So You Want A SUPER Fast NVMe Drive For Gaming?
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- Опубликовано: 2 июн 2024
- I test a super fast SSD against other stuff for gaming and then put it in a USB dock to see how much performance you lose.
WD_BLACK NVMe SSD: amzn.to/3HjjQS5
Lexar NVMe SSD: amzn.to/3tYrzlo
WD Greet Sata SSD: amzn.to/48U86B8
The Seagate and Samsung drives are no longer available.
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The lesson I'm seeing is don't overspend on an NVME drive. Something like a basic Samsung, WD blue or even a team group drive should be plenty. And if you're out of space, a SATA SSD should be fine.
Well nowdays exept for the trashiest SSDs NVMEs are almost same price most of the time so there is literally no reason to go sata
@@rotmistrzjanm8776 well surprise pre 2017 mb don't support nvme
@@lowliar8489PCIe to M.2 adapter:
SATA SSD are more expensive and slightly slower than gen 3 nVME but at least you can whack loads of them in without using all your PCIe lanes
the top lesson is: ON GAMING even a $12 sata 3 chinese 256gb ssd from aliexpress will have negligible performance impact when compared to a $1000 nvme, the only rule for storage is to not use hard drive
Just a note, that all those USB A to C cables look to be USB2.0 cables (white plastic in the USB A housing) which will obviously limit its speed a LOT.
yeah usb 2.0 is very slow
Have to be careful with c to c cables as well, not all will go over 5Gbps, I wonder if he even has a 20Gbps port.
this is how unaware of basic stuff this guy is. i mean i like him, but he messed up a lot of his videos because of things like that.
@@freesiuMessed up?! No the chaos is what makes Dawid great. That's pretty much the reason I watch his videos. He's the antidote to the overthinker
yea shouldn't be worse
i mostly jokingly put a NVMe into a ide adapter and installed that into my old laptop from 2002, went from read speeds of 15mbs to 90, so it was worth it still. xp booted to the desktop in like a second.
I didn't even know they made something like that.
You don't have to wait for a disc to spin up, so you will never wait as long as a mechanical drive if they're working normally.
@@jacksongunner7122i even have a pcie x16 to PCI adapter they seemingly make everything. btw i upgraded my dad's dell dimension 2400 with that one, went from it's horrible onboard intel 845 to a nvidia geforce gt 710. not like he games or anything but he refuses to replace the computer so i've been upgrading it over the years, it's basically the ship of theseus at this point though with a pentium 4 in the center.
Regular SATA SSDs were already faster than the maximum bandwidth that IDE can put through so I doubt those sustained speeds would increase between the two, I'd look at the random read speed (without knowing how much the adapter slows it down anyways)
@@jacksongunner7122nvme-->sata-->ide maybe,
I think there’s a chance those “Square USB” cables may have been USB 2.0 at 480mbps. Probably worth checking!
22.76s is more than a tenth of 2:34.94 (154.94s). But whatever... doesn't change the point.
i also got irked by that. He prob forgot that 1 minute =/= 100sec
Me too. Although it would be way easier to tell time if it was true!
@@KSBrazildecimal time was tried by France few hundred years ago
didn't work out
My experience is that it really doesn't matter which Gen m.2 you use in the end because the difference in load times is so small. Even a Sata SSD will work fine as we saw. Now if your doing content creation, then the read/write speeds will make a big difference. But for most gamers, a Gen 3 is going to work just as good as a Gen 4 or 5 drive.
Gen 3 does not work for flight simmers with the new cards. Bottlenecked every time with graphic demand. Im living proof in my Victus. PCIe Gen 3 slots only, the wankers!
@@Minnesota.Highlander Well that sucks... I've played MS Flight simulator in the past and it sucks when it doesn't run smoothly.
I see people complaining about generation of SSD affecting flight sim. I played it on my pc at launch and I had some data SSD from ed blue and It didn't lag at all
@@Minnesota.HighlanderI think the confusion here is that we're talking storage, not graphics cards. A pcie 4.0 card in a 3.0 slot probably will bottleneck you, but flight simulator once loaded in all runs in ram, not from the storage, so it shouldn't matter.
Could not disagree more. Gen 3 x4 is a paltry 4Gbps which is a slower throughput than SATA. Going from there (or even SATA SSD's) to Gen 4 x 4 or 5 x 4 is demonstrably faster. You have to make sure that you have the proper mobos and are using the proper slots. There are TONS of people who think that they have a Gen 5 but are using a gen 3 slot on the mobo and cant see the difference. Check the mobo manual because often the only slot that can give you gen 5 speeds is the one you are running the OS from. Gen 4 is STILL awesome even if you have to make the compromise for a GPU.
We can always count on Dawid to do the testing we think of and assume: "No one is enough a madman to try this surely!"
this is not that maddening of a thing to try lmao this is underwhelming imo and not nearly as informative as other channels
which other channels have done this exact test in the past 6 months?@@thecrimsonkid3574
@@thecrimsonkid3574 Watching Dawid for informative content is like watching Top Gear for advice on what car to buy. Both are entertainment first, information third, if it's lucky.
Honestly? A high-end NVMe drive like that is fantastic as a cache drive for video editing. Premiere and After Effects love tons of space to dump huge amounts of scratch disk media onto.
Might installing more RAM also help?
@@greatwavefan397 Generally speaking: Yep! Scratch disk space is super important for AE too, though.
If you're on a budget and trying to get more AE performance with only one upgrade: RAM > SSD.
yep 100%. After I switched to a larger capacity pcie 4.0 M.2 drive I use my older 500GB M.2 drive as a cache drive with PrimoCache. I also have 10Tb and 7TB HHDs for storage and that cache drive makes the HDDs perform like SSDs and sometimes just as fast as an M.2 drive (Once in a while I'll get a write speed of 1000 MB/s on the HDDs). I do keep a dedicated SSD with DRAM cache for editing in DaVinci Resolve though.
@@NonLegitNation2 Good call on using the M.2 drive as a drive cache! I need to set that up for myself sometime.
just one tip , if you're truly professional, buy a 500gb (or whatever scratch disk suitable size) and dedicated it only for that, with the amount of writes that thing will get it's unlikely to be reliable long term storage, remember, SSDs (newer tripple cell ones in particular) have a limited lifetime thats shorter than the earlier tech (SLC). Worth the sacrifice though, using an HDD for scratch disk is one of the worst experiences
NVMe is just so fast, you get diminishing returns even if you do splurge on one of the "super fast" ones. I bought a cheaper one a couple of years ago and I don't think the extra second or two reduction in load times is worth the expense of upgrading at this point. Now, I did spend a painful afternoon setting up an old PC with a spinny drive and got so frustrated I went on Amazon and ordered a $25 cheap SSD. 3 hours installing Windows and patches vs. about 15 minutes. Worth it!
Worked on refurbing some old laptops with spinners recently for a non-profit that thinks they're gonna run CAD software on a 3rd gen i3 with 8GB RAM and a mechanical hard drive, lol.
The behind the scenes reason for the lack of difference in the NVMe drives is, probably, straight forward. They're all fast enough that the bottleneck for loading is moved onto the CPU. To get better load times, you're going to need a better CPU, which arguably doesn't exist right now, at least for this specific metric.
No not really the bottleneck is their io latency that's barely improved lmao, there u get cpu bottlenecks sure. That being said faster cpu does speed up loading times but that's basically no mater what. Also this is like one of the biggest nvme uplifts ive seen, the ~50% faster loading he showed is pretty significant is it not?
@@Frozoken Could also be because he put them on the m2 slots that go through chipset, not the one directly connected to CPU.
@@Eversor86 kind of it increases latency by about 10-20% but it pretty decreases performance equally on all nvme safe. Maybe because they're now faster in general the real world difference would be slightly larger.
Either way past nvme safe the only upgrade I think will at all be noticeable is to optane. Bought a $50 pcie 3, 120gb optane (p1600x) and in game loading times it was about as much faster than my wd sn850x as that drive was over my sata ssd lmao.
Goes to show that latency is king seeing my optane with about 4x worse sequential speeds but 6x lower latency loaded faster every single time. It also works completely like a normal ssd there's no compatibility quirks at all
You're running the m.2 ssd's through the chipset which does make a difference too. not a big one but worth mentioning.
yeah, it would be interesting to know the PCI gen and number of lanes of the slots he tried and if that's why there was little difference between differently rated NVME drives.
@@360chillout2 Gen 5 NVMe is not faster, HP 13900 system here, EVO gen 4 is same speeds ???
@@lucasrem lol wtf are you talking about, gen 5 is over double the speeds of gen 4, you probably can't tell in 99% of tasks, but by pure numbers it is faster.
@@lucasrem You may have bought a Gen 5 drive, but does your board actually have Gen 5 slots? Or did you plug it into a Gen 4 slot, to which you'd get Gen 4 speeds.
@@grumpywolfgaming Random read is the exact same so no its not. Look at task manager when loading a games. It'd be a miracle to hit even 1GB/s of read usage, why? Becuase it's not loading much data sequentially and basically never has
WD SN-850X is just a beast! I use that drive in my new PC and noticeably see the difference in Windows and games load times. Its price was also really low about six months ago, but now it's on the rise...
So interesting that the square port is so slow. I knew that but didn’t think the different would be so clear.
Think it was an USB 3.0 port..
Yeah I’m not good with the terminology
It looks like all the USB-A to USB-C ports Dawid had were USB2.0, he needs specific USB3 or 3.2 Gen 2 cables, those should in theory be as fast as the Type-C "Thunderbolt" ones.
Also he used a Thunderbolt 4 class cable, not a generic C to C cable
Nobody notices that this is Anna from the videos....I noticed. Tell Dawid Hi :)
The NVMe USB enclosure is being largely bottlenecked by the fact it's going over USB.
He literally discusses the different USB results. Maybe you missed that.
lol noob
is being bottlenecked because USB 5 Gbps doesn't support PCIE lane over USB thus making the drive run at USB 2.0 speeds. You need at least 10Gbps ports on you pc if you want to use USB NVME enclosures.
USB 2.0, so 40 MB/sec? No. You probably meant USB 3.0 at ~450 MB/sec which is comparable to SATA but with some small latency hits.
shame four this man. he make terrible four inside my tunnel.
Wow that was actually a pretty darn good informative, fun and really good video. Don't get me wrong I am an actual fan of your videos I think your style is great and it makes for the videos to be super entertaining, but this was really good with really awesome info. I like how you just use the phone's timer instead of high-end tests like many other RUclipsrs. It really comes down to the end user experience. And the moral of the story is don't overspend on super fast NVME drives, stay with regular NVME drives unless you need the speed in an actual intensive application like rendering videos or something. For gaming seems the sweet spot is in regular NVME drives. I went with one of those WD Black NVME's for the operating system and apps so when upgrading for more storage for games or static files a regular NVME will do just fine. Thanks!
The video we never knew we needed! Cheers for doing this, bro!
biggest difference i have found was in install and update speeds personally, game loading itself is not so different between gen 3 and 4 nvme drives, but the difference in game updates and verifications etc... is very nice
This is pretty much what PCWorld said after their piece on the same topic from last year. i.e. The jump from HDD to SSD makes a material difference to the player experience, but after that point it's diminishing returns unless you're just copying and pasting huge files over and over.
As for the Lexar vs the WD Black... I wonder if maybe it had something to do with the Lexar being closer to full?
As someone who moves a lot of big files back and forth, NVMe drives get bogged down with big transfers and a SATA SSD can be as fast as a budget NVMe drive. There are other factors such as the quality of the controllers on your motherboard. And it really isn't worth buying any expensive drive whether it be SATA or NVMe unless you have an enterprise use where a few seconds time saved on a file transfer actually translates into real money.
The industry would have us believe you need the best to play a game of Fortnite when that just isn't true. Any affordable drive from a recognizable brand will do. It really isn't worth spending hundreds of dollars extra on top of the line components to shave a second or two off your load times in Cyberpunk. Because it isn't just the expensive drive, you also need the expensive MB and expensive RAM to actually make it useful.
Was an unexpected treat to run into you in the grocery store - felt star-struck after, made my day! Thanks for being so entertaining and educational 👌🙌
was he doing an experiment of what would happen if you put a watermelon in a paper bag? And then pushed it to a wet watermelon in a paper bag but with zip tie supports...
Thanks for the vid, I'm working with an extremely tight budget and it was nice to see the different SSDs againt each other.
Great video and helps to answer some of the same things I was wondering. It would have been helpful at the end or during the video to have a bar graph comparing each of the different options.
Once you hit a certain level of speed you're more waiting on the GPU and CPU to start doing stuff that's been processed and set up to run. There are tons of use cases that can benefit from this though. Maybe a video showing the differences in games that make use of resizable BAR?
Did you make sure the C to A cables that you were using were USB3? Because they looked like USB2 cables and a lot of motherboards have square USB ports that are just as fast as the USB-C ports.
Yeah I think the USB3 "square cable" should be much closer to the SATA SSD than the HDD. It won't be as fast as the best USB-C ports though.
Don't you need the fancyt red/orange 3.2 cables for NVME? Only it has 10Gbps transfer capacity.
Yea, gotta make sure you use the right port too, I believe the color coding for 10gbps USB-A is red while the blue ones are limited to I believe 5gbps. But if it's only a USB 2.0 cable, then you are limited to 480mbps.
Yes, because USB-C is a connector standard, not a transfer protocol.
I am always waiting for more vids always brightens my day
Another superb video Dawid, these real world tests are exactly what we need - the paper specs just don't translate well into what to expect in the depths of sweaty load time knife fights!
Awesome. Want more videos like this.
Seeing how fast Windows boots from each drive would have been very interesting. I use the 1TB WD Black basically just for the Windows installation, plus a 4TB and a 2TB Crucial MX500 for everything else. I'm pretty happy with this setup.
About the same.
Must be nice to be able to afford to waste a 1TB drive just for an OS that will fit on a 64GB TF card.
@@Lurch-Bot Putting your OS on a TF card sounds like a waste of a computer. Also the OP is doing it right. You will see a significant loss in performance and responsiveness running your OS on a smaller drive at almost max capacity vs the larger 1TB drive stated above. Those random read and writes make a difference.
@@dracer35 Exactly. I really don't want to stress my main storage device with too much on it. I know how slow all digital drives can get when you often fill up 90% of their capacity. Not to mention the lifetime reduction this clearly causes. So yeah, I may be able to afford a rather expensive drive for basically just Windows, but I also want to keep it for as long as possible. I'm not Wendy Wasteful or anything like that. Also, my PC boots in roughly 10 to 15 seconds. Great stuff!
@@scherge Im right there with you. I use a 1tb NVMe for my OS and then a separate 4tb NVMe storage drive for all my games and other stuff. System boots fast, is super responsive and works perfectly. I won't do it any other way. If a person was constrained by the cost, I would suggest they save up longer rather than buying an inferior part and being unhappy with the system.
Bought 2x SN850X and they are trully working as intended, great speed, nothing to complain abiout!! 👍
I saw gaming benchmarks on different SSDs. The difference between a mid-range NVMe SSD and a top-tier NVMe SSD was anywhere from .2 seconds to 2 seconds on gaming benchmarks. Games I play often will be on M.2 SSD. Games I occasionally play may get moved to a SATA SSD. Steam especially has a menu option to let you transfer your game over, which makes this nice. Some games even play off magnetic, usually older games from the PS360 era and before (I'm planning on swapping out my gaming magnetic HDDs with bang-for-the-buck 4TB or higher SATA SSDs eventually just because they are getting old)
My desktop has 2 NVMe SSDs. OS SSD and then a gaming SSD. I don't mind a cheaper one for gaming.
Of course, if I upgrade NVMe drives again later with gaming as the target, I'll do a quick check for gaming benchmarks. For almost everything I do on NVMe, I don't notice a huge difference. In some cases, I don't notice a difference between my SATA and NVMe SSDs
I'm thinking the FPS difference will be small because the most-used assets will be in RAM once the level is loaded. Loading itself might be a combination of FIle I/O and decompression, decompression happening on the CPU and sometimes the GPU.
very helpful thanks, especially the part about the slow speed of a USB A port to USB C drive caddy.
New Dawid videos just make me happy!
How timely Dawid! I just bought a SN_850X 2 TB this week for my PS5. I moved a 37 GB game from my internal drive to it in 10 seconds. I love NVME.
i did the same a while back with the SSD
@@HUYI1 It's a beautiful drive. I love it.
Sata SSDs are perfectly fine. Most games can not take advantage of NVME speeds for loading times. The difference between a SATA SSD and an NVME in loading times is usually less than a second.
For that matter, there are a ton of still popular games that won't even benefit from a SATA SSD, like FO4 because the engine just can't load it any faster than a spinner. I sure hope they fix that with the next gen update. I've played FO4 for 350 hrs and half that time was spent on a loading screen disguised as an elevator. We still only have a handful of games that actually won't run right on a mechanical drive.
When you run out of VRAM, you quickly realize even an NVMe drive is slow AF. There's a new storage tech coming which is basically non-volatile RAM. The SSD as we know it in any form factor will become obsolete for internal storage in consumer PCs by the end of the decade.
Hey Dawid, you are very right. WD SN850X is not only one of the best speed Gen4 Nvme SSDs(the speed that REALLY MATTERS is NOT the 7000+ MB/S read and write BUT the 4K read Q1T1-that is the one that actually helps with everything from loading windows faster to loading games faster etc.), but when on sale it is the most affordable among them. I don't game but I do use it in PC, laptop and also in external 10 GB/S Nvme enclosure as well.
GREAT timing and info!
I was going to buy my Nephew a 500Gb crucial p5+ for a boot drive, he is currently using 2 old cheap 250gb sata ssd's but I will now buy him a gen older 1Tb NVME.
For him at this point capacity is better than newest.
I would get him more then a tb if u can..Call of duty will take it up all by itself
Gen 5 NVMe, just as slow ???
under a rock for 3 years ? same speed now !
@@SpaceRanger187 Good to know . The plan is get him another for his Bday in the summer . I already bought him other bits and he aint the only one. If I treat him too much I gotta treat them all equally. He starts work soon thankfully ;#}
@@lucasrem I dunno what your on about. Yes I been under a rock.
I will buy a 60 quid one tb whatever gen that is but not lexar. I will look at reviews of the wd sn 750 and adata 800 and a coupla others.
At this point it's just nice to install/update faster
4:08 I didn't realize Canada used imperial math, in most countries 22 seconds is not less than a tenth of 154 seconds.
I just bought a wd_black 4tb nvme on sale a couple weeks ago. It was cool to see some tests considering I just slapped it in and never thought twice about it lol
Just what I need! A Dawid video to cheer me up while i'm in the hospital.
For me, the upgrade from SSDs to NVMe is about texture streaming and the future of DirectStorage implementations. This type of fluctuation in performance can be measured in Horizon Forbidden West, as an SSD can experience slowdowns or "lag," during cutscenes, while an NVMe drive seemingly resolves any latency buffering while loading the textures in real time.
Once I see this guy on my Homescreen I smile from ear to ear and if haven't seen him for a while, I ensure to see if he has new vids, can't help but feel a part of a family with this channel
with my old machine, amd fx 4300 4 core 4 thread chip, running on an old hdd, it took around 5-10 minutes for the machine to boot to desktop and become functional let alone booting up a game.
these are some great tests, it's weird that not alot of people do anything like this, another simple one is going from a multiplayer lobby to a loaded in match, or when you die and have to reload the save in many games too, alot of these are the real end user scenarios where you will really feel the difference in loading times but aren't often spoken about.
Depends on OS. For example FX-6100 will boot into Win 7 in like 30-40 seconds from old 500GB HDD.
@@aleksazunjic9672 i was on windows 7 too, just years of crap built up overtime until everything moved at a snails pace until it settled
i had a similar cpu but i bougth a cheap ssd for windows and a sata hard disk for games, it ran very well untill i moved to ryzen and nvme, even better
@@betag24cn I skipped right over SATA ssd to nvme, With a 2700x it took 10 seconds to boot and was instantly usable, blew my mind at the time. Still does to be honest.
@elcactuar3354 wtf f iff grammar nazzi
Like always perfect test
Dawid, I just want to say how much I love watching your videos. I do tend to watch a ton of negative, depressing things that are going on nowadays and your fun, energetic take on even crappy quality things is such a nice way to get my "jooozes" (in Dawid voice) flowing lol
Not a bad video but, deserving of a revisit or dedicated video on USB NVME adapters.
On the External NVME enclosures , there's a *lot* of consequential detail left out:
-There's at least 2 major manufacturers of NVME bridges, and both have had numerous 'teething issues'. Brand (RealTek v. ASMedia), and what exact 'revision' they are, can matter quite a lot.
-Many 'commodity' NVME-USB bridges are *PCIe Gen3 x2 lane*.
-Regardless of Bridge Chip used, USB/TB bandwidth are further separated by manufacturing design choices, component and *cable quality*.
-Different USB transfer modes (BOT v. UASP) plus how they effect both effective bandwidth and system latency
-Windows' Removable Device Policy; how and what "for Better Performance" does.
I bought that same Lexar NVMe drive back in December, and it's a beast.
Use a decent hard drive instead of some old 1tb drive from a decade ago. A modern decent 7200rpm single or dual platter HD has a 250mb++ RW rate.
I do not understand why the video has fewer views than other ones. This video is truly useful, yes maybe it is not funny, but it is intellectual and has great ideas in it! I definitely want to see such intellectual videos more often on your channel.
P.S. Hello from independent and civilized 🇺🇦Ukraine, Dawid.
Oh wow! A practical Dawid video
Very informative!
Would be interesting if you could test the same drives with game engines that use texture streaming.
IdTech 6/7 and Unreal Engine 4/5 have some pretty bad texture pop-in depending on the rig they're running on.
At 1:25 where you show your crystal diskmark speeds the top line represents theoretical yield. The second line is indicative of real world performance. So actually the lexar for some reason the read speed is only 3000 MB/s so it would perform similarly to the garden nvme at 2000 MB/s. Something is indeed wrong with that lexar or a setting is wrong on the system for it
I’m wondering if the bottom PCie slot is gen 3 as it is with a lot of motherboards. That would explain the slow speeds.
I'm still using a mid-range SATA SSD from 2014 as my main drive, as the gen 4 NVME (with DRAM) I bought few months ago didn't bring ANY performance differences
As someone who is completely out of m.2 slots (including a board pcie slot riser) its good to see that sata is still viable for new games
i have a 2tb m.2 on the board, and a 4tb sata i call 'the dump' where i put most of my games. good for everything I need
I've argued this with a friend now for the longest time. For gaming, a gen 3 nvme with 2000-3500mb/s(3300 in reality) reads speed is more than enough. But one thing, I didn't see here is the stutter from hdd to ssd to nvme. You can test this on newer games probably open world around 2018 to recent. When you move maps, specially when you run through them, the hdd can't keep up with the read and load speed need for the game.
I find mechanical drives to be perfect for general storage like pictures.
Thats a good Idea. Is it correct that HDDs lose the magnetic thing after some years and therefore lose Data? I heard that some time ago but do not know if thats true😅
@@DG-ks5wn they do yes but depending on use they have been known to last 10 years and more. My oldest has windows m.e which was released in 2000. So we're talking a drive 24 years old.
They are still useful for older games. PS4 came with HDD and many games are just ports.
@@drunkbillygoat okay that sounds good.
I was being told that HDDs lose their magnetics much faster. Now im not afraid anymore.
If HDDs dont loose their data at least 10 years thats awesome. Im not familiar with storage, especially HDDs😅
old ges will do just fine, images, videos, all will just work without issue
the problem comes when you start hearing windows doing defraentation or scandisk or windows indexing content or something like that, the noise is annoying af, i had a old hard disk and had to remove it, the noise stressed me, i moved to a laptop hard disk and the noise was still there but much lower, i moved to a cheap wd green nvme, no issues so far
the real lesson? one minute doesnt have 100 secods, mr. `ooooooo, a tenth of the time`
Oh yeah. I remember when sea of thieves came out and I was playing it with friends and i had it in an NVMe and they had it in an HDD and I could load in, get to the ship, and sail away before they got into the game.
I went from a 1 TB 2400 MB/s to a 2 TB 7500 MB/s drive in my gaming rig. Zero noticeable difference. lol
Except for more space. Duh.
any review would have told you that, gaming barely benefits 5% going from 500 mb/s ssd to 7000 mb/s, and not all software benfit from it either
Same lmao, all these huge numbers are stupid.
Games load MAYBE 1 second faster on a 7000 MBps drive compared to good old sata SSD.
but there is not reason to avoid these high speed ones, I mean, most of the time price of them is only slightly above sata ssds, why not?
if you got more sata ports and want CHEAP ssd storage go get slow satas from a reputable brand, ez
That's because DirectStorage isn't really a thing on PC. Eventually it may be, may not be. Who knows
@@Cy12237 that’s true it might make a real difference once that becomes a standard in the industry if it ever does.
i recently made a PC with a Crucial p3 and one with the t500 and i noticed immediately, and wished i hadn't cheaped out on the P3 on the other one, regular use it was noticeably faster
That's the same thing I discovered about NVMe drives, I went from a Western digital SN530 1tb to a Western digital 850X and I could not tell the difference.
the difference ends up being fractions of a second at the worst to maybe 4 seconds faster at the best case
You have to make sure that youa re using the fastest PCIe NVMe lane on your mobo and that you are using a board that supports PCIe gen 5 x4. If your board only supports PCIe gen 3 x4 or 4 x4 then its going to be THAT much slower. There is a huge difference in speed between 4Gbps, 8Gbps and 16Gbps.
@@cjmoss51those numbers are the theoretical cap of the lanes. not the drive, and definitely not the software moving data. it's diminishing returns at best in reality
@@bradhaines3142 Also having dRAM is more important then having faster drive. Gen 3`s and even 4`s can easily be beaten even by sata m.2 if they dont have a dRAM.
Excellent and relevant testing, thanks! I'm glad that once in a while we can still stray from aliexpress 😁 While not so relevant to your drive tests I would add that for the in game performance gamers want to keep in mind the impact of cpu L3 cache where huge maps are involved.
this channel is dangerously good
Yes I do! That’s why I just bought a 1TB Crucial T500. Gen 4 NVME with amazing reviews. Got it on sale for about 80 USD. You can’t beat that
Got a 2TB lexar drive as my main and a samsung 970 evo as my second and they are pretty amazing. I've had some Sabrent drives also in my previous built and they were pretty decent for the price too.!
I watch all your videos and have no clue ever what you are talking about yet enjoy your videos.
I have a Samsung 980 Pro M'2 2TB as my main drive, and a Kindston 4TB on the second M.2 slot., a Samsung 970 1TB as a portable M'2 drive. I even have a 9 year old Samsung 850 on the SATA slot. The 850 has sentimental reasons to me as it was one of the first SSD's I have ever purchased. Oodles of money for a 500GB drive :) But still runs great. Took advantage of the price cuts before they start to skyrocket once more.
So, we have reached the point where I can run my games off and external drive and see little to no speed reduction. What a time to be alive
Sata from a hdd is a massive jump, but sata to nvme isn’t as big because it’s generally the same technology at work just different in the way they access memory
Cool vid!
NVMEs are only really worth it for big graphically complex open world games where streaming is common. For regular games, even last of us which uses instanced levels; SSD is generally good enough. Also GEN3 nvmes are where it's at for gaming and general use, pcie4/5 only really helps for big mono file transfers. If they do better with little files; that's on the more modern controller; that sort of stuff won't saturate pcie3 4x for a while. Great video, btw desk mic be running ssssssuper hot, odd as its usually the open room mics that do that when it occasionally happens.
I use to love being the guy in chat "ok, whose got the mechanical drive? get a $30 sata drive, DM and I'll walk you through the install" and some would ask "you serious or just talking shit" and I'd say something like "oh yeah, let me just change my screen name to 'obviously your free tech support since you can't even watch youtube videos'"
Love the tribal music on the start-ups LOL! Curious, did you bypass Steam, and go straight to the executable?
I just upgraded to a WD black I noticed a difference between it and my XPG gen 3 drive. WD has a good software has an option something called gaming mode not sure if it makes a difference but might make for an interesting test.
You're comparing an expensive drive to a cheap one.
with a good mobo and cpu, you should be using stable 7200m/t-8000m/t ddr5, which really reduces latency and 1%'s, GG great vid as always tho Dawid :D, also I use 2x970 evo plus m.2 gen3 for gaming and no complaints atm, late 2025 game releases that will use direct drive more, i assume, will benefit from faster gen m.2's, all assumptions at this time, PC Centric did a vid recently, and actually went all the way up to gen5 with little to no gains for gaming...
I love this channel.
Those blistering high transfer rates for the "super fast" nvme drives only apply until the drives internal cache is filled for writes, or until the internal cache is depleted for reads. After that you are pretty much stuck with whatever speed the actual flash memory natively gives. And that is usually VERY slow compared to the rated performance based on only the cache being used. This is actually the same as it was for 2.5" SATA SSD's. Some manufacturers do, however, spend the money for the premium quality flash memory that will deliver the highest performance possible, but even that is nothing compared to the performance of cache memory, which is typically DDR3 or DDR4 RAM nowadays.
And some just dont have any cache and solely depend on memory itself...
I had an old 7200RPM hard drive back when I played a LOT of battlefield 4 and just didn't have the money at the time to buy an SSD. But when I finally got around to getting one I did a small test of load times in the on server I played on the most.....HDD took maybe 3 minutes every time when joining in. After moving the game files over to the SSD and loading in....took maybe 15-20 seconds. I did finally get around to buying a m.2 nvm drive and I like them cause to me they are easy to install but also no added cables to run them.
My understanding is that not all M.2 slots are created equal. Generally the slot closest to the CPU is best because of its direct PCIE lanes to the CPU, whereas the other M.2 and PCIE slots have to go through a "south bridge" chip. I checked the manual for that board, and all 3 slots are listed as PCIE 4.0 x 4. I'd be curious to know if the top slot would perform better, and make sure they're all marked as PCIE 4.0 in the BIOS rather than PCIE 3.0. (they're probably set to "Auto" so they should be at their best) Might make a difference. Might not.
In my pc i have 1 samsung 980 for windows, 1 samsung 970 evo for the games and one samsung 870 evo plus that i used to hasve all my games on before i bought the 970...and with this change i did noticed a few less seconds in loading speeds but not big deal.
In red dead 2 i noticed the biggest change..in cyberpunk it remained a few seconds but it did become somewhat faster for the initial load of the game.
So yeah, that's in the diminishing returns realm
Those are wicked fast!
pretty sure that bottom nvme slot is going through the chipset which is not very good for ssd's performance. But in my experience in real use it's hard to notice the difference between main and secondary m.2 slots especially when it comes to loading stuff such as os or games. Same goes for 4.0 vs good 3.0 drives. In these scenarios the bottlenecks are most likely random r/w metrics of the storage device and overall system power (cuz stuff has to be processed upon loading). Copying files without processing is another story tho.
It really depends on how your motherboard is wired. My B650 has 2 M2s. One is a PCIE 5x4, and the other is a PCIE 4x4 both through the CPU. Not sure about this specific motherboard though
Whilst game loading times is an okay real-world benchmark, it relies on many factors beside the drive read times.
I wonder how often Dawid actually calls it "The Epeenamatron"
Should've tested it with games with DirectStorage feature too.
I'd like to see Dead Space tested with this lineup. It's notorious for freezing between rooms due to loading and I'd be interested in seeing whether or not stuttering can be improved by beating it into submission with a crazy fast SSD.
i'm addicted to this youtube channel
That “normal” NVMe drive is the Samsung PM981 which is their OEM version of the Samsung 970 Evo, one of the fastest Gen 3 SSDs. Lexar NM800 Pro doesn’t beat the 970 Evo in some real world applications, probably because of firmware tuning. But Western Digital knows what they’re doing.
This is a good lesson that not all SSDs are created equal!
One nice thing about an SSD even on a slow external USB connection is that it does not require a supplemental power cable like most old school spinney disc things.
this is good strident content - you should go wild and let your hair down and do a raid0 followup with phoronix suite bench comparo - for big db the nvme is a massive improvement - you do have to be choosy but for certain workloads (and games maybe) nvme is a massive jump plus if you have faster sick 40gbe then you need nvme to unlock performance bottlenecks. also you could test usb4 hubs with various configs - this was really helpful content since with so many standards it can be tough even for experts to find best combos for optimal speed - expect things to kick up a notch in just the next few years with advent of usb 4.2/4.4x4/5/5.2/5.4x4, pci-e v6 and next gen nvme - i/o doubles on average every 3 years and we will be seeing big jumps in speed no doubt, more better pci lanes etc - it is all good in my sheltered estimation - to break it down - people want a pci card that can handle 4 fast nvme right now and need a mb that supports bifurcation but you can't run gpu/fast network and a nvme card at once now unless you goto server/ws platform which is prohibitive
thanks for this useful comparison honestly. was wondering how games compare on different ssds in 2024 🙂
I have a 128GB Samsung mSATA SSD in my 2013 HP Elitebook Folio 9470m
Windows installed in about 14 minutes on it. Coming from a Hard Drive, I was so confused I thought it failed so I clean installed again, 14 minutes.
2 years later since I did the upgrade, the laptop is still as smooth in terms of boot times, file transfers and overall system responsiveness.
In games, I didn't see much difference as I play games that dont have loading screens (Scourgebringer, Guilty Gear XX, BlazBlue CPEX, Super House of Dead Ninjas and others)
Overall you'll notice a huge difference when coming from a hard drive.
The problem with using advantages of nvme is that i/o apis need to be updated to be parallelised, otherwise we are working with random iops Q1T1 performance
I run win 11 on Kingston 1 TB NVME gen 4 and all of my games are on a WD SATA SSD 4TB and the game load times are around 10-15 seconds. Only down side is the spare NVME port switches off ( windows back up ) if using addition HDD for storage / backups etc so I had to unplug it altogether. I wouldn't store games on the same NVME as your OS as this often causes crashes.
16 seconds vs nearly 2 minutes in Forza is kind of insane. It boggles my mind when I still see comments about HDDs being "fine" for gaming or complaining when a modern game doesn't run well on HDD.
Hi Dawid, It is not just loading time, quite a few modern games do stream data from the storage as you traverse the world. Alan Wake 2 can even peak streaming data at 2GB a second. For sure a HDD or SSD can slow performance. I measured regular 1GB loading a second which lightly stutters frametimes when traversing the levels. You can see this in HW info 64. This is on a on a Gen 3 NVME m2.
The other game is Rachet and Clank - A Rift Apart even a SSD can cause a slight pause when going though portals. This was tested by Digital Foundry.
I'll prob test Last of Us Part 1 another time see how much it needs to stream.
i legit bought that SN850X yesterday, kinda mad that you happen to make a video with one as a main focus less than 24 hours later.
never seen one in person as i have been living out of SATA SSDs for many years. fingers crossed my 2080 doesn't cook it.
the WD Black SN850x is a nice drive, got one myself
The WD SN850X 2TB/4TB NVMe drives are nice. I have two of them in my Intel Xeon W7-2495X, ASUS Pro WS W790 ACE, 512GB DDR5, ASUS ROG RTX-3090 workstation.
Remember Dawid, USB A can be either USB2.0 (488MBs) or USB 3.0 (5GBs), looks like your "Square" usb cables are USB 2.0 which would give you HDD like speeds.
he makes the best videos thath can exist