M.2 Drive Performance

[C3PO]

Hi,

 

My next system will have one 2TB M.2 drive - rated at 4950MB/s read and 4250MBp/s Write, 680K IOPS. This one drive would contain everything, DCS and OS. Would I be better separating the storage into two separate physical M.2 drives, with the OS on a 500GB dedicated drive and then go for a 1TB main drive for installations - both at the same speed as the 2TB drive? It always was the case that the OS should be on a separate drive, but not sure now with the super high speeds of read / write.

Edited January 13, 2021 by C3PO

[EasyEB]

I run DCS on an M.2 with the OS on the same drive, and I have no issues with that setup. My only reference though is my last computer which was an iMac running windows bootcamp.

[Mars Exulte]

M.2 is a form factor, i.e. ''shape'' or ''style''. Like 2.5'' or 3.5'' are the thin squares and thick platter drices, respectively.

 

M.2 come in both SATA (ie ''old'' SSDs) and NVMe (the ''super fast'' new ones).

 

There is ZERO practical advantage to having a NVMe. It is quite literally a waste of money outside very specific use cases or industrial applications. You will literally NEVER see the transfer rates advertised in normal usage, transfers, or gaming.

 

As you are discussing 5000/4000 R/W you are presumably talking about a NVMe, and it does not sound as you have purchased it yet.

 

Do what you want, but just understand you are about to piss off a considerable amount of money on a literally useless piece of hardware. I would recommend ditching the NVMe and buying a larger SATA SSD, or several smaller ones and slaving them together. It will literally work exactly as well.

 

Also, for practical purposes, you don't really need to separate the OS if it's going on an SSD. There is no practical gain there beyond ''stats for benchmarks'' of negligible relevance.

 

-edit

Source : Me

I have used a NVMe drive for a while. They are useless. I also have put an OS on the boot drive, and noted it matters not at all.

Edited January 13, 2021 by zhukov032186

[imacken]

11 minutes ago, zhukov032186 said:

M.2 is a form factor, i.e. ''shape'' or ''style''. Like 2.5'' or 3.5'' are the thin squares and thick platter drices, respectively.

 

M.2 come in both SATA (ie ''old'' SSDs) and NVMe (the ''super fast'' new ones).

 

There is ZERO practical advantage to having a NVMe. It is quite literally a waste of money outside very specific use cases or industrial applications. You will literally NEVER see the transfer rates advertised in normal usage, transfers, or gaming.

 

As you are discussing 5000/4000 R/W you are presumably talking about a NVMe, and it does not sound as you have purchased it yet.

 

Do what you want, but just understand you are about to piss off a considerable amount of money on a literally useless piece of hardware. I would recommend ditching the NVMe and buying a larger SATA SSD, or several smaller ones and slaving them together. It will literally work exactly as well.

 

Also, for practical purposes, you don't really need to separate the OS if it's going on an SSD. There is no practical gain there beyond ''stats for benchmarks'' of negligible relevance.

 

-edit

Source : Me

I have used a NVMe drive for a while. They are useless. I also have put an OS on the boot drive, and noted it matters not at all.

 

I'm afraid I would have to disagree.

When I moved to NVMe - Samsung 970 EVO - for my boot drive, the difference in Windows performance was very striking. My boot time is about 2-3 seconds which is way faster than the time for my previous boot drive, a Samsung 860 EVO SSD. Even in normal Windows tasks it is much faster.  I would agree that the performance in games isn't much better, but still, especially as the price difference is very small these days - £110 for 1Tb 860 compared to  £150 for a 970 - I would recommend going for the NVMe all day long.

[Taz1004]

I think it may depend on brand too.  I have Crucial NVMe and Samsung 850Evo.  Crucial is much faster sequential read/write of small files.  But Samsung outperforms Crucial in every other way including 4K read/write.

[Pantera93]

Syria will not destroy your rig when loading if you do that from an NVMe 

[Mars Exulte]

4 hours ago, imacken said:

I'm afraid I would have to disagree.

When I moved to NVMe - Samsung 970 EVO - for my boot drive, the difference in Windows performance was very striking. My boot time is about 2-3 seconds which is way faster than the time for my previous boot drive, a Samsung 860 EVO SSD. Even in normal Windows tasks it is much faster.  I would agree that the performance in games isn't much better, but still, especially as the price difference is very small these days - £110 for 1Tb 860 compared to  £150 for a 970 - I would recommend going for the NVMe all day long.

 

 If Windows boot time is your only criteria, yes, you will probably notice a moderate difference. Under normal usage, you will not see a significant difference. File transfers, game load times, etc, all negligible difference if any.

 

 I have an externally cooled NVMe with 3.5/3.0 R/W times. In tests and practical usage, it operates similar speeds as the SATA drives I use, it just cost twice as much at the time. Acknowledging prices have come down since then, it's still largely irrelevant figures you will not see in practical usage. I do not care if my PC takes 10 seconds or 3 seconds to boot, as it does that, at most, once a day.

[imacken]

1 minute ago, zhukov032186 said:

 

 If Windows boot time is your only criteria, yes, you will probably notice a moderate difference. Under normal usage, you will not see a significant difference. File transfers, game load times, etc, all negligible difference if any.

 

 I have an externally cooled NVMe with 3.5/3.0 R/W times. In tests and practical usage, it operates similar speeds as the SATA drives I use, it just cost twice as much at the time. Acknowledging prices have come down since then, it's still largely irrelevant figures you will not see in practical usage. I do not care if my PC takes 10 seconds or 3 seconds to boot, as it does that, at most, once a day.

Is totally up to you what to use, but to say that NVMe drives are ‘useless’ is frankly ridiculous. 
There is a significant difference in every day Windows use, in my opinion, and for not much more money. It’s a no-brainer. 
But, I’ll leave you to your rant now. 

[Mars Exulte]

12 minutes ago, imacken said:

Is totally up to you what to use, but to say that NVMe drives are ‘useless’ is frankly ridiculous. 
There is a significant difference in every day Windows use, in my opinion, and for not much more money. It’s a no-brainer. 
But, I’ll leave you to your rant now. 

 

I went from a regular SSD to an NVMe I determined to be ''fastest'' at the time. I did so actively expecting a ''huge difference''. I didn't see it, neither in DCS load times nor in the initial transfer from the old drive to the new one. I also ran tests on it.

 

It's not ''my opinion'' it's what I actually observed and noted when seeing if the ''actual numbers'' lived up to the ''advertised numbers''. They do not. That's a fact, and easily verified. You will NEVER SEE ''multi gigabyte transfer rates''. Ever. 

 

I'm glad your OS boots a few seconds faster, and you feel individual windows pop open a few miliseconds faster and that you're happy with that which is all that matters (you like your purchase and are satisfied, that's good!)

[Paganus]

A couple of considerations...

 

1. The type of drive matters. The more bits per cell, the faster it degrades. That's why large SLC/MLC drives cost more.

 

SLC (Single-Layer cell) 1 bit per cell

MLC (Multi-Layer cell) 2 bits per cell

TLC (Triple-Layer cell) 3 bits per cell

QLC (Quad-Layer cell) 4 bits per cell

PLC (Penta-Level Cell) 5 bits per cell

 

2. Your mainboard layout matters.

 

As an example, this is the notes section from my current board.

 

*The PCI_E4 slot will be unavailable when an M.2 PCIe SSD module has been installed in the M.2_2 slot
*The PCI_E2/ PCI_E5 slot will be unavailable when an expansion card has been installed in the PCI_E3/ PCI1 slot.
*The SATA1 port will be unavailable when an M.2 SATA SSD module has been installed in the M.2_1 slot
*The SATA5 port will be unavailable when an M.2 SATA SSD module has been installed in the M.2_2 slot

 

3. PCIe is faster. Anything on SATA is capped around 600MB a second.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 13, 2021 by Paganus
add

[Dragon1-1]

It does come into play when you're trying to cram a large amount of data from SSD to memory, like, say, DCS does when loading a map.  I went straight to an SSD on a PCI slot, so I can't really compare, but right now, it's blazingly fast compared to a HDD, a big improvement in VR. Not to mention, for some inexplicable reason, in-flight performance improved greatly when I switched.

[Beirut]

I put DCS and other Steam games on a dedicated 1TB M.2 NVME. Is it faster than an SSD? Not sure. Do I like it? Yes! 

 

I want every 1% of advantage I can squeeze out of available hardware. And the M.2 drive is nice and neat and clean and sits on the MB all snugly and warm and has my flightsims on it. I built my own rig, I like having some fancy stuff, and a good NVME isn't going to break the bank. 

 

Dedicated flightsim  M.2 NVME? Why the hell not. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Lace]

On 1/13/2021 at 7:30 PM, Dragon1-1 said:

It does come into play when you're trying to cram a large amount of data from SSD to memory, like, say, DCS does when loading a map.  I went straight to an SSD on a PCI slot, so I can't really compare, but right now, it's blazingly fast compared to a HDD, a big improvement in VR. Not to mention, for some inexplicable reason, in-flight performance improved greatly when I switched.

20 hours ago, Beirut said:

I put DCS and other Steam games on a dedicated 1TB M.2 NVME. Is it faster than an SSD? Not sure. Do I like it? Yes! 

 

I want every 1% of advantage I can squeeze out of available hardware. And the M.2 drive is nice and neat and clean and sits on the MB all snugly and warm and has my flightsims on it. I built my own rig, I like having some fancy stuff, and a good NVME isn't going to break the bank. 

 

Dedicated flightsim  M.2 NVME? Why the hell not. 

 

 

 

Snap.  It was an improvement for me.  Perhaps not a huge one but an improvement nonetheless.  Maybe our esteemed colleague bought a duff one?

 

[Taz1004]

21 hours ago, Beirut said:

I put DCS and other Steam games on a dedicated 1TB M.2 NVME. Is it faster than an SSD? Not sure. Do I like it? Yes! 

 

I want every 1% of advantage I can squeeze out of available hardware. And the M.2 drive is nice and neat and clean and sits on the MB all snugly and warm and has my flightsims on it. I built my own rig, I like having some fancy stuff, and a good NVME isn't going to break the bank. 

 

Dedicated flightsim  M.2 NVME? Why the hell not. 

 

 

If you want every 1% of advantage, unzip all the huge texture zip files and rezip it using no compression.  DCS having to read gigabytes of texture files from compressed zip hurts loading time.  Both before and in-game.

[Dragon1-1]

Those textures are part of the problem, several normal and specular maps are 4K, where they really shouldn't be, because the effect will not be nearly as visible. On top of bloating loading times, it wastes memory and storage space.

[Dudikoff]

On 1/13/2021 at 7:46 PM, zhukov032186 said:

 

I went from a regular SSD to an NVMe I determined to be ''fastest'' at the time. I did so actively expecting a ''huge difference''. I didn't see it, neither in DCS load times nor in the initial transfer from the old drive to the new one. I also ran tests on it.

 

For what its worth, I remember checking a few of these game-loading tests comparing SATA and NVME drives and the differences were in fact negligible. Like 2-3 seconds max on a 30 second loading time.

 

At the same time, last time I checked I got the impression the NVME prices have dropped considerably and there's not that much difference anymore compared to a good SATA SSD.

Edited January 15, 2021 by Dudikoff

[Beirut]

2 hours ago, Taz1004 said:

 

If you want every 1% of advantage, unzip all the huge texture zip files and rezip it using no compression.  DCS having to read gigabytes of texture files from compressed zip hurts loading time.  Both before and in-game.

 

That is probably/certainly beyond my brain power. 

[Mars Exulte]

On 1/13/2021 at 12:30 PM, Dragon1-1 said:

It does come into play when you're trying to cram a large amount of data from SSD to memory, like, say, DCS does when loading a map.  I went straight to an SSD on a PCI slot, so I can't really compare, but right now, it's blazingly fast compared to a HDD, a big improvement in VR. Not to mention, for some inexplicable reason, in-flight performance improved greatly when I switched.

 

Oh, if you went from an HDD to an SSD of ANY kind it would be a HUMONGOUS difference. It's worth noting DCS specs RECOMMEND an SSD. It'll work on a platter drive, but it's very sub-optimal.

[BitMaster]

Back to the OT, does it pay t split OS and main APPS like DCS, Steam folders and likes.

 

From my point, a slave fixing machines for others, customers and family & friends, yes, it does make sense if the shit hits the fan and you need to reinstall the OS for whatever reason. It is not a mandatory thing but splitting it up can make that much easier if you have to troubleshoot a system. Disconnect the APP drive, only leave the OS active, and you won't by mistake or any other glitch wipe DCS, Steam...or your personal files. I highly recommend not to share the OS drive with important Apps and Files.

 

The other, speed related, question has lost most of it's importance. Back in the days of HDD's, maybe even pre S-ATA drives, it did REALLY impact performance if you kept it all on a single drive, you gained so much performance by splitting it up. Well, with SSD and NVMe this need has almost vanished but if you want the last 1% as said before or if you

multitask while flying DCS ( Stream, have 20 tabs open in Chrome, anything that needs constant data I/O and the OS managing it it MAY pay to have them separate. Here is where SSD and NVMe are miles apart. I use a lot of VMware and believe me it does matter A LOT if you use SSDs or NVMe in the world of Multi-OS's running on one system and hammering your I/O...agreed, this is not a common scenario but when the I/O is hammered and the pipeline usually longer than QD1 it does matter if you have 100k or 750k IOPS

and if you have 560MB/sec or 3500MB/sec or even more with Gen4. Looking at the prices of NVMe now, I don't see why you should buy into Sata-SSD if you can afford NVMe.

You can start with 1 NVMe and if you think or know it will work better some time down the road with 2 of them, ADD one.

 

The only big downside I have with NVMe is: It is THAT much harder and more time consuming to attach them to another system to rescue data etc.. You either need the correct external NVMe case or put it in your rig the proper way. With a Sata-SSD that is a lot simpler and faster.

 

I personally run DCS from 3 Sata-SSD Samsung 2x850 Pro & 1x860 Pro 256GB in an insane Raid-0. The performance scaled 100% with each drive added and I think I may add #4 soon as I need more space. I also plan to buy a 2TB Samsung NVMe this year and move DCS and VMware machines to that drive instead of the RAID-0 as it is THAT much better in VMware with 3-5 virtual machines running. DCS is just fine on my Raid-0 but I do not own syria map, maybe that map shows the limits of current Sata, might well be.

 

I like fast throughput, always took the better systems like SCSI and SAS in the past to obtain that edge over ATA but with Sata-SSD and NVMe it got so much cheaper to be at the very top of performance. CPU, GPU and RAM got so fast, you gotta feed that pipeline or much of that power is lost when your Data Path becomes a bottleneck again, which doesn't need to be with NVMe, especially Gen4. 

[javelina1]

On 1/14/2021 at 4:36 AM, Beirut said:

I put DCS and other Steam games on a dedicated 1TB M.2 NVME. Is it faster than an SSD? Not sure. Do I like it? Yes! 

 

I want every 1% of advantage I can squeeze out of available hardware. And the M.2 drive is nice and neat and clean and sits on the MB all snugly and warm and has my flightsims on it. I built my own rig, I like having some fancy stuff, and a good NVME isn't going to break the bank. 

 

Dedicated flightsim  M.2 NVME? Why the hell not. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I guess I kinda went ape sh*t on the NVMe's.  My O/S is one, DCS and flight sims are on a second, and I have my swapfile on a third.  Plus, I'm using a Samsung SSD (2TB), for my Steam "junk" file/games...   Yes,  i had to do a delicate dance to avoid "gimping" any of my bus/lane speeds, which I have.

 

My config is an overkill?  sure, but I love it....  As much as I have invested in this hobby, it's insane...

[Sn8ke_iis]

I like NVMe M.2 because of the form factor. They make a clean build without all the SATA cables to have to manage. They do put out heat though.

 

I also reboot a lot for troubleshooting and adjusting settings. Anytime I save booting, the better.  

 

In the States, prices have come down a lot from when I first bought one. They are more expensive than SATA SSDs but not by much. 

 

I have my OS on a separate 512GB and Games/Sims on the 1TB. Makes it very convenient for reinstalling Windows.

 

 

MSFS 2020 @ 1:45 

 

These focus on rebooting and loading times. Difficult to measure any FPS increase, although I'm sure it helps from time to time. 

 

Advantage of fast NVMe would be in something like video editing if you are transferring large files between two of them. 

[Beirut]

3 hours ago, javelina1 said:

I guess I kinda went ape sh*t on the NVMe's.  My O/S is one, DCS and flight sims are on a second, and I have my swapfile on a third.  Plus, I'm using a Samsung SSD (2TB), for my Steam "junk" file/games...   Yes,  i had to do a delicate dance to avoid "gimping" any of my bus/lane speeds, which I have.

 

My config is an overkill?  sure, but I love it....  As much as I have invested in this hobby, it's insane...

 

You're allowed to have some fun. It's your box of electro-LEGO, you can do what you want. 

 

I think fun is half the reason I got an NVME. I wanted one, it was fancy, affordable, and easy to install. I built my own rig and I enjoyed throwing in some of that high-tech stuff.