W D Black nvme m.2 now cost the same as a 860 evo sata , does this mean its now pointless to invest in sata?

[SeerzAbyss]

I currently own the 860 EVO SDD and although it maid a big difference making the switch from HDD i cant help but wonder what had missed out on if i  bought the W D Black nvme m.2. They both cost nearly the same price! and only being 6-8$ more.

 

although the m.2 is not the best in its class but also not worse or bad like some intel m.2. Would i be wrong to think its worth having instead of the 860 EVO sata SSD? And would it make a difference in game downloads? it took my 860 3 hours to download Battlefield1 , could of it been possible to  save 1 hour too 30 minutes of download time if i had gone with the budget nvme m.2?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jurrunio]

It just means Samsung is still overcharging its customers.

[vanished]

Unless you've got an insane 10+ Gbit internet connection like LTT, upgrading your SSD is not going to improve game download speeds.  The fact you say it took 3 hours tells me that this isn't the case.  According to the specs, it's a 50 GB game, meaning you'd have to have a download time of under 2 minutes before a SATA SSD starts holding you back.

[mariushm]

Your download speed has nothing to do with your storage drives.

You will download as fast as your internet service provider allows and as fast as the server at the other end will serve you the files.

 

Even mechanical hard drives can sustain write speeds higher than 125 MB/s which is the equivalent of a 1 gbps internet connection utilized at its maximum. Modern mechanical drives can reach up to 250 MB/s.

 

A SATA SSD has the potential to reach up to 560 MB/s when reading or writing data to it, exactly how close to these numbers it gets depends on the controller used in the SSD and the NAND memory chips. The 860 EVO can probably write at over 350 MB/s

An m.2 SSD uses pci-e lanes (inside the m.2 connector) to transfer data to the computer, giving it higher maximum speeds, up to 2-4 GB/s. You also get a bit better performance in some extreme cases (difficult to explain, I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible).

So they're better than SSD but for average every day things, a regular person may not notice a difference between m.2 and SATA ssds.

 

So they are better, but the downside is due to the connector, you can usually only connect 2-3 such drives to your computer. With SATA, you can connect as many as you have SATA connectors on your motherboard (and you can add SATA controller cards that add SATA connectors to your computer)

 

[SeerzAbyss]

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

Your download speed has nothing to do with your storage drives.

You will download as fast as your internet service provider allows and as fast as the server at the other end will serve you the files.

 

Even mechanical hard drives can sustain write speeds higher than 125 MB/s which is the equivalent of a 1 gbps internet connection utilized at its maximum. Modern mechanical drives can reach up to 250 MB/s.

 

A SATA SSD has the potential to reach up to 560 MB/s when reading or writing data to it, exactly how close to these numbers it gets depends on the controller used in the SSD and the NAND memory chips. The 860 EVO can probably write at over 350 MB/s

An m.2 SSD uses pci-e lanes (inside the m.2 connector) to transfer data to the computer, giving it higher maximum speeds, up to 2-4 GB/s. You also get a bit better performance in some extreme cases (difficult to explain, I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible).

So they're better than SSD but for average every day things, a regular person may not notice a difference between m.2 and SATA ssds.

 

So they are better, but the downside is due to the connector, you can usually only connect 2-3 such drives to your computer. With SATA, you can connect as many as you have SATA connectors on your motherboard (and you can add SATA controller cards that add SATA connectors to your computer)

 

okay that clears up some of my confusion, but is their any difference in boot times of a 80$ SSD from a 30-40$ SSD? or speed reduction when opening applications ?

[SeerzAbyss]

i know that the cheaper ssd are dram -less but i don't understand how that would affect boot times or opening applications or games faster

or if its noticeable

[Enderman]

14 minutes ago, SeerzAbyss said:

i know that the cheaper ssd are dram -less but i don't understand how that would affect boot times or opening applications or games faster

or if its noticeable

NVME does not speed up boot time or applications.

That's bottlenecked by your CPU.

 

NVME is really only beneficial for heavy data transfers.

If you have M.2 slots then sure there's no need to buy a sata drive, but if you run out of M.2 slots then you have to start using sata drives.

 

Motherboards usually only have 1-2 M.2 slots but 6-12 sata ports.

[mariushm]

44 minutes ago, SeerzAbyss said:

okay that clears up some of my confusion, but is their any difference in boot times of a 80$ SSD from a 30-40$ SSD? or speed reduction when opening applications ?

 

40 minutes ago, SeerzAbyss said:

i know that the cheaper ssd are dram -less but i don't understand how that would affect boot times or opening applications or games faster

or if its noticeable

 

The differences consist in the types of NAND memory chips used, how powerful the controller inside is (how many channels it has, if it can use DRAM cache or not, if it can use portions of NAND memory as SLC for write caching etc) , if the SSD has additional RAM inside for caching and other functions.

 

No, boot times usually won't be shorter, because high transfer speeds are achieved when transferring large chunks of files. When an operating system starts, there's lots of small files read, so there's little opportunity to ramp up to speeds of hundreds of MB/s. Also, when an operating system starts, a lot of things are done in series, one thing must finish before another thing starts... for example the operating system may initialize the video card and wait for video card to say "yeah, I'm good and ready to work" before doing the same for sound card ... while these happen there may not be data read from drives

 

types of NAND used : nowadays there's MLC , TLC and QLC  memory.  From left to right, speed decreases, quality decreases, but more data is packed in a smaller chip so it's more profitable for a company to produce them (and cheaper for you).

The memory chips wear out, they have a limited number of writes they can handle... for example, MLC is more resilient and let's say it can handle 5-7000 erases of its internal "pages", TLC can only handle around 2-3000 erases, and QLC chips can only handle 300-600 erases.

To get high speeds, controllers read and write to multiple chips in parallel, the same way computers use RAM in dual channel mode by pairing two memory sticks.

Cheaper controllers have only 4 memory channels, so they're only able to read and write to 4 memory chips at same time, and you get decent speeds (ex 500 MB/s read and 2-400 MB/s writes for SATA SSDs) and then there's controllers that can work with 8 channels, so they read and write to 8 chips at same time, and can basically hit the SATA's maximum speeds of 550 MB/s

 

In order to pack so many bytes of data on a memory chip, there's some compromises made... you can't erase or overwrite small amounts of data. The memory chips are typically arranged in pages that are usually 512 KB or some value around this number, and each page has "rows" or "blocks" that are 4 KB or some similar value.

By design, you can only write 4KB blocks at a time, but you can't overwrite them and you can't erase them - you can only erase pages - and each erase of a page destroys that page a bit - i mentioned in a previous paragraph the limited number of erases.

This is how memory chips in SSDs are different than RAM in your computer - you see a RAM stick now uses 8 chips to get 16 GB of DDR4 memory - that's because each byte can be erased or overwritten independently so there's lots of transistors in the chips to allow that. NAND memory chips sacrifice the ability to erase individual bytes to pack more data into a chip.

 

So going back... the controller has to be smart enough to keep track of how many times each page is erased, and once a page has reached a number high enough, the controller has to stop using that page and stop placing data there, because that page becomes unreliable.

Also, the controller has to be smart enough to delay erasing pages as much as possible.

Because you can't overwrite or erase small rows from a page, the controller also has to keep track where the data is actually located on the SSD.

With mechanical drives, data is arranged in a logical way, in a sequence on round tracks on the disc, so if the operating system says read the 10000 chunk of 4 KB, the mechanical drive knows it has to go on track 5 of the disc and read a segment of the round track from there. If operating system wants the 10001 chunk, mechanical drive knows the data is on same round track, right after the 10000 segment... they're fixed. 

 

With SSDs ... imagine you're opening a 6 KB text document in Notepad and you're changing a sentence somewhere.

Originally, the 6 KB document is in one page of 512 KB on one memory chip (let's say page 10) , and uses 2 rows of 4 KB from that page, let's say row  5 and 8 (they're not necessarily in sequence).

When you save the document, the changes have occurred in one of those 4 KB rows of data, but the SSD can't overwrite the data and can't erase a single row from that page. It also doesn't want to erase the whole 512 KB page and rewrite it with the modified data because it wears out the chips so what it does is more complex:  it makes a note in its memory that the 4 KB row from that page can be eventually erased if needed, then finds a memory page of 512 KB somewhere with an empty 4KB row and puts the modified data there, then memorizes who's the owner of this row.

So, originally your text document was like this:

First  4 KB : page 10, row 5

Next  2 KB : page 10 , row 8

After you hit save, the text document was like this:

First 4 KB : page 10, row 5

Next 2 KB : page 15, row 25  <- page 15 is the first 512 KB page that had an available (empty) 4 KB page

 

The operating system will ask for chunk 10000 and chunk 10001  but internally the SSD knows by looking in its database that you actually want page 10, row 5 and page 15, row 25 ... everything is translated.

 

All this data has to be kept somewhere, and it's usually kept in a tiny portion of the hidden memory on the SSD. So every time you write something, the SSD has to make this juggling and shuffle data around and memorize where data is moved, and then write this down in the memory so that if power is lost, the SSD doesn't lose track of where data is. But writing to memory takes time, so if you write 4 KB to memory chips, then have to write separately where you put those 4 KB, you're basically writing twice each time you write something. 

That's where the DRAM cache can help -when the SSD starts, the SSD controller can take all that information from memory, copy it in ram, hold it in ram and keep it updated in ram, and periodically write it to memory chips as backup. When power is lost, there's usually energy to dump the ram contents to SSD... so the SSD can be faster because it doesn't have to write twice to SSD each time.

The DRAM cache can also help speed writes to a SSD - let's say you copy a 100 MB file to the SSD. Writing the memory chips could take a second, but it a tenth of a second the data is put in that 512 MB - 1 GB of DRAM cache and right away the SSD controller says "i got it, it's as good as written to memory chips" ... so you see the file transferred in  1/10 of a second and everything feels faster.

Presence of RAM can also help by giving the controller a bit more time in finding pages with more empty rows, or finding pages that were erased less, so that at the end of the day, the controller can make smarter decision and erase pages less, therefore extend the life of the memory chips, make your SSD last longer.

So in general, DRAM cache can help when writing or reading lots of small things, and helps extend the life of the drive, but doesn't necessarily give you faster read/write speeds... there's subtle benefits.

 

[SeerzAbyss]

And hows does this compare to random reads or writes?

(Like in web browsing or your computer having a easyer time processing stuff in the background witch sometimes might hinder some performance on older cpu's.)

From what i understand those are what we, as a everyday user might occasionally make more use off ,rather than the speeds of reads and writes for data transfers witch only a small percentage of people actually use.

 

 

 

 Srry for all the questions , im just really  curious to know or get a real grasp on picking the right parts for a build.