gen5 Gen5 vs Gen4 NVMe

[PDifolco]

I'm looking at upgrading my "old" (3 years) 500GB Sabrent Rocket 4 for a larger drive, with current very low price a 2TB top Gen4 NVme like WD SN850X, Hynix P41 or Crucial T500 are in the 120-150 EUR range (I did buy my SN850 2TB for more than 400EUR 2 years ago at launch..)

Then I'm also planning an AM5 upgrade in 2024 with next gen AMD chips, and wondering if it's a good idea to get a Gen4 drive now if I have Gen5 support in a few months, maybe I could buy a Gen5 drive now ?

But Gen5 price are like x2 vs Gen4, really not a good deal, would try to avoid same mistake than with my SN850, and I'm not even sure of what I'll gain IRL with that, are Gen5 drives really faster at booting and loading stuff ? I'm mostly doing gaming and office stuff on my rig, not manipulating GB of files every day

OTOH SSD prices are at an all time low, but all signals are red for future prices, going to get up due to chip shortage and production decrease

Any thoughts ?

 

[Tan3l6]

Gen 5 SSD-s cost too much and the speed increase compared to a good Gen 4 drive for everyday use is marginal at best. WD SN850X is surely a good one.

[will0hlep]

4 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

I'm looking at upgrading my "old" (3 years) 500GB Sabrent Rocket 4 for a larger drive, with current very low price a 2TB top Gen4 NVme like WD SN850X, Hynix P41 or Crucial T500 are in the 120-150 EUR range (I did buy my SN850 2TB for more than 400EUR 2 years ago at launch..)

Then I'm also planning an AM5 upgrade in 2024 with next gen AMD chips, and wondering if it's a good idea to get a Gen4 drive now if I have Gen5 support in a few months, maybe I could buy a Gen5 drive now ?

But Gen5 price are like x2 vs Gen4, really not a good deal, would try to avoid same mistake than with my SN850, and I'm not even sure of what I'll gain IRL with that, are Gen5 drives really faster at booting and loading stuff ? I'm mostly doing gaming and office stuff on my rig, not manipulating GB of files every day

OTOH SSD prices are at an all time low, but all signals are red for future prices, going to get up due to chip shortage and production decrease

Any thoughts ?

On most gen 4 drives, the nand chips are the limiting factor of how fast the drive is, not the PCIe bandwidth, even in sequentuial reads and writes. As early gen 5 drives are using the same nand chips, gen 5 drives only see a small improvement over gen 4 drives, even in the home field turf of sequentuial reads and writes. In random reads and writes there is basically no difference.

 

Furthermore, increased speeds give deminishing returns. As an example, going 30mph instead of 20mph means you'll save 60 seconds per mile travelled. But going 80mph instead of 70mph will only save you 6.42 seconds per mile travelled. Boot times are already pretty quick on NVMe drives, so increasing the speed of the drive won't show much of a return.

 

At this time it is definately not worth the premium you'll pay.

[Jon-Slow]

Really not worth it with how much they cost right now. Just having more capacity for the same cost sounds a lot better.

 

 

17 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

I'm mostly doing gaming and office stuff on my rig, not manipulating GB of files every day

I handle large work files every day and every work application I have is already pretty snappy on my Gen4 drives. I would say Gen5 could be worth it once the prices drop to what Gen4 currently costs. In games there is no difference at all.

[venomtail]

26 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

are Gen5 drives really faster at booting and loading stuff

Petty much nope. Each generation is great at copy pasting huge files, ones that'll read to a place at once sequentially or is read as well. Windows, games, apps and everything else pretty much is categorised as random reads, not cause your computer is reading random stuff till it finds the right stuff but cause its speratic enought that it's random.

 

Random speeds to my knowledge have pretty much only marginally increased since PCIE 3.0. Biggest breakthroughs being the dram caches that help temporarily store the random writes and read until the slower PCIE 5.0 speeds can write them or read them past the buffer size. I'd say just get the 4.0.

[jaslion]

We are still at the point where there is very little to no difference for games and everyday stuff between a sata ssd and top spec gen5 drive. So just get a nice gen 4 and call it a day

[PDifolco]

44 minutes ago, Jon-Slow said:

Really not worth it with how much they cost right now. Just having more capacity for the same cost sounds a lot better.

 

 

I handle large work files every day and every work application I have is already pretty snappy on my Gen4 drives. I would say Gen5 could be worth it once the prices drop to what Gen4 currently costs. In games there is no difference at all.

 

32 minutes ago, venomtail said:

Petty much nope. Each generation is great at copy pasting huge files, ones that'll read to a place at once sequentially or is read as well. Windows, games, apps and everything else pretty much is categorised as random reads, not cause your computer is reading random stuff till it finds the right stuff but cause its speratic enought that it's random.

 

Random speeds to my knowledge have pretty much only marginally increased since PCIE 3.0. Biggest breakthroughs being the dram caches that help temporarily store the random writes and read until the slower PCIE 5.0 speeds can write them or read them past the buffer size. I'd say just get the 4.0.

 

12 minutes ago, jaslion said:

We are still at the point where there is very little to no difference for games and everyday stuff between a sata ssd and top spec gen5 drive. So just get a nice gen 4 and call it a day

 

Well I'm convinced, Gen5 isn't worth it, will get my 2TB SN850X (but isn't the T500 a bit faster  ?)  !

Also note that I'm using an 8GB RAM cache for "small scale" copy/paste  (esp. useful with my archive HDD)

 

Thanks gentlemen (or -women but I don't think there's any here  )