. Totally wasted for 99.9999% of users.
 
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Not sure if that's a direct response to me? If so, just to be clear for the OP - I'm not recommending that ridiculous setup (RAID 960 Pros + an Optane module) :lol:

But it would likely be the answer to "fastest" storage option. Very impractical, overpriced, and very buggy though.
 
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derekullo

derekullo

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For example:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-960-evo-nvme-ssd-review,4802-2.html

Scroll down to "PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance"

The first slide showing a real life launching of World of Warcraft taking about 57 regardless of the drive they are using.

Windows has to move files from hard drive to memory, memory to gpu along with any executions that need to happen on the cpu.

Using solid state drives in a raid is not bad in fact the drives internally are running raid 0 with all of its dies.

Even a raid 5 with ssd's isnt as bad as it sounds.

Yes there is write amplification which does make the drive die faster.

But the actual rebuilding of a raid 5 array with ssds takes minutes instead of hours, making ssd raid 5 rebuilds much faster and safer
 
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derekullo

derekullo

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Think of this analogy.

You want to get to work super fast and there is no traffic or police or pedestrians on your street.

If your job was 30 miles away it would make sense to buy something with high horsepower like a corvette to get there as quick as possible.

if your job was only 0.5 miles away then your fancy corvette doesn't really matter because it won't be able to go very fast before it reaches your destination.

That is very similar to hard drives, at some point diminishing returns becomes near 0 as you are waiting for other processes to complete so you can finish yours.

They had an article a few weeks ago that showed the service time for a bunch of ssds.

Basically they would transfer all the data that needed to transfer in 5 seconds and then for the next 15 seconds it was all in the cpu and memory's "hands" and then the program finally opened.
 
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Kewlx25

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My wife's 950 pro M.2 boots as fast as and loads games as fast as my SATA 850 EVO. That being said, when I was installing her computer, copying around 50GiB game folders, installing Windows Updates, checking game folders, it was blazing fast. It was doing over 1.25GiB/s for 30+ minutes. That's much faster than SATA.
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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Today, pcie drives are faster in sequential operations. Perhaps 5x faster than sata based drives.
Sounds good??? but the truth is that the small random times at low queue depths are about the same for all current drives.
That is what windows does most.
Same thing for raid-0. Synthetic benchmarks look wonderful, but that is not what the real world does. Bad idea.
m.2 is a size format. About like a stick of gum. It has no performance impact.

Upcoming, perhaps next year will be optane based drives with random performance perhaps 10x what we see today.

Buying today, look more to buying a quality drive that will perform as advertised.
Samsung evo and Intel would be at the top of my list.
 
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