NVME (m.2) / RAM Drive / RAID / SATA III SSD Game Load Time Comparisons

Very cool test thank you and confirmed what I have felt with m2 Vs sata. Expected ramdrive to be more consistent and little faster though. Raid6 spinning rust did well.
 
I've been thinking about getting an m.2 nvme drive, but I guess I'll wait since I still have space on my Sata3 SSD.
I've never heard of a good case for upgrade an SSD for performance. Even if you are running one of the earlier models, capacity is the strongest reason for upgrading.
I will upgade from my 256gb samsung 830 to something like the Intel 600p 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe. I've thought about upgrading earlier but most people say that under normal usage I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
 
I've never heard of a good case for upgrade an SSD for performance. Even if you are running one of the earlier models, capacity is the strongest reason for upgrading.
I will upgade from my 256gb samsung 830 to something like the Intel 600p 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe. I've thought about upgrading earlier but most people say that under normal usage I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Do some research on that Intel 600p...I almost considered it but the reviews were pretty bad saying you were better off using any other drive as it choked up in the cache and failed miserably even causing reboots and freezes.
 
Do some research on that Intel 600p...I almost considered it but the reviews were pretty bad saying you were better off using any other drive as it choked up in the cache and failed miserably even causing reboots and freezes.
That's sad, I wouldn't mind low M.2 (but higher than SATA) performance if the price is right.
I expected better from Intel, hopefully firmware updates will resolve the issues.
As the issues are not widely known, many will still buy it and the market will need to compete. If nothing else, it will be good for competition.
 
Speeds of gaming loading time when using a ssd is more or less purely cpu bound

funny when battlefield 4 loads or most of there frostbite games it uses all my threads on my old cpu and it was still cpu bound not storage , I have to see if it can use 16 threads on my ryzen system when loading next map

The days of using raid for storage to make the game load faster is long gone when using ssds (if anything it might increase loading times marginally due to cpu overhead of the raid)
 
I'm not surprised by this, nice work btw. I got a nvme drive a couple of years ago and didn't see any noticeable performance benefits over the SSD it replaced. My latest rig has two nvme drives and when I am copying data between the two drives I see a massive performance benefit. Other than that, not much.

I think most people are better off going for a larger capacity SATA SSD over nvme. At least for now. The prices have been dropping and they are becoming more affordable. Right now, the 1TB samsung 970 Evo about $80 more than the equiv SATA version, but the SATA version of the 860 Pro SSD is $50 higher. I'd go with the Evo nvme over the 860 Pro, but I think most would be happy with the Evo SATA drive.
 
I tried to get ReFS working on my 850 EVO to test if there was a difference. Unfortunately it failed to format every time.

I would have loved to test on Ubuntu or Mint as well, but Fallout 4 doesn't have Linux support. And with that game being the only one with meaningful load time differences (that I've found), I'd rather not wipe all my data from my gaming PC to test the few games that would work and likely still show minimal differences.
Could you test with even just 1 game? Also Steam Play exists today where it didnt in 2016. Could be a game changer at least for compatibility. Thanks for your hard work on this very enlightening nonetheless.
 
I'm planning to upgrade from my trusty Samsung 830 256GB to a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB, unless the 1TB sees a major discount this month.
I'm hoping to notice a difference in responsiveness.
 
I'm planning to upgrade from my trusty Samsung 830 256GB to a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB, unless the 1TB sees a major discount this month.
I'm hoping to notice a difference in responsiveness.

depends on what your doing but the 970 evo is considerably faster then the 830 (its about 200% to 500% faster depending what your doing)

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compa...e-M2-500GB-vs-Samsung-830-256GB/m493995vs1387

i would get the 1TB if your planning on using it with say games so you don't have to use 2 drives

if a SATA evo or Crucial MX500 is available at 1TB you save money and get larger SSD for less money (but if you have the m.2 slot i would use it if you don't mind spending £/$ 50-90 more)
 
Last edited:
depends on what your doing but the 970 evo is considerably faster then the 830 (its about 200% to 500% faster depending what your doing)

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compa...e-M2-500GB-vs-Samsung-830-256GB/m493995vs1387

i would get the 1TB if your planning on using it with say games so you don't have to use 2 drives

if a SATA evo or Crucial MX500 is available at 1TB you save money and get larger SSD for less money (but if you have the m.2 slot i would use it if you don't mind spending £/$ 50-90 more)
It will be double the size and many times faster. I will be watching for a Black Friday sale to see what I can get in the 500GB-1TB range.
I'm just hoping that the performance difference will be noticeable in responsiveness.
Some programs like Word with Mendeley can be sluggish when working with very large documents for example, but I'm not sure what the bottleneck is.
 
It will be double the size and many times faster. I will be watching for a Black Friday sale to see what I can get in the 500GB-1TB range.
I'm just hoping that the performance difference will be noticeable in responsiveness.
Some programs like Word with Mendeley can be sluggish when working with very large documents for example, but I'm not sure what the bottleneck is.

Single threaded CPU performance is likely the bottleneck if you are already accessing it from a SSD.
 
Great thread to make me feel better about myself going SATA instead of NVME on my new gaming/Firefox build.
 
Blast from the past. I wonder if this has changed, or if tested with updated hardware the results would be essentially the same - even with the fastest PCIE gen 4 NVME, or even the new gen 5 NVME drives coming soon. I'm guessing not.

Sadly I just have a Firecuda 530 2TB (TBW spec was the deciding factor) and a Micron 9300 15.36TB U.2 drive for my game library - no SATA III SSD to compare it with. A bit of online searching reveals similar results in 2020 and 2021, and only Forspoken (delayed until Jan 2023 - which does look interesting) taking advantage of Microsoft's new DirectStorage API to leverage these blazing fast MB/s speeds.

Anyone else seeing something different?
 
and only Forspoken (delayed until Jan 2023 - which does look interesting) taking advantage of Microsoft's new DirectStorage API to leverage these blazing fast MB/s speeds.

Most of the good difference of speed between M.2 and SATA SSD, seem to be how the game was made with that kind of speed in mind more than Win32 standard API vs Direct Storage:
DirectStorage3-scaled.jpg
https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/DirectStorage3-scaled.jpg

Will see with GPU decompression and-or other game at the time of the presentation with fast m.2 and very fast CPU with many cores it was almost irrelevant.
 
Back
Top