Worth it to upgrade from SATA SSD to M.2 SSD?

[BattleToads]

I'm not really worried about gaming performance, I know there won't be much of a difference there anyway. With the drive I have (TeamGroup SATA SSD 960 GB), it is great until you start handling large files. It will essentially "bottleneck" when installing games or updates. I have fast-ish internet and can download at over 40MB/s. This will "bottleneck" the SSD to the point where the rest of my PC will freeze. This also happens with Steam or Windows updates. I am assuming this is happening because the RAM inside the SSD is getting full and thus causing the tank in speeds and the PC to freeze. 

 

Is this occurring because this is a cheap SATA SSD or do all SATA SSDs have this issue? Would an NVME drive eliminate this issue and allow me to deal with large files like games and updates without the "bottlenecks" and freezes? 

[tkitch]

you'd have to look at task manager.

 

Steam is shocking CPU heavy to download from.  Games are heavily compressed and then unpack on your system, and it kills the processor.

[LIGISTX]

7 minutes ago, BattleToads said:

I'm not really worried about gaming performance, I know there won't be much of a difference there anyway. With the drive I have (TeamGroup SATA SSD 960 GB), it is great until you start handling large files. It will essentially "bottleneck" when installing games or updates. I have fast-ish internet and can download at over 40MB/s. This will "bottleneck" the SSD to the point where the rest of my PC will freeze. This also happens with Steam or Windows updates. I am assuming this is happening because the RAM inside the SSD is getting full and thus causing the tank in speeds and the PC to freeze. 

 

Is this occurring because this is a cheap SATA SSD or do all SATA SSDs have this issue? Would an NVME drive eliminate this issue and allow me to deal with large files like games and updates without the "bottlenecks" and freezes? 

There is no way a SSD is not able to write fast enough for a 40mbps (or even 40MBps) internet connection. DRAMless SSD’s do run into an issue when their “fast” NAND gets full and you have to write directly to the slower stuff, but man an SSD would need to be absolutely garbage tier to run into issues from even gigabit (which is 125 MB per second) to be an issue.

 

So, the answer I guess is, maybe? I would look into your drive specifically and see if people have similar issues. If not, you may have other issues, like windows just being broken. 

[BattleToads]

2 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

There is no way a SSD is not able to write fast enough for a 40mbps (or even 40MBps) internet connection. DRAMless SSD’s do run into an issue when their “fast” NAND gets full and you have to write directly to the slower stuff, but man an SSD would need to be absolutely garbage tier to run into issues from even gigabit (which is 125 MB per second) to be an issue.

 

So, the answer I guess is, maybe? I would look into your drive specifically and see if people have similar issues. If not, you may have other issues, like windows just being broken. 

So I'm guessing it's not normal to take over an hour to install a large game then? How do I find the other issue or if windows is broken? The reviews for the drive are decent. 

[Blue4130]

8 minutes ago, BattleToads said:

So I'm guessing it's not normal to take over an hour to install a large game then? How do I find the other issue or if windows is broken? The reviews for the drive are decent. 

Open task manager when installing a game. Which part is maxed out? (my guess is cpu) 

[BattleToads]

1 minute ago, Blue4130 said:

Open task manager when installing a game. Which part is maxed out? (my guess is cpu) 

No, it's the SSD. I just ran a benchmark on it and there is definitely something wrong with the write speed. Only about 30 MB/s. 

[Moonzy]

1 hour ago, BattleToads said:

Is this occurring because this is a cheap SATA SSD or do all SATA SSDs have this issue?

Probably only cheap SSD

Though I personally bought an m.2 SSD just for games because of the issues you described, was using a cheapo SSD and it was the bottleneck during patches

 

My PC didn't freeze because I was using a separate SSD for my OS

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, BattleToads said:

No, it's the SSD. I just ran a benchmark on it and there is definitely something wrong with the write speed. Only about 30 MB/s. 

RMA time. Even a garbage ssd should not be that slow. That's 1/3 of the speed of a slow laptop spinning drive. 

[BattleToads]

7 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

RMA time. Even a garbage ssd should not be that slow. That's 1/3 of the speed of a slow laptop spinning drive. 

So there's no chance it's a windows setting? I saw something about enabling AHCI mode and reinstalling windows?

[LIGISTX]

6 hours ago, BattleToads said:

So there's no chance it's a windows setting? I saw something about enabling AHCI mode and reinstalling windows?

AHCI vs IDE or RAID mode wouldn’t affect the speed.

 

8 hours ago, BattleToads said:

Only about 30 MB/s

What benchmark?

 

Also what is the rest of the system components? 

[BattleToads]

7 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

AHCI vs IDE or RAID mode wouldn’t affect the speed.

 

What benchmark?

 

Also what is the rest of the system components? 

Benchmark is AS-SSD. 

Ryzen 5 1600 AF

16GB DDR4 3200 CL16

Radeon RX 6600 8GB

Asrock B450-HDV motherboard

Teamgroup SATA SSD 960 GB

Windows 10

[BattleToads]

So I checked and it is in fact running in AHCI mode already. It's looking like the drive has just always been bad, but I couldn't tell because I was upgrading from a mechanical HDD. The read speed still seems acceptable at over 400 MB/s, but the write speed is only 30. Any recommendations on a new drive? Should I just get an m.2? Also, the drive is two years old at this point, so I'm guessing I couldn't RMA it... 

[IPD]

Really depends on capacity you need.  NVME is slowly taking over for SATA WRT cost, but the gap isn't fully closed yet--meaning that SATA in large capacity will probably still be cheaper and at only a marginally slower speed (from the user perspectove).

 

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-Plus-MZ-V7S2T0B/dp/B07MFZXR1B

 

Something like this is a solid choice, imho.  But i don't know that I would go beyond 2TB for NVME...yet.

[BattleToads]

2 hours ago, IPD said:

Really depends on capacity you need.  NVME is slowly taking over for SATA WRT cost, but the gap isn't fully closed yet--meaning that SATA in large capacity will probably still be cheaper and at only a marginally slower speed (from the user perspectove).

 

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-Plus-MZ-V7S2T0B/dp/B07MFZXR1B

 

Something like this is a solid choice, imho.  But i don't know that I would go beyond 2TB for NVME...yet.

what about this one? https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-2tb-blue-sn550-nvme/p/N82E16820250173?Description=ssd&cm_re=ssd-_-20-250-173-_-Product

[IPD]

Probably would fit the bill nicely.  I don't have any experience with WD's M.2 yet.