Super Speed SSDs

petersmart

petersmart

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Most of us are used to the speed of SSDs by now and know that they can really boost Boot times - well now there's a new kid on the block!

With speeds up to 3600 MB/Sec when mounted on a PCIe3 slot.

I've been building a Z800 workstation with 4 SSDs mounted in software RAID 0 which gives these speeds:

ScreenHunter_4.jpg

But I decided to try out the new Samsung 970 NVME M.2

A 250GB cost me £65.00 from Amazon and I had to order a card from China to accomodate it:

ScreenHunter_002.jpg

Once it arrived I put the Samsung SSD on it and fitted it to a x16 slot.

And nothing happened! - it turned out I needed to download a driver from Samsung - once done It installed with no problems.

A quick trip to the Disk Management in Control Panel to initiate and format it and it was good to go.

And the speed - INCREDIBLE even mounted on my PCIe2 x16 slot which does not get the full speed available:

NVME M.2.jpg

That's right - even at approx 1/2 speed on my slots it beats even my 4 SSDs mounted in Raid 0!

The only problem I had was that it wasn't recognised by the BIOS (A 10 year old Z800) so couldn't use it as a BOOT drive.

But if anyone has a PC with PCIe3 slots this would be incredible!

And the most modern PCs, I believe, can use it as a boot drive.

But for the moment I'm considering selling my brand new SSDs and buying a 2TB version.
 
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They were £90 for the 500GB with Amazon the other day but they keep messing with prices.
I believe the higher the capacity the faster and more durable.
I think to get the max advertised speed you need the 1TB or 2TB, not sure
 
Caerus said:
They were £90 for the 500GB with Amazon the other day but they keep messing with prices.
I believe the higher the capacity the faster and more durable.
I think to get the max advertised speed you need the 1TB or 2TB, not sure
Click to expand...

No it's to do with the PCIe slots, PCIe3 can reach approx twice the speeds of PCIe2 slots (which I have).

And you also need to use all 16 lanes I believe, which is why I went for the card with 16 lanes.

But even at 1/2 speed still AWESOME!

And it was also recognised by my Linux Mint 18.3 even without needing to load the drivers - because Linux has all the drivers in the kernel which is updated regularly.
 
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I've got one of these drives and have been impressed as I could notice the difference in boot time over my older Samsung 840 Pro which I've been using for the past few years. Even Lightroom seems to start up slightly faster and is slightly more responsive. My motherboard has two native M2 slots, so they plug straight in and work at full speed with no need for extra cards.
 
Just to keep this thread going. I really hope the prices keep dropping on SSD`s in general.
I have stopped myself buying big into SSD tech for so many years, waiting for prices to drop to sub £100 for decent 1TB SSD.
I find the performance of a single standard SSD a dream come true and don't feel the need for more performance personally.
Things were different back in the day of HDD where it really was holding a PC back and bottlenecking otherwise high power machines.
As soon as I tried a SSD I was happy.
 
Caerus said:
Just to keep this thread going. I really hope the prices keep dropping on SSD`s in general.
I have stopped myself buying big into SSD tech for so many years, waiting for prices to drop to sub £100 for decent 1TB SSD.
I find the performance of a single standard SSD a dream come true and don't feel the need for more performance personally.
Things were different back in the day of HDD where it really was holding a PC back and bottlenecking otherwise high power machines.
As soon as I tried a SSD I was happy.
Click to expand...

Well for me the fact that it can replace 4 SSDs AND get double speed is impressive!

It also allows me to make the machine even tidier by reducing the need for extra cables

I can easily foresee the time when mechanical HDDs will no longer be included in a machine but only as an external backup - and as cloud storage becomes even cheaper and as broadband becomes even faster it may no longer be considered viable to actually own an external HDD at all.

And another positive is that they can be partitioned if I wish - whereas that's not possible with RAID configuration.
 
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I also have the 500Gb Samsung EVO 970 in the M2 slot on my laptop. I also have a 960Gb SanDisk Ultra II SSD installed. The boot time is very quick as is the read/write speed.
I install progs like photoshop on the quicker C drive and store photos, music etc on the slower D drive. This setup works well for me.
 
My motherboard has two m.2 nvme slots. I use one 500gb 970 evo for the boot drive and another for my working Lightroom catalogue.

It does make for a very speedy machine.
 
Brazo said:
My motherboard has two m.2 nvme slots. I use one 500gb 970 evo for the boot drive and another for my working Lightroom catalogue.

It does make for a very speedy machine.
Click to expand...
Same here, used to have a Z170 Gigabyte board but that only had one M.2 slot, sold that and bought a Asus Z270 Tuf which has two slots, speeds are incredible, especially reads which is what you want for loading your catalogues up.


Screenshot 2018-12-26 at 16.39.58 copy.jpg
 
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