Storage Solutions Which SSD is faster?

[NotMyRealName]

I too am using a 840 EVO 120GB in one of my laptops. And it is not enough. Hell, I find that even 240 is a squeeze, but then that is because I keep multiple ISOs with me on hand.

Secondly, most users will not have the assortment of drives you have - hence you are not most users. Those who need to store some videos/music/large files will find it difficult to manage on the 120GB.

I can understand on a laptop, but there is no other reason to be using an ssd for (slow) storage. And a lot of users have external drives etc, so i don't think my extra storage is that exceptional...

 

[guest_999]

@vivek.krishnan Isn't it self-contradictory when you say "that is because I keep multiple ISOs with me on hand" while calling other user as "not most user". Most users also don't keep multiple ISOs with them. Also you are assuming that a user with 120Gb ssd/240GB ssd will try to fit all their data in that drive only which again is not correct for most users. Like you said even 240GB ssd is a squeeze for you so are you going to buy a 500GB ssd next or are you going to buy a 1TB portable next(most likely) or are you going to limit yourself to 240GB only. If you already have a 1TB portable drive(an almost certain scenario with typical laptop upgrading to ssd) then why would you fill your 120GB ssd with data unless you really need space(aka large games/softwares/VMs) in which case you are not like most users.

 

[iPwnz]

It's an 840 EVO 120

If I remember correctly, the 840 EVO is said to have speed problems when it reaches/exceeds a certain threshold in used storage. This however was fixed in latter models. You can look it up.

 

[NotMyRealName]

If I remember correctly, the 840 EVO is said to have speed problems when it reaches/exceeds a certain threshold in used storage. This however was fixed in latter models. You can look it up.

Been there, solved that...

 

[rajil.s]

This may not be for everybody, but I use 2nd hand Intel DC S3500 ssd in a ZFS mirror as boot drives. When buying from eBay it is important to check the health status of these SSDs to avoid a lemon.

 

[NotMyRealName]

I think realistically, a home or office user wont reach anywhere near the danger mark for TBW, so even a used drive should have plenty of life left in it. Enterprise environments however, are another matter, and it is possible to get a used drive near the limits. I would never put any money into a used drive which was used in an enterprise. But how does one know where the drive was last used? Seller can say anything. I also think any SSD has a huge speed difference over mech HDDs. So even the slowest ones are good enough. The fastest ones, while the added speed may be noticeable and measurable, how does it matter if windows takes 1 second more to boot up or your game takes 10s more to load? Coz that's all the difference is really.

Tl;dr: Any ssd is better than an hdd and for most users, the fastest ssd is not really worth the price premium over the regular ones.

 

[superczar]

OP would have probably already brought the drive but posting this for future reference
NVmE SSDs should be THE os disk choice for anyone putting together a new system.. Period!
Even if it may go marginally over budget, cut down on the case or elsewhere but don't even bother with a SATA ssd.

Sample test: sustained 2900MB/s sequential read and 1400MB/s write on a Samsung 970 evo

 

[Chaos]

NVmE SSDs should be THE os disk choice for anyone putting together a new system.. Period!

True! But on laptops, especially the thin and light ones, a normal desktop nvme drive will burn through the battery faster.

The consume roughly 3x as much power when on full tilt. Typically laptop nvme drives have modified firmware for lower power consumption.

 

[superczar]

True! But on laptops, especially the thin and light ones, a normal desktop nvme drive will burn through the battery faster.

The consume roughly 3x as much power when on full tilt. Typically laptop nvme drives have modified firmware for lower power consumption.

This was meant specifically for desktops
For the Smasung NVmEs, I think the power consumption at full load is typically around 3W
My other experience with NVmE SSDs is with Apple's proprietary SSDs - while its near impossible to try find out what it draws - but let's hypothesize it's 1W

On a typical 50Wh laptop battery that runs say 5 hours , this would mean a system draw of 10W going up to 12 W yielding a runtime of approx 4 hours
However, since the SSD wouldn't be drawing full power at all times (say 1/2 the time), the actual reduction would be no more than 1/2 an hour

 

[Chaos]

On a typical 50Wh laptop battery that runs say 5 hours , this would mean a system draw of 10W going up to 12 W yielding a runtime of approx 4 hours
However, since the SSD wouldn't be drawing full power at all times (say 1/2 the time), the actual reduction would be no more than 1/2 an hour

Samsungs should be pretty okay. Their power consumption isn't ridiculously high and they have decent power management. Still their spec says they may consume upto 6.2W at full load.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12670/the-samsung-970-evo-ssd-review/8

However there are quite a few third party controllers from the likes of Phison, SMI etc which are used by many name brand SSD manufacturers that have broken power management.

These will reduce battery life even more significantly.

 

[guest_999]

OP would have probably already brought the drive but posting this for future reference
NVmE SSDs should be THE os disk choice for anyone putting together a new system.. Period!
Even if it may go marginally over budget, cut down on the case or elsewhere but don't even bother with a SATA ssd.

Sample test: sustained 2900MB/s sequential read and 1400MB/s write on a Samsung 970 evo
View attachment 75942

No it is not "the definite choice for OS". First of all sequential read & write speeds have no significance with respect to OS booting & performance, for those random 4K read/write speeds matters. Second,between a good ssd(like Samsung) & NVMe the difference between booting will be something like 2-3 seconds at best & for normal day-to-day tasks it will be even lesser(in milliseconds most likely). The only significant advantage of NVMe over ssd is its Random read/write (4KB, QD32) iops performance(370000/500000 for Samsung 970 NVMe vs 98000/90000 for Samsung 860 evo) & this advantage can only be fully utilized in operations on very large databases(server like workload which 99.9% of laptop users don't have).

 

[William_Mboy]

NVmE SSDs should be THE os disk choice for anyone putting together a new system.. Period!

Not at all, look past artificial testing and you get maybe 2 second faster loading speed on startup with double the price.

 

[superczar]

Not at all, look past artificial testing and you get maybe 2 second faster loading speed on startup with double the price.

No it is not "the definite choice for OS". First of all sequential read & write speeds have no significance with respect to OS booting & performance, for those random 4K read/write speeds matters. Second,between a good ssd(like Samsung) & NVMe the difference between booting will be something like 2-3 seconds at best & for normal day-to-day tasks it will be even lesser(in milliseconds most likely). The only significant advantage of NVMe over ssd is its Random read/write (4KB, QD32) iops performance(370000/500000 for Samsung 970 NVMe vs 98000/90000 for Samsung 860 evo) & this advantage can only be fully utilized in operations on very large databases(server like workload which 99.9% of laptop users don't have).

Not at all.
Forget about the theoretical numbers (or my quoted speeds) for a minute. Also ignore the boot time.

I use this setup (nvme )for my home office desktop while my office laptop has very nearly the same configuration albeit with a SATA SSD
The subjective difference in very nearly everything is large..
Whether it be the time to open a large spreadsheet or alt-tabbing between 7 open PPTs.

The difference is so large that I have a very strong preference to use this over the other.
Now you could argue that the laptop processor may be thermal throttled but I seriously doubt that , especially considering productivity apps are hardly CPU intensive

In any case, the price delta between m.2 pci-e and m.2 sata is very small and not too big vs traditional sata ssd - so unless someone is working on a very tight budget, there really is no reason to choose any other SSD for a new system

PS: For what it's worth, I am too old to be bothered about synthetic tests
The only reason I ended up running this test was to try get an answer to my curiosity over what makes the home desktop feel so much faster

 

[Chaos]

No it is not "the definite choice for OS". First of all sequential read & write speeds have no significance with respect to OS booting & performance, for those random 4K read/write speeds matters.

There is a definite, noticeable difference between NVMe and a SATA SSD. Moved two of my PCs last year to a 512GB 960 pro and a 250GB 960 evo from crucial sata ssds. The difference in experience when loading large applications like Unreal Engine 4 editor or Photoshop/Lightroom was definitely tangible. You may not notice differences in simple apps like Word etc but even if you make large PPTs with lots of embedded content, you'll notice a difference.

Also this is purely storage performance related. I do not use the windows page file as I have ample RAM. Swap is disabled on both. One machines has 64GB DDR4 and the other has 32GB. Planning to move my Xeon workstation to NVMe or Optane soon as well.

 

[Lord Nemesis]

There is somehow these perceptions among some people that SSD's should be used only for the OS or that certain size is more than enough. Apart from OS, I have all my applications (except games) on the SSD and the sequential reads do matter when large applications or files have to be loaded. In fact, it would matter even more for games where large asset files have to be loaded and if not for the cost per GB, I would rather have my entire game library on fast SSD's. NVMe SSD's make perfect sense for any desktop and to be honest even more so for laptops where your entire storage is a an SSD and all your applications are running from it.

 

[cute.bandar]

I use this setup (nvme )for my home office desktop while my office laptop has very nearly the same configuration albeit with a SATA SSD
The subjective difference in very nearly everything is large..
Whether it be the time to open a large spreadsheet or alt-tabbing between 7 open PPTs.

alt tab time ?
There should not be performance increase in alt-tab because of upgrading to an NVmE SSD. If you do notice that , that is either placebo or you have major bottlenecks somewhere. 7 ppts is nothing.

 

[superczar]

alt tab time ?
There should not be performance increase in alt-tab because of upgrading to an NVmE SSD. If you do notice that , that is either placebo or you have major bottlenecks somewhere. 7 ppts is nothing.

I am not even sure what the debate is about - a top of the line 256GB NVmE is 9.5K vs I dunno, say 5K for a SATA? What's that in the grand scheme of things anyway, or as a % of the total system cost?

Now I am not sure what your use case is (or the size of your PPTs) - but a bunch of typical bloated workplace ppt (+ the typically concurrently open Outlook / Business Skype/ N number of excel sheets) can occupy quite a bit of memory ..
Enough to swamp a 8GB memory module which means alt-tabbing back to the xls or pptx you were looking at just about an hour ago has you looking into the swap space..

Anyway, like I said, spending a couple of K extra on a NVmE is near certain to get you visible performance improvements for almost all use-case

On a side note, I find it odd that Most folks will happily overspend on a PSU with way more headroom than they will need - or even on a fancy case but will cut corners on the choice of the drive

 

[cute.bandar]

you are suggesting spending 4.5k extra for faster storage so that swapping is faster INSTEAD of getting more memory ?
Its hard to read further

 

[guest_999]

Not at all.
Forget about the theoretical numbers (or my quoted speeds) for a minute. Also ignore the boot time.

I use this setup (nvme )for my home office desktop while my office laptop has very nearly the same configuration albeit with a SATA SSD
The subjective difference in very nearly everything is large..
Whether it be the time to open a large spreadsheet or alt-tabbing between 7 open PPTs.

The difference is so large that I have a very strong preference to use this over the other.
Now you could argue that the laptop processor may be thermal throttled but I seriously doubt that , especially considering productivity apps are hardly CPU intensive

In any case, the price delta between m.2 pci-e and m.2 sata is very small and not too big vs traditional sata ssd - so unless someone is working on a very tight budget, there really is no reason to choose any other SSD for a new system

PS: For what it's worth, I am too old to be bothered about synthetic tests
The only reason I ended up running this test was to try get an answer to my curiosity over what makes the home desktop feel so much faster

A large spreadsheet or alt-tabbing between 7 quite complex PPTs will also have high iops in which NVMe has advantage over ssd though I am guessing your office laptop has lower ram compared to this desktop with NVMe. As for price difference it is there but more importantly NVMe drives run hot(especially those cheap adata ones) & most budget mobos have NVMe slot directly underneath gfx card slot.

There is a definite, noticeable difference between NVMe and a SATA SSD. Moved two of my PCs last year to a 512GB 960 pro and a 250GB 960 evo from crucial sata ssds. The difference in experience when loading large applications like Unreal Engine 4 editor or Photoshop/Lightroom was definitely tangible. You may not notice differences in simple apps like Word etc but even if you make large PPTs with lots of embedded content, you'll notice a difference.

Also this is purely storage performance related. I do not use the windows page file as I have ample RAM. Swap is disabled on both. One machines has 64GB DDR4 and the other has 32GB. Planning to move my Xeon workstation to NVMe or Optane soon as well.

The thumb rule of any system is fastest speed of system is equal to speed of lowest component in the system(aka bottleneck).In a normal system with NVMe it is usually the processor or ram which is the bottleneck(afterall nothing is faster than direct communication between ram & processor). I am guessing your processors are also quite fast(i7 or equivalent). I doubt one would see any noticeable difference if one opens the same ppt you are using on their i3/i5 laptop with 8gb ram on a NVMe.

 

[Chaos]

The thumb rule of any system is fastest speed of system is equal to speed of lowest component in the system(aka bottleneck).In a normal system with NVMe it is usually the processor or ram which is the bottleneck(afterall nothing is faster than direct communication between ram & processor). I am guessing your processors are also quite fast(i7 or equivalent). I doubt one would see any noticeable difference if one opens the same ppt you are using on their i3/i5 laptop with 8gb ram on a NVMe.

Ryzen 7 1700 @4GHz on 64GB machine
i5 8400 on 32GB machine

On both it is pretty noticeable!