New Hard Drive for gaming system

[Jedsdad]

Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB is cheap at PC Force till the end of the month and free shipping too

https://www.pcforce.co.nz/index.php?...ducts_id=5345&

[Driftwood]

Yep thats the one.

[1101]

Ideally you'd have your OS on the M2 drive since it will be considerably quicker than the SSDs and won't make much of a difference in gaming performance.

In real world use , is the diff in speed between M2 & SSD actually noticeable ?

[Driftwood]

They are certainly listed as a whole lot faster.

[dugimodo]

In real world use , is the diff in speed between M2 & SSD actually noticeable ?

Nope, pretty much isn't. For my latest build I replaced an older sata 850 evo with a NVME 970 evo - really can't notice it. And that's as a boot drive, for games the important thing is having an SSD but after that the gains are minimal.
For me personally I'd get a larger SSD over a faster one at a similar price.

Here's some evidence to back me up, there's plenty more to be found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCDQaE9N-eo

I use the 970 evo as a boot drive and for some games, the 850 evo I retained as a steam drive, and I use a regular 2TB HDD for the overflow. I notice the difference running games from the hdd but otherwise it's a wash.

[Driftwood]

So if it's not going to be any faster, I may as well leave the OS on the smaller SSD and just have games on the M.2.

[chiefnz]

So if it's not going to be any faster, I may as well leave the OS on the smaller SSD and just have games on the M.2.

Well yes and no....

Most modern motherboards use SATA III which maxes out at a throughput of 600MB/s (or 300MB/s for SATA II). Via that connection, most SSDs will provide Read/Write speeds in the neighborhood of 530/500 MB/s.
NVMe units, on the other hand, provide write speeds as high as 3500MB/s. That’s 7x over SATA SSDs.

Whilst NVMe has a theoretically higher transfer speed, you won't really "see" it now because most games don't require transferring 3500MB/s for loading so the NVMe will likely go higher than SATAIII's 600MB/s (just) but only if the game loading needs to read/write beyond the 600MB/s SATA maximum.

I replaced my Crucial 512GB SSD with a Crucial P1 1TB M.2 NVMe unit and my experience thus far shows there is a "perceptible" speed increase in game load times when compared to running the same games installed on the SATAIII SSD... but too be fair it is only just barely noticeable...

Another key factor is price point between SSD and NVMe, I got my 1TB NVMe for AU$179 and if I compare that to a 1TB SSD there is on average a price variance of minus AU$20 to plus AU$10 (so between AU$159 - AU$189) difference so you get the same capacity at a "lower" transfer speed... given that... it makes more sense to get an NVMe as the cost is negligible at best but the performance benefit is much higher going forward.

So I would say if you have sufficient NVMe slots, get the NVMe to run your games off and ditch the SATA. In the long run it is the better choice when you look at capacity vs performance and cost between a SSD and NVMe unit.

Hope that helps a bit more.

[Jedsdad]

I ordered a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250GB M2 NVME from AliExpress for NZ$97.63 on 27/7/2019 and received it today 7/8/2019 and a lot cheaper than even PC Force.

I have installed it and have cloned my OS to it and all up and running OK.

According to Samsung Magician it is genuine.

So very pleased with my purchase.