New to SSDs

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

In piecing together a new computer I have decided to go with an SSD for the first time. I'm planning on using an SSD of some type as my primary storage, no HDD.

I've done some research, but am still confused on a number of areas and am looking to get some specific questions answered if possible.

I've read that multiple NvMe drives on one motherboard can slow each other down. Is this true? Is the same true for SATA drives? If this is true, is the slow even noticable?

With that in mind, what are your thoughts on getting one larger SSD over 2 smaller ones.

I've also read that SSDs can become slower when full. Again, if true, is this noticable?

Thanks for any advice.

[Magma Dragoon]

It really depends on the motherboard. I've heard of a dedicated x4 for NVMe being split into x2x2, one goes through chipset, all go through chipset and share that bandwidth, etc...

I don't really understand dynamic cache or why it works, but people say leave 10-20% empty.

Personally I have one 500gb NVMe drive for my OS, a 1tb SATA SSD for my big games, and a 1tb HDD for smaller games. I like keeping my eggs in different baskets in case one of them goes bad.

[Overseer]

Most modern AMD boards have one dedicated M.2 slot that goes directly to the CPU. It gets more complicated once you want 2 on those as manufacturers can do whatever.
Intel on the other hand has it pretty much always go through the Chipset, which could present a bottleneck. But i have never seen any tests if that is a problem by itself under load. It certainly will be once you install 2.

2 NVMe is really overkill. On X570 you could install a single 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe and have about 5 GB/s on reads.

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

Thanks for the input guys.

For the record, I am getting the Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS motherboard. I think only one M.2 slot goes to the chip set, but I'm not totally sure.

Maybe I'll go for one large 2 TB SATA SSD. As that alleviates my storage space concerns. Do SATA SSDs slow down when you add a second?

While a NvMe drive is faster, I'm upgrading from a old HDD, and I'm sure it will still seem lightning fast to me.

[Overseer]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย R.A.T. Army *MST3K*:

Thanks for the input guys.

For the record, I am getting the Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS motherboard. I think only one M.2 slot goes to the chip set, but I'm not totally sure.

Maybe I'll go for one large 2 TB SATA SSD. As that alleviates my storage space concerns.

While a NvMe drive is faster, I'm upgrading from a old HDD, and I'm sure it will still seem lightning fast to me.

If you don't have very specific extreme use cases or want to get rid of cables for looks NVMe is a waste.
The Crucial MX500 2TB would be a good choice.

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

That's the exact one I was looking at!

I was looking at crucial for both my SSD and the NVMe.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Always go with multiple drives, not just one. One ssd won't be enough space.
Such as

Samsung 970 EVO 500gb m2 nvme
and
Samsung 860 EVO 1tb m2 sata

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Bad 💀 Motha:

Always go with multiple drives, not just one. One ssd won't be enough space.
Such as

Samsung 970 EVO 500gb m2 nvme
and
Samsung 860 EVO 1tb m2 sata

What about one large SSD? A 2TB SATA to be more precise.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

It's best to have an OS drive all to itself as this makes system wipes much easier.

[AbedsBrother]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Bad 💀 Motha:

It's best to have an OS drive all to itself as this makes system wipes much easier.

Only a concern for people who regularly do system wipes.

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย AbedsBrother:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Bad 💀 Motha:

It's best to have an OS drive all to itself as this makes system wipes much easier.

Only a concern for people who regularly do system wipes.

I kind of agree. I'm not overly concerned with having a tiny NVMe drive just for my OS. I think I'll go with a large SSD drive, like the crucial one mentioned above. it's actually very highly rated and I've been looking at it prior to Overseer even mentioning it.

[nullable]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Bad 💀 Motha:

It's best to have an OS drive all to itself as this makes system wipes much easier.

There's nothing wrong with using partitions in my experience. You can wipe a 500GB partition just as easily as a 500GB drive.

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

Will 2 drives slow each other down if one is NVMe and I get a SATA as a second drive?

Like a 1TB NVMe and a 1 TB SATA.

[nullable]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย R.A.T. Army *MST3K*:

Will 2 drives slow each other down if one is NVMe and I get a SATA as a second drive?

Like a 1TB NVMe and a 1 TB SATA.

No.

But let's say there's some combination of SSDs that would run "slower" than optimum.

• Even at half speed SSDs are still a lot faster than HDDs. (IOPS is the key) But you'd have to have some ancient hardware or have done the worst thing possible in configuring the drives for this to occur.
  
• You're not going to be using maximum bandwidth most of the time anyway.
  
• You're not going to notice difference outside of benchmarks.
  
• NVMe's are ~3x-6x faster depending on the NVMe, there's really no scenario where you can configure things where the NVMe is only as fast as a SATA SSD or a SATA SSD is as slow as a HDD.

I'm running a Samsung 970 evo NVMe (500GB) and a Intel 600p NVMe (2TB), and two SATA SSD's (2TB and 1TB). And you know what's super great? Having 5.5TB of SSD space, zero HDDs, treating SSDs like storage and not worrying about them at all. Oh yeah, and amazing system performance in all possible cases.

I've used and am using SATA SSDs as primary drives, and NVMe drives as primary drives. I've had single SSD systems and multiple SSD systems. You really can't go wrong any which way. However you roll it, as long as you have enough space where you don't have to micromanage "premium" space all the time you're golden. Whether it's NVMe or SATA is pretty secondary, both types perform way way better than HDDs and that's the biggest benefit. And both types perform really well as far as delivering a superb user experience (compared to HDDs).

And for my money outside of benchmarks or side by side comparison, it's really hard to feel a difference between NVMe and SATA SSD's in most use cases. There's definitely some diminishing returns where even slower SSDs feel pretty fast, and as a result the fastest drives just don't blow your hair back like the number suggest they ought to.

A 970 evo doesn't load everything 4-5x faster than an 850 evo... despite having 4-5x the bandwidth.

[L37]

The only reason why NVME/pci-e SSDs can affect each other is the fact that modern desktop platforms simply do not have enough pci-e to run multiple x4 devices along with gpu (x16).
Specifically on x570, because of fast pci-e 4.0 link between cpu and chipset you can use 2 nvme ssd-s at full speed. One will be connected to cpu, another one - to chipset.
As for sata - multiple devices in theory should not affect each other, however overall bandwidth may be limited either by controller or again, by chipset-cpu link.

Also.. it does not matter. even at pci-e 3.0 x1 you will be totally fine in terms of practical performance, because linear speeds are irrelevant and random access speeds are limited by ssd and are way below what even x1 3.0 pci-e can achieve.

And fun fact - all this issues are mostly artificial "for marketing reasons". One can run something like 6 full speed 3.0 x4 nvme ssd-s on almost 10 year old lga2011 platform without issues.

[L37]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย grzegorz77:

...
I wrote about raid0 for hdd.
I do not recommend it for ssd at home.

There are usecases for ssd-s too.
Like i have a bunch of old 256gb ssd-s and i do not want to use them as separate drives (it is a pain, considering how large things are nowadays). I used software raid0 to join 4 of them into single logical drive, yes, chance of failure is higher, but as long as i am aware of this it does not matter. I could have used jbod (and i planned to), but then i thought - why not? I loose nothing, i gain some speed and get my single large partition anyway...