Question about SSDs for Windows and DCS

[Aluminum Donkey]

Greetings everyone,

 

I have two SSDs, one is an NVMe (Samsung 960 EVO 250 GB) and the other is a SATA3 drive (Kingston V300 240GB.)

 

I currently have Windows 10 on the SATA drive, and DCS on the NVMe drive (only thing on that drive.)

 

Question is, would I be better off using the uber-fast NVMe drive for Windows and the SATA one for DCS, especially with the Windows paging file on the NVMe drive?

Would I notice any improvement in how things run, or am I better off having DCS on the fast NVMe drive?

 

Reason I'm wondering is that people say there's no improvement in gaming with an NVMe drive. I bought it for DCS to get around texture loading stutters, but everyone says it makes no difference. So, I'm considering putting Windows on it instead.

 

What do you all think, is it worth the time and effort?

 

Thanks so much! 

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[Qiou87]

Funny enough, NVMe drives actually provide more benefit to loading games than to Windows itself (disclaimer: this applies to SOME games, in others there is no benefit at all compared to SATA). I would not go to the trouble of reinstalling Windows on the NVMe drive because you will most probably notice almost no benefit.

 

Regarding the pagefile, it is a different topic, because you can move it to another drive without the need for a fresh install. I am not sure how much of a benefit it would bring to you though.

 

You have to consider that most people looking at this already looked at everything else, they are running the fastest CPU at its best settings, the most powerful graphics card, etc. so the next logical step is to make sure the drive is not going to limit them (would be a shame after investing so much money).

 

But in your case and with an average gaming PC that's already a couple of years old at least (based on your sig), I am not sure all this trouble is going to be worth it. It would be better to identify a problem and try to solve it than to randomly start to optimize this or that, which might as well make things worse if you don't know what you are trying to improve in the first place.

Edited January 14, 2021 by Qiou87

[Aluminum Donkey]

Thanks Qiou87, I'm still considering it because it seems to me that having Windows 10 (and the paging file) on the fastest drive is a great idea. My loading times in DCS (on the NVMe drive) are very good, my only concern is if the slower SATA3 drive will give noticeable stutter when actually flying the missions.

 

I'm always hearing that SATA vs. NVMe makes little difference for gaming, and that the best use of the fast NVMe drive is for a quick boot, snappy response and ultra-fast paging file access in the OS, but not for games. Also, I'm running out of space for more DCS stuff on the 250 GB NVMe drive, and a new SATA drive is cheaper anyway.

 

Gonna hafta think about this a bit

[LucShep]

The thing with NVMe is that its advantages (over SATA3) are only really noticed in day-to-day usage with very large chunks of data transfer (reads and writes).

They're exceptional in that regard, and absolutely worth the money for those that operate in such circumstances.

But when it comes to gaming (even "resource heavy" sims like DCS World), those advantages are kind of wasted, as the data transfer there doesn't saturate (yet!) bandwidth/speeds to choke SATA3 SSDs.

Same for the O.S. (Windows) partition, and even less accentuated. Differences in SSD performance are hardly noticed between NVMe and SATA, perhaps only in boot times (2 or 3 secs advantage on average).  

 

That's now.

But in future, with price differences between SATA3 and NVMe M.2 SSDs of average capacity (250GB to 1TB) decreasing every semester, as well as increasingly wider adoption/usage of NVMe drives, reasons to go for a SATA3 SSD instead may become related to specific user cases. For example, higher number of SSDs in system (motherboards usually allow only two NVMe M.2, and some allow over six SATA drives) and/or high capacity drives (like 2TB+ SSDs) where price differences may remain considerably in favor of SATA.

 

To sum up, and in your case with SATA SSD for O.S. and NVMe for DCS, might as well just leave it as it is. That's fine as is, not worth the trouble. 

 

 

For anyone interested in the subject of "NVMe vs SATA" SSD and its application usage, this is a great video article:

 

 

 

And for fun and giggles, here's some real-time comparisons with games loading:

 

 

 

 

Edited January 14, 2021 by LucShep

[Aluminum Donkey]

LucShep, thanks so much man, I'm starting to think I should just leave it alone and get a bigger SATA3 SSD for games and whatnot. Maybe getting the NVMe drive only for DCS was a good idea after all.

 

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[reece146]

I'd try putting the pagefile on the NVME. The nature of swapping means that it potentially GBs of RAM are being swapped at a time so in theory this would allow the NVME to shine at the best bulk transfer performance possible.

[BitMaster]

On 1/14/2021 at 7:46 PM, reece146 said:

I'd try putting the pagefile on the NVME. The nature of swapping means that it potentially GBs of RAM are being swapped at a time so in theory this would allow the NVME to shine at the best bulk transfer performance possible.

+1. Could make a difference with 16GB if you hit the ceiling and need to swap hundreds of MB

 

If you buy new, I would still consider NVMe over Sata SSD, unless you aim for 2 or 4TB where the price difference still hurts somewhat.

[Aluminum Donkey]

Thanks for the input everyone!

 

Just for laughs I wiped both drives clean and put Windows 10 Home on the NVMe drive, along with the paging file.

 

DCS is now on my SATA3 drive. For the life of me, I can't really tell the difference! Windows seems to boot a little faster. DCS loading times are pretty much the same as they always were. The biggest difference is that when re-loading a mission I've already flown, the loading time is reduced to dang near zilch!

 

Other than that, it doesn't seem to matter that much, so I guess I'll leave Windows, the pagefile.sys, my various boot-time stuff and a couple games on the NVMe drive, and use SATA for DCS. It doesn't matter much, but Windows seems happier (slightly faster) on the NVMe.

 

I don't do heavy media production on my rig, so I guess the NVMe drive just isn't that big of a deal. When I need a new SSD I'll probably just get a big, dumb, cheap SATA3 one.

 

Thanks all,

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