M2.SSDs and system speed

I've been considering building a new PC but this raised a few questions, and wondered if any of you know the answers.

I will want to use an M2. SSD Gen 4.0 to get maximum speed for booting and applications. But I have older slower M2.SSD Gen 3.0 to hold games and other stuff that I would want to also move to the new system. But I've read that if you install 2 M2 SSDs of different speeds they both get reduced to the slowest drive. If this true? Or only for certain motherboards? Some motherboards now have support for 4 M2s to be installed. But would this be the same, With the slowest of the 4 dictating speed, or are the seperated to prevent this.

I've also been reading that when more then 1 M2 is installed it slows the overall system bus down and reduces GPU performance because it takes a hit to the PCI-E bus. Is this true? That's not something I had considered or even thought about before.

I've also read that some motherboards disable SATA ports when M2s are installed.

I normally buy Asus motherboards and read that slots are routed through the chipset, so there are no impacts on your GPU PCIe lanes.. If you ran all M.2 slots at pci-e x4 bandwdith you'd lose some SATA Ports and one of the smaller pci-express slots . Hmm...

Do some motherboards have the option to select M2 slot mode?

I only just read how much faster NVME is than SATA..... gadzooks

Sounds blazingly quick.

Yes, really fast. In a system that can handle full Gen 4 NVME M2 the system can boot in a couple of seconds.

And the Gen 4 M2 used in the Playstation 5 is really fast. Able to sustain 7000MB/s read and 5000MB/s write. That is what allows games to seemlessly load game levels seemlessly (no load screens). It is quite a big jump in storage technology

Obviously it comes at a price. PS5 compatible M2s, you are looking at £179 for 1TB and £280+ for 2TB. But even slower Gen 3 M2s are still much faster then an SATA drive and are dropping in price. You can get one with 3500MB/s read speed and 1TB storage for about £79.

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Originally Posted by J T

I only just read how much faster NVME is than SATA..... gadzooks

Sounds blazingly quick.

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Yup, my Samsung NVME SSD can easily do a couple of gigabytes per second.

I put the Gigabyte AORUS 1TB M.2 GP-AG70S1TB (PCIe Gen 4.0 x4/NVMe) in my PS5, it's crazy fast!!

It is mad how fast they are.

Remember many years ago (2006 onwards) PC gamers were going mad over those Rapter drives? Hitting over 200MB/s on the right setup. Now the fastest NVMe Gen 4 M2s can achieve 7000MB/s, or 6.8GB/s.

That's just mad numbers and importantly for game designers removes all data transfer speed limits between storage and ram. You can literally just swap out between ram and storage in realtime. So no load times. This is what was so revolutionary about the PS5 design.

If I copy f.e.x a 50GB game on the PS5 from one disk to another it takes less than 30 seconds. On the PS4 you could have a longer coffee break.

Indeed. It's also great that broasband is now far faster then just a few years ago. Finally we don't really have that much of a bottleneck between download speeds, storage and ram. It is amazing how fast technology moves really.

Gone are thr days when you have do leave your PC on for a week to download a large rom set of current game. And moving big files it collections between drives is painless now too. No coming back in thr mooring to find a file transfer failed 3 minutes after you left it and nothing copied.

Now we have the issue of wishing some servers were faster or acutely considering what else we can doenload.

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Originally Posted by Demon Cleaner

If I copy f.e.x a 50GB game on the PS5 from one disk to another it takes less than 30 seconds. On the PS4 you could have a longer coffee break.

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That's a staggering real world example. Wow.

My main rig is down atm, so I can't get to my data on the installed M2's. - I'll post some figures once she's back up & running. - Lots of hammer & saw action going on to make provision for a new water loop. :guns:

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Originally Posted by Harrison

It is mad how fast they are.

Remember many years ago (2006 onwards) PC gamers were going mad over those Rapter drives?

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Were they the 10,000rpm ones? I remember that. Were they noisier than a regular (a regular is what, 7200? 5400? something like that)

Yes they were the 10,000 ROM ones. And they were normally in odd smaller sizes suxh as 74GB. They had extra heatsink fins on the outside of the HD case because they got hotter at the faster speed. I never owned one but don't think they were any louder. I used to use Maxtor and then Seagate 7200 drive and they were not that loud either.

I recently dug out my now very old P2 PC that I returned is original spec a few years ago. It has a 5 25" Quatum Bigfoot 12GB HDD in it. That ribby is physically huge (as large as a DVD drive) and I had forgotten just how load it was. And the read access sounds. Not sure how I used to put up with it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by J T

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Harrison

It is mad how fast they are.

Remember many years ago (2006 onwards) PC gamers were going mad over those Rapter drives?

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Were they the 10,000rpm ones? I remember that. Were they noisier than a regular (a regular is what, 7200? 5400? something like that)

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"On February 10, 2003, Western Digital announced the first consumer 10,000 RPM hard drive, sold in 36 GB and 74 GB versions.[1]

On April 21, 2008, Western Digital announced the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA Raptor hard drive series. The new drives, called WD VelociRaptor, feature 300 GB capacity and 2.5-inch platters enclosed in the IcePack, a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink. Western Digital claimed that the new drives were 35 percent faster than the previous generation Raptors.[2]

On April 6, 2010, Western Digital updated the VelociRaptor series. The drives contain up to three platters and a 600 GB total capacity, upgraded from the dual-platter 300 GB design of the prior flagship model. Western Digital claims the new models are 15 percent faster than the previous generation of VelociRaptors.[3]

On April 16, 2012, Western Digital updated the VelociRaptor series for the second time. The new drives contain up to three platters and a 1000 GB total capacity, upgraded from the triple-platter 600 GB design of the prior flagship model. It was the last generation of Raptor hard drives to be manufactured; Western Digital removed it from its product catalog in mid-2016, without any direct successor."

From here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_Raptor

You can still buy them on Amazon....

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Dig.../dp/B007VPGJIY

Be quick, ....only 9 left in stock! :lol:

Meaning that 10 years ago we only had a max of 1TB drives?? Crazy.

No 2TB drivers were common in 2012. Just the Rapter drives were smaller due to their speed meaning more air needed to move within the mechanism reducing capacity.

I had loads of Samsung and Seagate 2TB drives then and some are still in use now I think 3TB drives were just appearing then too and a few server level enterprise 4TB drives, but they were silly prices like £2k.

Tbh guys, SSD & NVMe should be a lot cheaper than they are. The manufacturing costs are considerably smaller than a mechanical hard drive. :nuts:

But they charge you because they can get away with it & still whack you for silly money on large Spinning hard drives. :eyebrow:

That is true. Mechanical drive need to be assembled in clean rooms. Curcuit boards and chips don't and no moving parts. They are still playing off the pandemic chip shortages though.

The cost of a 2TB is still over £270. And a 4TB is currently silly money. But that's for the Gen 4. Gen3 are starting to drop off you don't need such fast storage.