M2.SSDs and system speed

[Harrison]

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?

[J T]

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

Sounds blazingly quick.

[Harrison]

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.

[Stephen Coates]

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

Sounds blazingly quick.

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

[Demon Cleaner]

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

[Harrison]

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.

[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.

[Harrison]

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.

[J T]

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.

That's a staggering real world example. Wow.

[Kin Hell]

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.