Question Which NVME for Windows 11?

[DreadBelch]

Better to grab a cheap 500GB or larger NVMe Gen 4 SSD for a Windows 11 boot drive or spend more on a faster NVMe? Thanks.

 

[Tech Junky]

Depends. I use a sn850 but also have a sn770 for storage. The sn770 performs better in the TB4 enclosure and performs fine in the laptop. The 770 throws me for a loop as it's dramless and shouldn't perform better than the 850. I've used various other drives too but the speed of the NVME in general is only noticeable at boot and loading large files or games. Most of the time they're idle.

 

[DreadBelch]

Good to know, thanks.

 

[Tech Junky]

I suppose a gen3 drive is just as good for boot times. The higher speeds by gen4/5 are more useful for sustained use. Programs with a lot of activity r/w will perform better like SQL. Of course if the source and destination are like speeds you'll get faster copies between them. if it's just a single boot with a couple of partitions though save some money and go gen3. It's still 6x faster than SATA.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Programs with a lot of activity r/w will perform better like SQL.

Don't know how TLC drives fare with that but I had a firewall analytics program installed on an MLC drive that used MySQL. It ate up almost two percentage points of the SSD's life in less than a month. It was instantly sent to oblivion. Even now, if responsiveness isn't a requirement, I would put a DB on a RAID array of HDDs rather than SSDs.

 

[Tech Junky]

That drive would have lasted ~4 years. Putting it on raid though still might only get you 5 years depending on the spinner.

Now, ime and use I might hit 5% per year and I doubt it would last 20 years. I tend to swap drives often though as new tech arrives. There's a trade off between life expectancy and speed.

 

[OlyAR15]

It doesn't really matter. You aren't going to notice a difference. I barely noticed a difference going from SATA to NVMe Gen3. Going to Gen4 is basically negligible difference.

I guess if you are doing really heavy disk-based work, it might make a difference, but normal desktop stuff, not so much.

 

[LiluDallas]

I have used almost cheapest Gigabyte M30 (NVME PCI-E 3.0) 512 Gb 3 years without issues https://ssdrive.net/gigabyte-m30-512-gb and replaced it with WD SN850 with almost twice better speed not give increasing of speed at all

 

[Tech Junky]

I have used almost cheapest Gigabyte M30 (NVME PCI-E 3.0) 512 Gb 3 years without issues https://ssdrive.net/gigabyte-m30-512-gb and replaced it with WD SN850 with almost twice better speed not give increasing of speed at all

Do you only have a gen3 slot? Are you getting 3GB\s out of the drives?

 

[LiluDallas]

Do you only have a gen3 slot? Are you getting 3GB\s out of the drives?

No, I get PCI-e4 too. Crystaldisk get full speed, but I can't see some significant changes.

 

[mikeymikec]

Better to grab a cheap 500GB or larger NVMe Gen 4 SSD for a Windows 11 boot drive or spend more on a faster NVMe? Thanks.

Based on my experience that few people regard their data and/or OS setup as having zero importance, I'd advise against cheaping out on storage, because if it dies (which is somewhat more likely if you cheaped out), it will be irritating to say the least.

 

[Tech Junky]

No, I get PCI-e4 too. Crystaldisk get full speed, but I can't see some significant changes.

Have you tried multi-thread copying? Dragging separate folders into the destination vs just all of them?

I noticed when I copy a bunch of stuff at once it tends to surge at the start and then slow down over time to ~600MB/s but, if I grab the data in chunks and move them over it maxes out the bus speed. This is even more noticeable with the SN770 than the SN850.

No matter the drive though as I have several of them they all tend to do the same thing on sustained copies. Though the WD's tend to perform better than the phison based drives. I do have a smaller Samsung drive that does pretty well but, that's not 1TB like all of the others which does make a difference in testing.

CDM is synthetic and doesn't give you the best comparison for actual speeds. I can do blistering CDM tests all day long but, how does that impact real world performance?




So, this is one of the 770's in the enclosure I'm using over TB4.

By running dual operations at the same time it's over double the throughput of a single copy and by dragging over multiple folders individually it keeps the speeds higher than you would see over the duration over one single big copy.

 

[Tech Junky]

Maybe I should put this another way... When loading a game that's GB's in size it makes a difference but, so does the GPU being used in how that is loaded and the speeds in which you'll see a difference.

Going from a GTX1650 to a RTX3060 reduced load times by a significant amount of time. Where it might take 1 minute to load on the GTX it only takes ~20 seconds on the RRTX. All drives / ram being the same. CPU was different but, that doesn't make as much of a difference in the initial load of the files. Even during a session the CPU doesn't play a huge role as the GPU is doing most of the work.

When loading these huge files into the GPU / RAM you can see the drives utilization shoot up for the duration of the load and then it drops back down to 0-5% where it normally is.

 

[DreadBelch]

Based on my experience that few people regard their data and/or OS setup as having zero importance, I'd advise against cheaping out on storage, because if it dies (which is somewhat more likely if you cheaped out), it will be irritating to say the least.

Yeah, I ended up going with a 1TB WD SN770 Gen4 for the OS. That drive will be paired with a 2TB SK hynix P41 Gen4 for graphic design/games. Slight overkill, but I wouldn't be the first person on these boards guilty of that lol.

 

[LiluDallas]

Based on my experience that few people regard their data and/or OS setup as having zero importance, I'd advise against cheaping out on storage, because if it dies (which is somewhat more likely if you cheaped out), it will be irritating to say the least.

That's why I have 2 backup HDD with 4 tb capacity and recommend it for everyone. Expensive SSD can stop working too

 

[Tech Junky]

Expensive SSD can stop working too

And without warning.

 

[daveybrat]

I have used almost cheapest Gigabyte M30 (NVME PCI-E 3.0) 512 Gb 3 years without issues https://ssdrive.net/gigabyte-m30-512-gb and replaced it with WD SN850 with almost twice better speed not give increasing of speed at all

The Gigabyte M30 series was released in May 2021 so how have you been using it for 3 years now?

 

[LiluDallas]

The Gigabyte M30 series was released in May 2021 so how have you been using it for 3 years now?

Omg, sorry I opened the old case photo and check label. There was even older ssd, it looks like m30, but has that long model name. This means my speeds was worst then I think and I don't see the difference when change it to WD.




I find on youtube video comparison of Win 11 booting on SATA SSD vs HDD vs NVME. Is there are people, who wait more than 10 seconds to boot? I am surprised, that on video windows was loaded in 40 seconds on SATA, this old SSD took near 10 seconds for boot and new NVME if faster, but not significant.