Solved Hey hardware guys. Need advice on m.2 drive

bobkn said:

Really? As mentioned before:

F=9/5 C +32. (F=1.8C +32.)

Memory is inexplicable. I still recall Planck's constant (6.63 E-34 Js). Why? A Web search would produce it as fast as I could type the query.

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I do this in my head, but fast ways of estimation is 5° C == 9° F, and adding / subtracting the 32 as needed, and you're close. So, if it is 37° C, estimate ends up being (7*9) + 32, plus ~4, or 99° C - and it's actually 98.6.

The other thing is to memorize the tens - 10 °C = 50, and for every 10° C add 18° F. 50, 68, 86, 104, 122, 140....

Scannerman said:

The 980 PRO is the way to go if you have a GEN 4 platform; but if all you have is PCIe GEN 3 and you don't plan on moving up to GEN 4 then it's really pointless to pay the premium for 980 PRO. Don't get my wrong, I love my SAMSUNG PRO silicon in my GEN 4 unit. Glasskuter will never see these speeds on their GEN 3 platform, which limits out at 3500. Just sayin'.

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Future proofing. Why stick with a gen 3 drive that may need to be moved to a newer device later on, if there is no reason to? The price difference is negligible, and unless there is a reason that a gen 4 device will not work in a gen 3 slot (there isn't), absolutely 0 reason to consider a gen 3 drive.

The biggest reason to not buy Gen 5 drives is price - the difference between 4 and 5 right now is staggering, so it would be a waste of money in that sort of a scenario. But gen 4 has been out for a good while now, at the very least 3 years, as that is when I built my machine, and I'm pretty sure it's closer to 5 (without actually looking). Given the fact that the drives are backward compatible, the only issue is price. Since they are very similar, more advantageous to get the newer gen 4 drive.

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@glasskuter - glad you found what you wanted at a reasonably good price, too. I'd read about then but have not had the opportunity to use their drives yet, I suspect I may go with them, if not SK Hynix direct, for my next drive upgrade or build.

Enjoy!

pparks1 said:

So, which stat is truly the one that makes one better than the other?

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It's the stat that says you should've just bought a bicycle instead. It consumes the least fuel, and consumes the least fuel regardless of what feelings you or anyone else might or might not have about that. lol

pparks1 said:

I can assure you that booting the OS, starting my apps, and launching games there is no noticeable difference

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I have an app for that

OK, so, I've been using this little app since the early days of 7.
It's called BootRacer and provides boot times in real time. It
launches with the OS and you can see how long it actually takes
for the OS to get to the start of Windows. I find it useful but, some
might say it's just a gimmick. Maybe give it a try and see for yourself.
And No, I'm not advertising for them. I just like the program.

Flashorn said:

I have an app for that

OK, so, I've been using this little app since the early days of 7.
It's called BootRacer and provides boot times in real time. It
launches with the OS and you can see how long it actually takes
for the OS to get to the start of Windows. I find it useful but, some
might say it's just a gimmick. Maybe give it a try and see for yourself.
And No, I'm not advertising for them. I just like the program.

Download BootRacer 9.30.2024.1217 - Free Utility for Monitoring Windows Boot Time and Detecting Slow Startup Programs!

BootRacer Monitors Boot Time and Detects Slow Startup Programs!

greatis.com

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Yeah, I've goofed with apps like that before. In this case, if you stick in a Gen 3 drive and Gen 4 drive and put the same OS image on each of them, and test repeatedly, there will be next to no difference between the two drives. One may average to 11.18 seconds and the other might be 10.98 seconds. For all intents and purposes, it's the same. It certainly isn't going to be 2x as fast even though the drive specs show a 2x+ improvement.

hdmi said:

It's the stat that says you should've just bought a bicycle instead. It consumes the least fuel, and consumes the least fuel regardless of what feelings you or anyone else might or might not have about that. lol

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I do have a few bikes and they have consumed no gasoline or diesel thus far. It does take me a lot longer though to get across the state on my bicycle. LOL

johnlgalt said:

I do this in my head, but fast ways of estimation is 5° C == 9° F, and adding / subtracting the 32 as needed, and you're close. So, if it is 37° C, estimate ends up being (7*9) + 32, plus ~4, or 99° C - and it's actually 98.6.

The other thing is to memorize the tens - 10 °C = 50, and for every 10° C add 18° F. 50, 68, 86, 104, 122, 140....



Future proofing. Why stick with a gen 3 drive that may need to be moved to a newer device later on, if there is no reason to? The price difference is negligible, and unless there is a reason that a gen 4 device will not work in a gen 3 slot (there isn't), absolutely 0 reason to consider a gen 3 drive.

The biggest reason to not buy Gen 5 drives is price - the difference between 4 and 5 right now is staggering, so it would be a waste of money in that sort of a scenario. But gen 4 has been out for a good while now, at the very least 3 years, as that is when I built my machine, and I'm pretty sure it's closer to 5 (without actually looking). Given the fact that the drives are backward compatible, the only issue is price. Since they are very similar, more advantageous to get the newer gen 4 drive.

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@glasskuter - glad you found what you wanted at a reasonably good price, too. I'd read about then but have not had the opportunity to use their drives yet, I suspect I may go with them, if not SK Hynix direct, for my next drive upgrade or build.

Enjoy!

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I just google, F to C. Type in a number, done.

pparks1 said:

So, which stat is truly the one that makes one better than the other?

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A: The one that saves the consumer the most spending capital.

I do know what you mean, however. Stats and specs can be presented in ways that are often misleading. My occasionally used X570 HERO platform runs SAMSUNG PRO (can't remember if it's 970 or what the # is) without issue. Years before I had to return some SAMSUNG NVMe after contacting SAMSUNG about it failing to be seen in the BIOS in my ASUS X99 series board. SAMSUNG informed me that it wouldn't work in my system board so I had to return it. The retailer was very good about this and I received a full refund. I later read about this issue with some of SAMSUNG's NVMe and as near as I can tell SAMSUNG had it corrected. At the time of purchase I could not locate a QVL for NVMe for my system board. In the end I opted for Intel Optane NVMe which, years later, resulted in new problems. If it were not for Solidigm software that 1TB stick of NVMe would likely be useless for me. Moral of the story: Stuff happens.

Now that NVMe has been around for some time encounters like mine have been greatly diminished. SAMSUNG has been the leader in the industry for years. They also make pretty decent monitors IMO. I think Glasskuter made a good, informed choice. I could not recommend the choice they made because I have zero experience with this brand of NVMe. I only recommend hardware that I have tried and tested myself. My, what a lively thread this has turned out to be! Kudos to Glasskuter for stirring up those cerebral juices and initiating so much earnest participation!

absolutely 0 reason to consider a gen 3 drive.

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There is one gen3 that consumes less power and creates less heat than all the others . That might be a reason . As pparks confirms ( apart from sepcialized use cases ) there is no appreciable performance difference irl.

Always a reason to consider a gen 3 drive for a PCIe gen 3 system board:

1) Energy and heat efficiency.
2) Cost of gen 3 drive is usually less.
3) Backward compatibility not always compatible.
4) Some gen 3 NVMe delivers faster speeds than some gen 4 on a gen 3 system board.
5) Installing gen 4 NVMe on a gen 3 system board does NOT "future proof" the system board.

They are worthy considerations although not always applicable. I suspect Gen 3 NVMe will be around for a while, even as SATA and mechanical hard drives are still in abundance.

pparks1 said:

Yeah, I've goofed with apps like that before. In this case, if you stick in a Gen 3 drive and Gen 4 drive and put the same OS image on each of them, and test repeatedly, there will be next to no difference between the two drives. One may average to 11.18 seconds and the other might be 10.98 seconds. For all intents and purposes, it's the same. It certainly isn't going to be 2x as fast even though the drive specs show a 2x+ improvement.

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Actually, that wasn't my point. It was and still is to see if anything was adversely affecting the startup.
Specifically, I knew if an update was installed, I would get longer startups but, if the startup was longer
or shorter than expected for no reason, then I investigate further.

Sometimes a quick boot to the OS isn't desirable. I want my boot up to last at least 2 or three minutes. I want to be able to read all the interfaces as I sip my coffee and still have time to interrupt the boot in the event of something gone awry or simply to make alterations in one of the interfaces if need be. I can appreciate a fast boot in specific instances and I'm happy with my 20 second or less boot on my laptop, but it really does depend on what you're using your PC for and how you're using it. Speed matters most when you're up and running in the operating system.

Scannerman said:

Always a reason to consider a gen 3 drive for a PCIe gen 3 system board:

1) Energy and heat efficiency.
2) Cost of gen 3 drive is usually less.
3) Backward compatibility not always compatible.
4) Some gen 3 NVMe delivers faster speeds than some gen 4 on a gen 3 system board.
5) Installing gen 4 NVMe on a gen 3 system board does NOT "future proof" the system board.

They are worthy considerations although not always applicable. I suspect Gen 3 NVMe will be around for a while, even as SATA and mechanical hard drives are still in abundance.

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1. A consideration, for sure, similar to the difference between gen 4 and gen 5 drives.
2. These days, difference in cost is usually negligible.
3. NVMe is a specification. The difference in PCIe generation is literally the bandwidth available, and unless you buy a drive that is not compatible with the slot type you have on your motherboard, moving between NVMe PCI3 gen 3 and NVMe PCIe gen 4 should be fully compatible - you can go in both directions, and the slower of the two will be the limiting factor.

A good example:


A better explainer:


And an overall overview:


Plus, the specification itself from the group:


4. That would be on the drive, then, as the bandwidth available to both drives is the same, based upon the motherboard hardware.
5. I was not talking about future proofing the board, I was talking about future proofing the user and being able to use that drive in any recent machine.

Basically, if you find a really good, really cheap gen 3 drive sure, it might be worth it. But if you know that you'll be using the drive for quite a while, a gen 4 might be a much better buy for the long haul.

johnlgalt said:

Basically, if you find a really good, really cheap gen 3 drive sure, it might be worth it. But if you know that you'll be using the drive for quite a while, a gen 4 might be a much better buy for the long haul.

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Of course, these drives are all pretty darn affordable these days. I paid almost $300 for 80GB on my first SSD. I think if somebody were to buy a Gen 3 today, and 18 months from now bought a new mobo with Gen 4, they could probably just buy a new Gen 4 drive and turn this Gen 3 into a spare drive in the box or an external NVMe in a 10Gbps enclosure without feeling like they were out a lot of money.

There is that, and I should have thought to mention it as well, as that is what I did with my original gen 4 drives lol.

3x Sabrent Rocket 4 (gen 4) 1 TB drives were what I built this rig with. In early 2022, I replaced those 3 with 3x Samsung 980 Pro gen 4 drives, and then bought USB 3 connected NVMe enclosures for the original, and all three are now external storage.

So ubiquitous to have them there that I tend to forget that is a very valid option for the future as well.

Crucial P5 M2 Gen3 (as per an earlier comment I made) is able to run at over 7200 MB/s per Crystal Bench in a laptop with battery if the Crucial RAM cache is enabled. I've been using two of these P5's in my laptops for over two years now without problems. A performance drop of about 20% to 5800 MB/s is noticeable after the M2 heats up but it stabilises there.

When I bought them the price difference between Gen3 and 4 was substantial and my laptops are only Gen3 so buying Gen4 M2's was a waste of capital. Similar situation now between Gen4 and Gen5. I have no intention of upgrading these laptops anytime, although breakdowns are probably inevitable. As it stands, the Crucial RAM cache on the P5's allows pretty good performance bang for buck.

pparks1 said:

I do have a few bikes and they have consumed no gasoline or diesel thus far. It does take me a lot longer though to get across the state on my bicycle. LOL

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You got a point, I'll admit. I also prefer Rhosgobel rabbits.

ian50 said:

Crucial P5 M2 Gen3 (as per an earlier comment I made) is able to run at over 7200 MB/s per Crystal Bench in a laptop with battery if the Crucial RAM cache is enabled. I've been using two of these P5's in my laptops for over two years now without problems. A performance drop of about 20% to 5800 MB/s is noticeable after the M2 heats up but it stabilises there.

When I bought them the price difference between Gen3 and 4 was substantial and my laptops are only Gen3 so buying Gen4 M2's was a waste of capital. Similar situation now between Gen4 and Gen5. I have no intention of upgrading these laptops anytime, although breakdowns are probably inevitable. As it stands, the Crucial RAM cache on the P5's allows pretty good performance bang for buck.

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I have a stick of Crucial P5 NVMe. It works well but once that cache fills it really drops in file transfer speeds. I can't justify the extra that I paid for the drive for this reason, but I take solace in the knowledge that Crucial is made by Micron and that's a big plus for me.



I don't think it's the platform I'm using either, given some of the analytical charts I've read here compliments of Tom's Hardware. The sudden drop in transfer speeds is typical for silicon drives. This is not enough of a reason to return the NVMe but people should know that just because their SSD peaks at specific speeds during data transfer this doesn't mean that the speed will be constant and, in some cases, file transfers could even take longer as compared to cheaper, more conventional silicon such as WD SN770, which I also own. (Actually, I bought three of those.)

If transfer speeds and high end caching are not that high a priority, but you still want something at least twice as fast as a regular SATA M.2 drive you could opt for something like a nice, inexpensive stick of Gen 3 NVMe such as the one I found on Amazon here, today: TEAM GROUP 36 bucks US for a 1TB stick of NVMe is a pretty good deal. I've seen some other brands sell for even less but I don't recommend them because I've never used them. I've never had a bad experience with TEAM GROUP yet. Once again, this is a matter of user preference. The 'one size fits all' approach only goes so far with computers. What the drive is being used for and how it is being used are certainly crucial factors in selecting an appropriate drive.

Scannerman said:

, but it really does depend on what you're using your PC for and how you're using it. Speed matters most when you're up and running in the operating system.

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Yes, of course. One of the main reasons why I went for the 980 PRO (PCIe 4.0) instead of the 970 EVO Plus (PCIe 3.0) in spite of the fact that my laptop's internal M.2 socket is still limited to PCIe 3.0 is that the 980 PRO, even if it operates at only PCIe 3.0 speed, has a higher sustained sequential write speed than the 970 EVO Plus. Also, if it operates at only PCIe 3.0 speed, the 980 PRO heats up a tad slower than the 970 EVO Plus.

I use ramdisk software (specifically, Romex Primo Ramdisk with both DMM and Compact mode enabled in it) combined with Sandboxie-Plus. This allows me to choose, individually for each sandbox, whether the sandbox is located on the SSD or is located on the ramdisk. Each time when a sandbox that is located on the SSD gets populated or updated with some additional data, there can be noticeable delay depending on the size of data written to it and also depending on other factors. So, to mitigate these delays where they matter the most, I move some of my sandboxes back and forth between the ramdisk in a selective manner.

I do this by running FastCopy in diff mode, usually from within a series of batchfiles that I wrote myself, and, these same batchfiles also run the del command to remove the unnecessary/leftover data from the ramdisk after the copying is done. This matters also because DMM with Compact mode assures that the ramdisk never uses up more RAM than really should be needed to store the data on the ramdisk so, the free available space on the ramdisk does not waste any RAM. (The free ImDisk also does this, but there is noticeable delay between running the del command and the ramdisk actually deallocating the space in RAM, and, the read/write speeds of Primo Ramdisk are multiple times higher compared to ImDisk.)

In addition to this, there's things like Task Scheduler's ability to let the user define advanced Triggers by manually editing their XML Query so, it also is possible to let these batchfiles be run as part of the Actions that belong to such Tasks in Task Scheduler, etc.. I mean, due to the frequency of some of the events, in some situations enough data can be moved from the RAM over to the SSD in such rapid succession that the sustained sequential write speed of the SSD being limited by the speed of PCIe 3.0 actually becomes the main bottleneck, visibly in the real world. So yeah, it depends.

Years ago, I ran Ramdisk on my old X99 platform and I have to say I was impressed with the speeds I was getting with my RAM drive. I'm not sure if there's really anything out there that can compete with Ramdisk with respect to speed even today, but I kept running into stability issues (likely due to bottle necking) so I removed it. At that time I didn't have any NVMe and I was using standard SSDs but as you already know the magic is done in the RAM. Indubitably, Ramdisk has improved immensely from when I last used it and I'm surprised that it isn't more popular among the speed phreaks and computer enthusiasts of this decade. Perhaps one day I'll play with it again. I can see Gen 4 NVMe keeping up with RamDisk immensely better than conventional SATA interfaced silicon.

I don't know that I can agree with you more when it comes to sustained sequential read and write speeds, key word being sustained. In this regard Samsung Pro has consistently proven themselves. The fluctuation in the bounce when Sabrent resets the cache looks alarming and I can't help wondering if this behaviour in read and write cycles won't eventually result in damaging the drive over time. :::shrugs::: It just looks scary. I'm not a hardware developer so I'm not really qualified to say if it's good or bad, but none of the other samples in this chart does this. Hynix spikes and drops and then drops again, so I see little advantage there.

Scannerman said:

I ran Ramdisk on my old X99 platform

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I didn't think anyone used RamDisk any more. I still have my Ramdisk on Windows 7.
I actually bought it from AMD and it still performs well.
I think I will try it again. Thanks for reminding me of this.


On a different note, we haven't heard from Glasskuter. I hope she didn't run in any problems
with her installation or maybe she hasn't received the drive yet.
Anyone know?