To RAID0 2x 512GB 950 Pro NVME's or not?

S

Shocked

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 1, 2009
Messages
373
I may have gotten a little overly ambitious with storage ideas for my new build and purchased two of these things. I wanted to try the NVME drives, but I also knew I wanted ~1TB of SSD storage space, so...

I definitely don't need the performance of RAID0, but it would be more convenient to have one single 800-900-ish GB partition (depending on OPing I suppose). And I'm currently planning on getting a Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 which has two tempting M.2 slots. But then again it would also be convenient not to have to deal with RAID0 at all (I haven't messed with RAID at all since my WD Raptor's in the early 2000's, but I remember it being a headache)

So if option 1 is using them in RAID0, and option 2 is using them as separate drives, then for option 3 - with the same budget - I could just return one of them and get a 1TB 850 Evo to use as a second drive. Which might be what I'm leaning towards at the moment.

The NVME drives might be overkill for what I do anyway. A lot of gaming, some multimedia work and some pretty extreme multitasking, but I don't tend to work with/move huge files around all that much.
 
Sounds sweet. I don't think RAID 0 is that much of a headache for something like this. As long as you back up your important files, and accept that you may not be able to move the RAID array to different hardware, you should be fine.
 
Return both and just go a 1TB Evo - unless you have a good reason (which you can articulate aside from "I want one") you don't need a Pro.
 
I second Keljian - save the cash and get the 1 TB EVO. It'll be slower than any NVME based drive, but even with your stated workload I can't see you stressing one out.
 
Fair points, I may do as suggested and return both. You don't see any difference in normal usage with one of these drives vs a SATA SSD?
 
Shocked said:
Fair points, I may do as suggested and return both. You don't see any difference in normal usage with one of these drives vs a SATA SSD?
Click to expand...

Game level loading on some games will be marginally quicker but we're talking a difference of 5-10 seconds at most. Consider that a "normal" sata ssd can do about 500 MB/s that means it can fill 16 gig of ram in 32 seconds. Quadrupling it to 2500mb/s will mean you can do it in under 10, but this is a fringe case. Most games only use 6-8 gig of ram at most, and about 2 gig is preloaded, so the most you'll be waiting is about 12 seconds, and you are more likely to hit a CPU bottleneck first
 
Or wait for the 960 Series. Samsung looks to be releasing the 960 EVO in an m.2 NVMe flavor as well. I'd bet that by the time those debut, the pricetag for a 1TB drive will be less than your current 2 x 950Pros. We can't search the forum right now, but there was an article in the News section last week about them with more detail as well. Here's the direct press release from Samsung. Seriously, who needs Raid 0?

Samsung Electronics Accelerates the NVMe Era for Consumers with Its Highest Performing 960 PRO and EVO Solid State Drives
 
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Shocked said:
Fair points, I may do as suggested and return both. You don't see any difference in normal usage with one of these drives vs a SATA SSD?
Click to expand...

In my experience, as the owner of both SATA based SSDs and PCI Express SSDs and one newfangled NVME boot drive, no, the difference is not gigantic.

In my opinion, we're in the realm of diminishing returns for a while when it comes to SSD speed. The largest part of what made SSDs feel so much faster than mechanical drives had nothing to do with their transfer speed going dramatically up, but had to do with their access times going magnificently dramatically down. There's not really much more room to gain on the access times front, so everyone is scrambling to have the highest transfer speeds possible, but the user impact of that is significantly less.

At some point it comes down to the performance of the rest of the system as well; even if your SSD had unlimited speed, the rest of your system can't consume the data at unlimited speed.

It reminds me of the evolution of TV a little bit. Moving from VHS to DVD was revolutionary; sound got amazingly better, we got things like extra content and no rewinding, and the picture quality improvement was huge. When Blu-Ray came around and everything went to 1080p, there was still some room for an upgrade- people had bigger TVs now so the HD quality was appreciated. But it wasn't as big- people already had good sound, and the extra content and no rewinding was old hat. Now there's 4K, and for a *lot* of people, well, who gives a shit. It's just picture quality, and 1080p is already pretty nice for a normal size TV at standard viewing distances. SSDs feel the same; at first the upgrades were revolutionary, but now they're just evolutionary and all kind of blur together.
 
^ Well said. As an owner of many different SATA SSDs and a few different m.2 sata and NVMe drives, I'd concur with sinsisterDei's comment. The speed different does exist, but it's nowhere near the gap that exists between spinner and even a current gen SATA SSD.
 
If you go all NVME and no optical thats a few cables you eliminate from the case. NVME is just stupid nerd cool. My 950 pro is the coolest thing i've ever seen. As for raid my 2 barracudas were raid 0 for 10 years. It actually transferred fine from my ip35 pro to my z170mx. I Un Raided them, that was a pain!, they are 10 years old but both work fine still.
 
DouglasteR said:
Nothing like a new enthusiastic product line to rekindle the OPs doubts :D

PSA. Wait for the 960 EVO 1tb. Just a little more weeks/months
Click to expand...
Ugh... I didn't know they were that close, but I only have about a week before I really need to finish this build up.
 
If you are looking to saturate 10gbit, a single nvme drive should do it (even evo)
 
As i have saidn a thousnd times. Nvme is great for better 1QD and multitasking. If you search my posts i list a slew ofreasons why these new drives are great for various work loads. But depends on how much you do at once.

if
1qd
steady state
multiple programs at once
consistency
and something else

are critical to you get these. If you dont know if these are important they probably arent


but sont raid 0 these unless needed. You hurt qd1 and add complications unneededly. Wait for 1 tb models or Xpoint

sorry for crap reply. On cell and leave in 40 hours
 
Shocked said:
I may have gotten a little overly ambitious with storage ideas for my new build and purchased two of these things. I wanted to try the NVME drives, but I also knew I wanted ~1TB of SSD storage space, so...

I definitely don't need the performance of RAID0, but it would be more convenient to have one single 800-900-ish GB partition (depending on OPing I suppose). And I'm currently planning on getting a Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 which has two tempting M.2 slots. But then again it would also be convenient not to have to deal with RAID0 at all (I haven't messed with RAID at all since my WD Raptor's in the early 2000's, but I remember it being a headache)

So if option 1 is using them in RAID0, and option 2 is using them as separate drives, then for option 3 - with the same budget - I could just return one of them and get a 1TB 850 Evo to use as a second drive. Which might be what I'm leaning towards at the moment.

The NVME drives might be overkill for what I do anyway. A lot of gaming, some multimedia work and some pretty extreme multitasking, but I don't tend to work with/move huge files around all that much.
Click to expand...

I don't have two NVME drives to try striping them together ("RAID" 0), but if the RAM drive that I used for testing can be an indicator of the difference between striped NVME drives and a single NVME drive, game load speeds won't be improved.

NVME / RAM Drive / RAID / SATA III SSD Game Load Time Comparisons
 
arestavo said:
I don't have two NVME drives to try striping them together ("RAID" 0), but if the RAM drive that I used for testing can be an indicator of the difference between striped NVME drives and a single NVME drive, game load speeds won't be improved.

NVME / RAM Drive / RAID / SATA III SSD Game Load Time Comparisons
Click to expand...
Well, I wasn't totally expecting a real difference in game times - I remember seeing some SSD / RAM disk comparison a few years ago that didn't show much difference, although I have to admit I was curious about certain games like Battlefield.

At this point I'm more curious to find out at what point in October we can expect Samsung 860 (EDIT: or 960, rather) series availability. Everything I can find only says "October". I could hold out through the first week of October, maybe a tad more, but that's about it. :(
 
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to way in abit i have 5 200 gig sas 12gig/s ssds (bought them used for $200) and it destroyed my ocz revodrive in speeds it is allso a noticeable improvement over a single sata ssd
 
I just got back from vacation last night and decided to finally take apart my old PC and move some parts (one of the 2.5" SSDs) around to my main machine (details in sig) - going from a 3x RAID0 (SATA 6GBS drives) to a 4x RAID0, along with 1 single NVME drive for comparison.

A couple of points:

1) A single NVME destroys 3 and even 4 regular SATA 3 SSDs (maybe SATA limitations or overhead / crappy mobo controller?).
2) Despite the difference in numbers, the "feel" hasn't really improved at all from games loaded from the NVME or the RAID0 drive. I could say this since 2x RAID0
3) The 'Should or Shouldn't' you question depends upon what you are doing. Gaming on a single NVME is more than enough. As for heavy multitasking, I would think more system ram would be the way to go.

RANDOM BENCHIES

1x 500gb Samsung 950 Pro NVME m.2
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : Crystal Dew World
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2134.620 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1371.915 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 543.312 MB/s [132644.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 382.107 MB/s [ 93287.8 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 1756.971 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 1495.364 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 50.391 MB/s [ 12302.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 205.053 MB/s [ 50061.8 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [C: 39.1% (186.2/476.4 GiB)] (x1) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/10/02 0:28:32
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14393] (x64)


3x 1tb Micron M600 Sata3 (RAID 0)

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1182.281 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1106.679 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 345.838 MB/s [ 84433.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 306.849 MB/s [ 74914.3 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 1152.909 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 993.195 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 27.405 MB/s [ 6690.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 94.312 MB/s [ 23025.4 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [D: 6.9% (197.8/2861.5 GiB)] (x1) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/10/02 0:30:46
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14393] (x64)


4x 1tb Micron M600 Sata3 (RAID 0)

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1485.558 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1282.526 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 361.311 MB/s [ 88210.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 326.090 MB/s [ 79611.8 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 1338.684 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 1149.882 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 27.278 MB/s [ 6659.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 96.186 MB/s [ 23482.9 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [D: 5.2% (197.8/3815.3 GiB)] (x1) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/10/02 10:53:21
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14393] (x64)
 
Shocked said:
Well, I wasn't totally expecting a real difference in game times - I remember seeing some SSD / RAM disk comparison a few years ago that didn't show much difference, although I have to admit I was curious about certain games like Battlefield.

At this point I'm more curious to find out at what point in October we can expect Samsung 860 (EDIT: or 960, rather) series availability. Everything I can find only says "October". I could hold out through the first week of October, maybe a tad more, but that's about it. :(
Click to expand...

From the specs they are throwing around, it will be a 40 to 50% boost in transfer rates - 2gb/s to 3gb/s - insane! Given the form factor and the growing capacity, pretty soon we won't need huge cases anymore to have all the storage that we want, just alot of M.2 type sockets!
 
dvsman said:
From the specs they are throwing around, it will be a 40 to 50% boost in transfer rates - 2gb/s to 3gb/s - insane! Given the form factor and the growing capacity, pretty soon we won't need huge cases anymore to have all the storage that we want, just alot of M.2 type sockets!
Click to expand...

You won't even need a lot as SSDs continue to get denser and denser chips.
 
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