M.2 SSD

geneo said:

The real leap, for the OS, is going from SATA protocol to NVME. Any improvements in the the speed are hardly noticeable.

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That explains why my previous machine which was on Samsung 980Pro 2TB 2.5" SSD's that were SATA connected was way slow compared to the Toshiba XG6 KXG60ZNV1T02 1TB NVMe M.2 used in the Dell XPS 15 9570 as the time it took updating Windows 10 Sprint 2019 update was like night and day in time and also in-place windows repair installs.

Didn't read entire thread, so forgive me if I repeat.

I have installed Windows to an NVME drive. The problem was/is I have to physically remove all other (SATA) drives before installing or Windows will either refuse to install to it, or spread it's system/boot files onto other drives.

I did not find the NVME (the speed of using Windows on it) to be any faster than installing to my M.2 SATA drive. Not in any way I could notice anyway. Windows itself is just slower than either of the SSD drives, so no visible difference in performance. So now I use the NVME to store games and files and the SATA drive to boot Windows from. I figure if Windows is going to thrash and kill one, I prefer it to be the older M.2 SATA SSD. If anything is going to take advantage of the NVME speed, it would be the loading of games and the like, not clunky old, spaghetti code, Windows.

I had 3 NVMe drives, 2 SATA II SSDs and 2 SATA II HDDs installed in my system when I installed Windows 10. And the 2 clean installs (for a total of 3, including the initial install) since I built the machine last year.

You do not necessarily have to remove all your other drives at all.

TBH, I've almost never had to remove other drives for Windows install - the exception being when I've tried to set up fully independent dual booting, using hte BIOS to swap the boot drive, so each OS had it's own MBR and boot loader.

But I've definitely seen that advice given out to people left and right - and it seems to work.

As for speed - it's going to depend upon a lot of things, including (but not limited to) your hardware and your UEFI fw / BIOS settings if there will be a speed difference at all. The Chipset, the CPU, the number of other devices you already have in your system (PCIe lanes matter), the speeds of the drives themselves, the actual interface, the hardware used on the drives....

I mean, here is an example of a typical Bait and Switch that drive manufacturers have been doing for a while now....


There are lots things to consider.

We will get the same for PCIe 3.0 SSD

abactuon said:

How We Test PCIe 4.0 Storage: The AnandTech 2021 SSD Benchmark Suite

www.anandtech.com

We will get the same for PCIe 3.0 SSD

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You must have a point, but I don't see it.

Buyer's guide for M2 SSD.

I'm still using an old HP envy laptop from 2016 that has this type of device in it -- not sure which model - but it's definitely "faster" than a newer roughly comparable laptop where an old 2.5 SATA 2.5 inch spinner was replaced with a "classic" SSD.

I haven't tried any "external SATA->USB" adapters yet as I've quite a few spare classic SSD's for experimentation and testing -- I'm sure also these are on the way out now as the NVMe devices become standard, are cheaper to make and should consume less power (although power consumption from an SSD is pretty minimal anyway).

cheers
jimbo

johnlgalt said:

You do not necessarily have to remove all your other drives at all.

There are lots things to consider.

Click to expand...

I absolutely had to remvoe the non-nvme drives, but now that I think about it...it may be because I was also using MBR and not GPT on everything. Maybe when using GPT, then Windows is happy to install on the 4 GPT partitions it creates rather than spread its boot files to other drives?

Quite possible. I didn't have NVMe when I was using MBR, and I didn't try to use MBR when I moved to my rig with NVMe, so I cnnot say one way or another -but that might very well be it.

I have both on this machine. I didnt have any difficulty installing to a gpt disk without affecting the mbr disk.

I dont know what windows setup does if you have multiple gpt disks attached.

SIW2 said:

I have both on this machine. I didnt have any difficulty installing to a gpt disk without affecting the mbr disk.

I dont know what windows setup does if you have multiple gpt disks attached.

Click to expand...

can't say I've ever had problems with W10 and later with multiple GPT HDD's/SSD/s

cheers
jimbo

I'm betting it was an MBR thing, and that Windows just really does not like all it's "eggs in one basket" especially on NVME, at the time anyway (they were still pretty new), maybe improved by now. So I had to give it no other choice.