Are the vendors ripping us off on M.2 NVMe drives?

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x509

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I'm in the market for a new SSD,:wideyed: so I checked out the pricing of NMVe vs. SATA 3 M.2 form factor drives. Holy empty wallet, Batman. :mad: For 2 TB drives, the NMVe drives were like 2X or more the price of SATA 3 drives in either M.2 or 2.5" format. :eek: Are the drive vendors gouging us, badly? :wideyed: What is going on here? Are the chips in the NMVe drives different from the chips in SATA 3 drives? Is there a supply vs. demand issue here?

After comparing the specs on NMVe drives, I can see why people are excited about their performance, so I would really like to get one of these to give my aging main system a performance boost. If I wait a few months, will prices drop?

x509
 
The controller is different between SATA and NVME, but I believe the actual flash chips are the same.

HOWEVER

For NVME on the M.2 form factor, there is less physical space available on the drive for a manufacturer to install flash chips. Physically less space I mean- a 2.5" SSD is over twice the physical size of a M.2 slot SSD. What this means for high capacity drives in particular (like the 2TB unit you referenced) is that the M.2 version of the drive has to use fewer, higher capacity and more expensive flash chips, whereas achieving the same capacity on a 2.5" form factor drive could instead use twice as many lower capacity chips that are less expensive.

As for performance, there is very little functional performance difference between a SATA3 SSD and a NVME SSD for cosumer workloads. If SATA is cheaper, get SATA.
 
sinisterDei said:
The controller is different between SATA and NVME, but I believe the actual flash chips are the same.

HOWEVER

For NVME on the M.2 form factor, there is less physical space available on the drive for a manufacturer to install flash chips. Physically less space I mean- a 2.5" SSD is over twice the physical size of a M.2 slot SSD. What this means for high capacity drives in particular (like the 2TB unit you referenced) is that the M.2 version of the drive has to use fewer, higher capacity and more expensive flash chips, whereas achieving the same capacity on a 2.5" form factor drive could instead use twice as many lower capacity chips that are less expensive.

As for performance, there is very little functional performance difference between a SATA3 SSD and a NVME SSD for cosumer workloads. If SATA is cheaper, get SATA.
Click to expand...
Well, for Samsung, the price for a 2 TB SSD is the same between 2.5" and M.2.

I do a lot with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. We're talking large file sizes, 25-50 or even 10-0 MB a picture, sometimes processing 50-100 photos at a batch. If I am going to go with SATA 3, then I might as well just put two HDDs in RAID 0 (if I understand one of the answers to my question about RAID 0 and RAID 1 performance.)
 
x509 said:
Well, for Samsung, the price for a 2 TB SSD is the same between 2.5" and M.2.

I do a lot with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. We're talking large file sizes, 25-50 or even 10-0 MB a picture, sometimes processing 50-100 photos at a batch. If I am going to go with SATA 3, then I might as well just put two HDDs in RAID 0 (if I understand one of the answers to my question about RAID 0 and RAID 1 performance.)
Click to expand...

I don’t think your file size is anywhere near making spinners better than SSD... but you do what you do.
 
If you look inside a 0.5/1TB Samsung 2.5" SSD you'll find how tiny the PCB is and there are 1 or 2 flash chips. M.2 allows for double sided and I don't think the physical space is of any issue here. 22110 has plenty of space. The thing is SATA M.2's are about the same price as 2.5" form factors.
I think the primary reason is this, the 2 to 5x performances and you know... more performance has to always cost more money :) .
Well, speaking out of this, I guess controller and cache would be somehow more expensive whereas for a SATA drive they could put some "less-expensive and slower" controller design..
 
x509 said:
Well, for Samsung, the price for a 2 TB SSD is the same between 2.5" and M.2.

I do a lot with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. We're talking large file sizes, 25-50 or even 10-0 MB a picture, sometimes processing 50-100 photos at a batch. If I am going to go with SATA 3, then I might as well just put two HDDs in RAID 0 (if I understand one of the answers to my question about RAID 0 and RAID 1 performance.)
Click to expand...


Not sure how you're coming to this conclusion. Sure, a couple HDDs in RAID0 might come close to the sustained throughput of a SATA SSD. But the file access latency of an SSD will still be orders of magnitude faster than that of any HDD setup (and a RAID layer could conceivably make it worse). Latency improvements are the main reason SSDs feel so much faster.

NVME SSD latency is, at best, only a hair faster than that of a SATA SSD. That, combined with rarely-to-never being able to take advantage of the increased throughput PCIe grants, is why many here and elsewhere recommend against spending the 1.5-2x price vs. SATA for a NVMe SSD.

A HDD setup for your work might make sense if you're concerned about SSD wear, or if an adequately sized SSD is cost-prohibitive.
 
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I am working with Adobe Creative Cloud daily and have a digital assets library of several terabytes populated with file sizes ranging from 1-2mb to 1.5gb psds (low %). The library resides on a WD gold 10TB and was contemplating getting SSDs for this purpose so that Adobe Bridge browsing becomes faster. Searching through forums though has not allowed be to come to a clear conclusion that it is worth it. Adobe Bridge generates previews/thumbnails every time I browse even though it has build a 50GB cache. If I browse a main folder (with show subfolder contents enalbled) with 3-4.000 files it takes some time to build the previews eventhough there is no disk activity so I don't know if an SSD would help much. Even if it did I am sure an NVME vs SATA would not do better and of course I can't buyt 4-6TB SSDs just for those items.

I am thinking of getting a Samsung EVO 1TB Sata for testing since their price has dropped and if it does not perform I can turn it to a Steam Game Drive (games are also on the WD Gold 10TB - but I ma not much of a gamer anyway).

My fonts library resides in a Samsung 960Pro (15,000 Fonts) in a consolidated library made by Suitcase Extensis Font Management Suite. I can't say it is slow but I don't think that it is the NVME that makes any difference vs when it was on HDD after fonts are loaded into memory.

For batch processing with Lightroom you PC will still pause to process each image in between so I am not sure you will see a huge benefit there either especially by going NVME vs Sata SSD.

If anyone knows for sure and working with these and has done a comparison, feedback would be nice.
 
x509 said:
We're talking large file sizes, 25-50 or even 10-0 MB a picture, sometimes processing 50-100 photos at a batch. If I am going to go with SATA 3, then I might as well just put two HDDs in RAID 0 (if I understand one of the answers to my question about RAID 0 and RAID 1 performance.)
Click to expand...

This is not even close to true. The biggest performance increase from moving from spinning disks to SSD came in the form of reduction in access latency, NOT from raw transfer speed. RAID0 of some spinning disks only increases the transfer speed, not the latency, and even the combined transfer speed of two top-end 7200 RPM HDDs is unlikely to match a single 860 EVO drive, meanwhile the 860 EVO will have latency numbers orders of magnitude faster. Plus, of course you can put SATA SSDs into RAID0 as well, when it comes down to it; I do it myself, though mine is to achieve a big single volume rather (2x 1TB combined into a 2TB disk) rather than in search of any additional speed.

If you are processing images in batch, 50-100 at a go, then that is the *exact* scenario for which a SSD (*any* SSD) will greatly benefit you. That's 50-100 individual drive seeks essentially zero'd out. Beyond that, if NVME netted you 10% of a performance increase over SATA in your actual, real world application, I'd be completely flabbergasted.
 
JargonGR said:
I am working with Adobe Creative Cloud daily and have a digital assets library of several terabytes populated with file sizes ranging from 1-2mb to 1.5gb psds (low %). The library resides on a WD gold 10TB and was contemplating getting SSDs for this purpose so that Adobe Bridge browsing becomes faster. Searching through forums though has not allowed be to come to a clear conclusion that it is worth it. Adobe Bridge generates previews/thumbnails every time I browse even though it has build a 50GB cache. If I browse a main folder (with show subfolder contents enalbled) with 3-4.000 files it takes some time to build the previews eventhough there is no disk activity so I don't know if an SSD would help much. Even if it did I am sure an NVME vs SATA would not do better and of course I can't buyt 4-6TB SSDs just for those items.
Click to expand...

I've seen these benchmarks here and they show only a small difference for ssd and hard disk in lightroom work, but i don't know if that can be useful toyou. I can assure you browsing folders with thousand of big photos feels instantaneous on ssd while hard disk can take minutes, also when you read or write big files like 1.5gb psds any ssd will be quite faster (i'd say 4 times faster).
 
leadays said:
I've seen these benchmarks here and they show only a small difference for ssd and hard disk in lightroom work, but i don't know if that can be useful toyou. I can assure you browsing folders with thousand of big photos feels instantaneous on ssd while hard disk can take minutes, also when you read or write big files like 1.5gb psds any ssd will be quite faster (i'd say 4 times faster).
Click to expand...

The problem I think with Adobe Bridge is that it does a lot more than simply reading / browsing the files since the previews it builds are not simple thumbnails. For example it creates thumbnails after having read the content of EPS or AI vector files or PSD files and this is not something you can do with file explorer for example (no thumbs for such files). It also extracts a lot more info about the files. This is probably the reason that we don't see differences since the bottleneck is not the storage medium but all the other processes in between file reads.

As far as writes are concerned yes, SSDs will be faster but saving an 1.5GB PSD is not something I do daily and even when I do it on the WD Gold (240+mb/s) we are talking about 10 seconds so it's not that bad. I am also concerned with the endurance of the EVOs for such use if I begin to write a large amount of data daily and Pros or Intels are not exactly cheap.

What i will do is get a 1TB Samsung EVO to do some testing since they are much cheaper now than they used to be. Of course this cannot hold my whole library but I could move some files there after testing what benefits the most. As I said my fonts / cache and library are already on the 960 Pro but they do not consume so much space. Textures, Photos, PSD Mockups or Video files though are another strory.

My plan is to start with the EVO and also add another WD Gold 10TB (rebranded to Ultrastar I think now) for backup purposes. I damn live in a chaos of over 30 HDs that I need to clean and consolidate (keeping indexes now) into 10Tb or bigger models but those are also not exactly cheap either so I am upgrading slowly while adding faster SSD storage where it matters the most.
 
You couldn't pay me enough to do heavy user work on a spinning rust system anymore. Fuck that shit.

I have to suffer them on some networks because reasons, but even my slow as molasses to update main work place has flash where it matters now.
 
Nothing beats my SCSI ultra 320 drive cabinets from ~2001; they can read and write at 174MB/s at the same time.

That computer has 3x 8 drive cabinets, so it sounds like a 747 taking off, but I still keep it for video and photoshop.

I still have a stack of replacement drives, if any fail. This stuff was given away to me, and replaced by SSD's that failed in a year.
They then replaced them with SAS drives, for even more cash. The SAS drives are slower, as there aren't as many in the raid0 group. :)

SCSI isn't so scuzzy. :D
 
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My $99 amazon special samsung T5 is faster, and fits in a pocket. Frugality meets practicality.

Funny enough, it looks SCSI to userland with UASP.

Spinning rust is for bulk storage in another room over the network with a nice fat buffer of ram and flash in front of it (and lots of redundancy), fuck it for anything else.
 
sinisterDei said:
The controller is different between SATA and NVME, but I believe the actual flash chips are the same.

HOWEVER

For NVME on the M.2 form factor, there is less physical space available on the drive for a manufacturer to install flash chips. Physically less space I mean- a 2.5" SSD is over twice the physical size of a M.2 slot SSD. What this means for high capacity drives in particular (like the 2TB unit you referenced) is that the M.2 version of the drive has to use fewer, higher capacity and more expensive flash chips, whereas achieving the same capacity on a 2.5" form factor drive could instead use twice as many lower capacity chips that are less expensive.

As for performance, there is very little functional performance difference between a SATA3 SSD and a NVME SSD for cosumer workloads. If SATA is cheaper, get SATA.
Click to expand...

This. Done multiple builds with both tech and in real world use there is nothing to it.
Only real positive of nvme is no cables and tidier install, I use all eight sata ports in my personal rig so that's irrelevant to me.
 
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