Is the Crucial P3 Plus 2TB M.2 ok as a game drive?

[g335]

Hello,

 

I bought the Crucial P3 Plus 2Tb M.2 as my game drive, not my main system drive.  I read that its does not have any cache.  Should I get a different drive to use as the game drive?

[Shimejii]

2 minutes ago, g335 said:

Hello,

 

I bought the Crucial P3 Plus 2Tb M.2 as my game drive, not my main system drive.  I read that its does not have any cache.  Should I get a different drive to use as the game drive?

Its fine for most games and it wont have any impact on the game loading times to a realistically noticeable amount. If direct storage actually becomes more of a thing in the next few years you may have some issues, but thats a TBD still.

[Needfuldoer]

Nah, it will be fine. You probably won't even notice a difference unless you convince yourself there is one.

 

DRAM cache helps write speeds, not read speeds. Games read a lot more than they write. Even when you're downloading new games or updating the ones you've got, your Internet connection will be the bottleneck, not your SSD.

 

If you had a bottom-of-the-barrel, no name SSD, you'd benefit from upgrading. Crucial P3 Plus drives are better than that.

 

 

[g335]

47 minutes ago, Shimejii said:

Its fine for most games and it wont have any impact on the game loading times to a realistically noticeable amount. If direct storage actually becomes more of a thing in the next few years you may have some issues, but thats a TBD still.

 

41 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Nah, it will be fine. You probably won't even notice a difference unless you convince yourself there is one.

 

DRAM cache helps write speeds, not read speeds. Games read a lot more than they write. Even when you're downloading new games or updating the ones you've got, your Internet connection will be the bottleneck, not your SSD.

 

If you had a bottom-of-the-barrel, no name SSD, you'd benefit from upgrading. Crucial P3 Plus drives are better than that.

 

 

Thanks,

 

Do you think its worth changing it to a 4TB drive or just add a extra drive?

[g335]

48 minutes ago, Shimejii said:

Its fine for most games and it wont have any impact on the game loading times to a realistically noticeable amount. If direct storage actually becomes more of a thing in the next few years you may have some issues, but thats a TBD still.

Whats direct storage?

 

[Shimejii]

Just now, g335 said:

Whats direct storage?

1 minute ago, g335 said:

 

Thanks,

 

Do you think its worth changing it to a 4TB drive or just add a extra drive?

Just add an extra drive. Unless you have a need to keep all the games downloaded,2 TB should be more then enough.

 

 

Direct storage is a Direct 12 Thing that allows game assets to be loaded much faster, but really has not been used by more then a handful of games since its announcement a few years ago at this point. It requires gen 4 NVME drives, but has had little impact on PC since no dev has really implemented it fully yet, just partial implementations.

[porina]

5 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

DRAM cache helps write speeds, not read speeds. Games read a lot more than they write. Even when you're downloading new games or updating the ones you've got, your Internet connection will be the bottleneck, not your SSD.

You can feel the difference when a game is updating/patching separately from the download. Still, this is relatively uncommon.

 

4 hours ago, Shimejii said:

It requires gen 4 NVME drives, but has had little impact on PC since no dev has really implemented it fully yet, just partial implementations.

I'm not sure it requires gen 4, since lower performing models of that are hardly any different from a good gen 3. It'll speed up disk reads regardless, although faster is better to a point. Forspoken was the first to use it, and it used it to speed up load times. Ratchet and Clank is closer to the ideal use case, as it uses it to load data between transitions. From memory, PC still took a bit longer to load than PS5 but it is getting there. It is inevitable more games will support it going forwards so planning ahead doesn't hurt.

[kokosnh]

It’s DRAMless QLC SSD, very slow write outside of pSLC. As QLC is just slow. 
it’s actually the bottom of the barrel of the PCIe 4.0 SSDs. 
there were some reports of stutters in games specifically on that drive, but that’s all.

 

So if it’s only the game drive, it should be mostly OK in today's games ( if you won't see any stutters ), but the install/update time will just be slow.

 

8 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

DRAM cache helps write speeds, not read speeds

It helps both

 

 

[Needfuldoer]

35 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

It helps both

Sorry, I was trying to keep it simple but I should've been more specific.

 

DRAM cache helps write speeds more dramatically than read speeds, and only helps read things that are repeatedly used or were recently written. Otherwise it's just an extra stop the data has to make on its way to the system bus. You miss having a cache more when you're writing than when you're reading.

[kokosnh]

1 hour ago, Needfuldoer said:

DRAM cache helps write speeds more dramatically than read speeds, and only helps read things that are repeatedly used or were recently written. Otherwise it's just an extra stop the data has to make on its way to the system bus. You miss having a cache more when you're writing than when you're reading.

And this is completely wrong…

DRAM is used to hold a copy of FTL, so the address of all the data in NAND. 
It’s not a write bufor, like NAND in SSHD. 

 

if SSD don’t have DRAM, it needs to read the NAND twice, to get to the data.

first to read the FTL that it has to store in NAND, and only then it can read the actual data. It’s still quite fast, but it literally needs to read NAND twice, hence latency penalty, and poor random 4KQD1. 

 

of course, write is also faster, especially sustained writes, as it updating the FTL in DRAM, and don’t have to rewrite it in NAND, all the time.

 

of course, the DRAM SSD also flush the FTL from DRAM to NAND in some time ( to have a copy ), but they are not forced to do it when it’s busy with other write operation…