SSD and M.2 NVMe question

[Lima]

Hey, hello there everyone.

I haven't been following PC chat for a while. I stumbled into Newegg, just outta curiosity, and came across their M.2 sales..

I am wondering if there is anything better headed our way than the present stuff available, technologically wise. Was looking at a WD Black 1TB M.2 NVMe

Thanks in advance.

 

[Sagath]

M2 drives are all based on PCIE-x technology (or sata, but avoid those) and the fastest on the market when paired with a good controller and a dram cache. Currently that means pcie4 based drives. There's a discussion point about 3vs4 and noticing real world performance, but we'll avoid that for now

The next best thing will likely be the next drive that works with pcie5 when it is released.

 

[Bond007]

WD Black has a few year old model (SN750), which was/is a very good drive, but the SN850 was just released and is (IMO) the best nvme ssd right now. Not sure which you are looking at.

 

[Izerous]

NVMe is still somewhat "new" and unlikely to be replaced any time soon, it will just continue to grow for the next PCI-express versions. Volitle ram drives are about the only thing that are faster however being volitle and far more expensive... 1TB ram drive would be thousands yet a NVMe in 1TB is only like $100-200 depending on model.

 

[moocow]

Didn't know there's a new WD black SSD, will look into that as well. In short, M.2 is the physical format and NVME is the protocol. Like Sagath said, you want the NVME model if you can afford to but also look out for DRAM less NVME models which are slower because they don't have on board cache. There are also SATS M.2 models that are a bit slower but if you are using as game drive, I don't see a problem with it.

Take WD as example:

• WD Blue, that's a SATA
• WD Blue SN550, that's NVME but it's DRAM-less
• WD Black, not sure what it is but it's an older model
• WD Black SN750, was the top end NVME model with DRAM
• WD Black SN850, haven't heard of it until today but will look into it

You need to factor in the PCI-E generation speed, some are only rated to PCI-E gen 3 while AMD 5xx series boards are gen 4 now. Typically the PCI-E gen 4 SSD cost more but also have faster Read Write speeds. Finally, you will see cheaper QLC chips that use quad bits per cell. The price is cheap but their performance isn't as great compare to TLC. It seems like a better Stream drive where you install once and read many.

 

[draemn]

If your goal is gaming, you won't see much benefit to NVME drives until games start using the directX 12 directstorage API or something similar (Nvidia is using it for their direct IO feature), basically GPU talking directly to the NVME drive. If you're not gaming but you deal with lots of files (photos, videos, etc), then you'll see an immediate benefit. It's definitely one of those things where we've had NVME for a number of years without fully tapping the benefits.

I'm hoping that in the next two years we'll see a huge change towards the GPU talking directly with NVME drives in games

 

[clshades]

I'd like to install an nvme directly onto the video card itself.

 

[Lima]

Am glad I asked, thanks everyone.

Doh.. forgot to mention just for snappiness/speed, not really gaming nowadays

Seeing I got a B350, I just might wait till next year. If I can fight the urge..

 

[moocow]

You have to wait until next year anyway because there's no stock! Unless you pay double for it.

 

[draemn]

After I looked around, for my use I found no reason to upgrade from a good SATA SSD to a NVME, but I'm also frugal, so it takes a bit to convince me.