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ssd question

Carnage788Carnage788 Member UncommonPosts: 18
in Hardware
so i recently upgraded to a samsung 859 evo from a standard hd, huge upgrade.  few days later i upgraded my motherboard to a maximus IX formula.  After reading up on it a bit more i found out that is supports M.2 ssd, i have a few days left to take back my standard ssd.  My question is it even worth it?  Is the speed that much faster for gaming/general pc use?

Comments

  • jdnewelljdnewell Member UncommonPosts: 2,237
    For general PC use and gaming I wouldnt worry about returning it. I doubt you would notice the speed increase.
  • CleffyCleffy Member RarePosts: 6,412
    Speed is about the same. Since the m.2 is mounted directly to the mobo, there is 1 less peripheral to run sata cable and power to. It probably has less latency. Overall minor benefits.
  • centkincentkin Member RarePosts: 1,527
    While the m.2 is significantly faster in raw terms to an SSD, how much you get out of it depends upon how much of a bottleneck your drive is being on your system.  In essence the overall faster your PC is, the more you will notice the difference. 

    Think of it like playing a game and considering a i7 level processor vs an i5 processor.  The question is if the processor is what is slowing your system down or the video card.  You might hardly notice a difference at all if you have a reasonable but not massively beefy video card.  Your frame rate might be 31 with the i5 and 33 with the i7.  But if you were running dual 1080s you would see a much greater increase because what is slowing you down is now the processor not the video.

    SSDs are already faster than expected from a software point of view.  A good M.2 is even faster.  But improving on something that is 10% of the problem can only get you so far.

    Remember that you also have the cost difference and the time you have to spend migrating your data again.
  • CleffyCleffy Member RarePosts: 6,412
    One thing I am wondering on m.2 ssds is if it's wise to RAID0 them for speed similar to what MSI does in it's laptops. I imagine there is a large cost to the endurance and I would definitely want backups of data.
  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383
    The biggest advantage of SSD is random access time. It's ~way~ faster than an HDD at getting to the files in the first place. Like hundreds/thousands of times faster (often measured as Random I/O or seek time).

    But for sustained read/writes, it's only a bit faster. Like maybe twice as fast.

    RAID0 helps with read/write time, and M.2/PCIe/NVMe helps with read/write time, by allowing you to go faster than the SATA3 interface allows. Neither of them help a whole lot with random access time. And again, your looking at maybe doubling the speed you can get, but not hundreds/thousands times faster.

    Would it be faster on PCIe/NVMe? Yes. Would you notice? Likely not, unless your doing some corner-case work like editing large video files daily or constantly moving around disk images.
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