Is Samsung 980 PRO actually faster than other SSDs in real world?

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UncleJoe

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Apparently many people are disappointed by the reduce write endurance. That doesn't affect me.

I just want to know from a speed perspective, are those gains actually achievable in real world apps?

I've studied the benchmarks on Anandtech, and the most disappointing thing is the sequential read speed of 7000 MiB/s is only attained at queue depths > = 16. At QDs 1 to 4, there's hardly any improvement over PCIe 3 drives like the SK Hynix Gold P31, which beats the 980 PRO in many categories.
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Do games that do upfront loading or any consumer apps take advantage of that parallelism? What about games that continuously stream like Rage or GTA?

For random reads/writes, they claim 1M IOPs vs 500k for the 970 PRO, but the benchmark doesn't show it, at least for QD=32. Only 345K.
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It also made me realize how much faster Optane is, especially at low queue depths. Intel is releasing Optane 2 hybrid SSDs soon. Is that a better alternative? I hope they pair the Optane with TLC NAND, not that terrible QLC. Also hope the Optane size is much > 32GiB of Gen1, which was a huge disappointment. The 980 Pro has a whopping ~114 GiB of SLC!
 
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VoodooRufus said:
I wish they compared the 980 Pro to the Optane 905P. Both are expensive enough to compete with each other.
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Anandtech's Bench is the place to go for comparing any two drives that have been tested by AT at any time, even if they don't show up in the same review. It does not give the graphs, though: 980 Pro 1TB vs. 905p 1.5TB; 980 Pro 1TB vs. 900p 280GB Unfortunately, the 480GB 900p's results are not in there and so nothing shows up, but what a wonderful drive it is.
 
Judging from that, they trade blows pretty well, except for the Random 4k and Destroyer latency and read rates.

Not sure how much of a difference in real life usage there would be. I'd still like to add a 905P 380GB M.2 to my rig as a primary boot and software drive, but it's just so darn expensive.
 
I never saw the 99th percentile read latency benchmarks in the Anandtech 980 PRO review. That's strange the Intel P905 had worse latency under load than the 980. Optane inherently has very low latency at low QD=1, so how can it do worse under load?

I would not get Optane drive as primary storage, only for cache, because that would be wasteful. To get the best throughput and latency, it needs to be accessed through the memory bus, either used as a cache for DRAM or directly addressed by an app using memory load/store instructions. Unfortunately, that's only available on Xeons. I don't know if Intel will bring the DDR-T protocol to desktop CPUs any time soon.
 
UncleJoe said:
Apparently many people are disappointed by the reduce write endurance. That doesn't affect me.

I just want to know from a speed perspective, are those gains actually achievable in real world apps?

I've studied the benchmarks on Anandtech, and the most disappointing thing is the sequential read speed of 7000 MiB/s is only attained at queue depths > = 16. At QDs 1 to 4, there's hardly any improvement over PCIe 3 drives like the SK Hynix Gold P31, which beats the 980 PRO in many categories.
View attachment 283562


Do games that do upfront loading or any consumer apps take advantage of that parallelism? What about games that continuously stream like Rage or GTA?

For random reads/writes, they claim 1M IOPs vs 500k for the 970 PRO, but the benchmark doesn't show it, at least for QD=32. Only 345K.
View attachment 283563


It also made me realize how much faster Optane is, especially at low queue depths. Intel is releasing Optane 2 hybrid SSDs soon. Is that a better alternative? I hope they pair the Optane with TLC NAND, not that terrible QLC. Also hope the Optane size is much > 32GiB of Gen1, which was a huge disappointment. The 980 Pro has a whopping ~114 GiB of SLC!
Click to expand...

Yup. Optane low QD performance spoils all current PCIe 4.0 drives for me, at least from the OS drive use case.
 
Buy an Optane 905p for the OS. For data drives, there is not much benefit to the 980 PRO over Phison E16 drives that are half the price. I have 4x Phison E12 drives in VROC RAID0.
 
Will a Optane 905p be as attractive for an AMD setup as it is for intel? there is no secret sauce that only intel benefits?
 
Abula said:
Will a Optane 905p be as attractive for an AMD setup as it is for intel? there is no secret sauce that only intel benefits?
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It's an NVMe PCIe storage device, so it will work with no compromises on AMD.
 
so is buying a PCIe 4.0 NVMe pretty much a waste of time?...I currently have a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD...for my upcoming Zen 3 5800X build should I keep that drive or upgrade to a PCIe 3 NVMe?...this is mostly for gaming
 
UncleJoe said:
Do games that do upfront loading or any consumer apps take advantage of that parallelism? What about games that continuously stream like Rage or GTA?
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Practically nothing desktop/workstation related does. QD1 is the most important metric there, with probably up to QD4 being relevant. Choose any NVMe drive with DRAM for ease of mind and you'll be fine.
 
A 3.5" SSD on SATAIII is going to be barely slower than the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives in games, as it stands today.

If the way game data is stored in the future changes based on requiring an SSD, which would allow developers to fundamentally change how data is placed in storage, then I would expect to start seeing significant improvements moving from SATAIII to PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 storage in the future. But the game would likely require that specific type of storage if that were true (think next gen consoles).

For now, there's no need to upgrade over a standard SSD just for gaming.
 
bigdogchris said:
A 3.5" SSD on SATAIII is going to be barely slower than the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives in games, as it stands today.

If the way game data is stored in the future changes based on requiring an SSD, which would allow developers to fundamentally change how data is placed in storage, then I would expect to start seeing significant improvements moving from SATAIII to PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 storage in the future. But the game would likely require that specific type of storage if that were true (think next gen consoles).

For now, there's no need to upgrade over a standard SSD just for gaming.
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Probably somewhere in 2021 they will make better use of them since the consoles now have faster storage.
 
Furious_Styles said:
Probably somewhere in 2021 they will make better use of them since the consoles now have faster storage.
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Maybe. But developers have to consider users at home as well. Some people still have HDD's in PC's.

I really only see the true benefit of such high speed SSD's in consoles being achieved on exclusive titles for several more years.
 
bigdogchris said:
Maybe. But developers have to consider users at home as well. Some people still have HDD's in PC's.

I really only see the true benefit of such high speed SSD's in consoles being achieved on exclusive titles for several more years.
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I hope not. It's time to leave behind the mech drive holdovers. The new console market is much larger (will be soon at least) and they might just have to make an SSD the min requirement.
 
Furious_Styles said:
I hope not. It's time to leave behind the mech drive holdovers. The new console market is much larger (will be soon at least) and they might just have to make an SSD the min requirement.
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I agree it is time to ditch the mech drives. The people that will complain about not having a SSD are the same people that are still using AMD x4 CPUs. If you still don't have a SSD at this point gaming is not a concern to you.
 
Furious_Styles said:
Probably somewhere in 2021 they will make better use of them since the consoles now have faster storage.
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More like 2024. It takes 3-5 years of development for most AAA games and the first wave of 9th gen exclusives aren't coming until q4 2022 - q2 2023. Full use of the SSDs likely won't be taken advantage of until future games after that. Most will still be using dated engines for years to come and hold games back for 8th gen just to have more customers to sell to.
 
VoodooRufus said:
I wish they compared the 980 Pro to the Optane 905P. Both are expensive enough to compete with each other.
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i have both the 380gb as boot drive on my i9 7980xe rig and it was a hell of a Expense $700 i also hada 280gb 905p but replaced it with a intel 750 1.2tb instead.
 
Never in the history of IT has a 7 times (ish) jump in performance from SATAIII to NVMe been so...underwhelming in the real world. If similar sized NVMe drives cost twice as much as SATAIII SSDs or more, I wouldnt bother with them at all in most general/domestic usage cases.
 
Does the analysis change based on the way SSDs are used in PS5 and XBOX? Do we neec NVME PCIe 4.0 drive that read 7,000/sec to replicate that performance on PC?
 
Blackstone said:
Does the analysis change based on the way SSDs are used in PS5 and XBOX? Do we neec NVME PCIe 4.0 drive that read 7,000/sec to replicate that performance on PC?
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Usually on PC you need more performance due to more overhead for similar results
 
Hopefully MS direct storage will really take advantage of NVME drives. Supposedly it's a game changer for gaming and IO. We'll see.
 
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