Been quite a while since we've seen a storage review from the [H]

G

Grimlaking

2[H]4U
Joined
May 9, 2006
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I see the storage forums are alive and well. Just curious if we will see one.. you know one a year or so would be nice. Looking on the front page for SSD Storage reviews the last article is from 2015.

Are all NVME's the same? Are some more heat prone than others? OR are we just saying.. If you have current SSD the impact on gaming really is nil between them and it's pretty much all up to personal experience and opinion?
 
I think its because they dont have anyone to review them to their standards.
 
Grimlaking said:
Are all NVME's the same? Are some more heat prone than others? OR are we just saying.. If you have current SSD the impact on gaming really is nil between them and it's pretty much all up to personal experience and opinion?
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They're not all the same, but they are functionally equal to each other for gaming purposes yes. You put an intense workload on them - heavy databases, intense disk I/O from a VM server, 4K+ RAW video editing, etc - then sure, they begin to differentiate themselves.

But for gaming and general "boot into Windows real fast" type use? They're pretty close to the same. Loading a game level at 500 MB/s versus 2000 MB/s isn't much different because the game assets have to be processed and decompressed and such and the rest of your shit can't handle that at 2000 MB/s or whatever. Likewise, Windows boots even faster, but when you moved from a mechanical drive to a SSD your boot time dropped from 30 seconds to 5 seconds and that was a huge deal! But now, you can swap to NVME from SATA SSD and your boot time drops from 5 seconds to 2.5 seconds, and while that's percentage wise a huge increase, in real life it's barely enough time to scratch yourself.
 
I think we need reviews today that cover extended gaming time and performance. Placement on a motherboard or different motherboards interfaces and how that impacts the performance of the SSD over time. There are meaningful things to glean for Overclockers and Enthusiasts alike. And honestly... I hate going to Toms hardware for any review info.. it just feels wrong.
 
Skillz said:
I think its because they dont have anyone to review them to their standards.
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When people take the job and start reviewing hardware, they often find out that it's a lot of work and not the fun times and free hardware they expected. I've seen more people come and go here over the years than I could easily count.
 
Grimlaking said:
I think we need reviews today that cover extended gaming time and performance. Placement on a motherboard or different motherboards interfaces and how that impacts the performance of the SSD over time. There are meaningful things to glean for Overclockers and Enthusiasts alike. And honestly... I hate going to Toms hardware for any review info.. it just feels wrong.
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I do try to address the topic of storage in these areas on the motherboard reviews. Granted, I usually just throw theories out or quick measurements with an IR thermometer. I haven't done extensive testing to see what the facts would be in these cases. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume shoving an NVMe drive under a Titan V is going to be a bad idea. However, it probably works most of the time unless you have the system in a bad chassis with poor airflow, etc. How often this is a problem is up for debate. I know I've seen data concerning throttling over the years, but I'm not sure to what extent this issue really exists. Anytime I've ever tested a given drive or set of drives on a motherboard, I get the results I should as posted by the manufacturer or other sites. My feeling is that our concerns about motherboard layout as it relates to storage are more theoretical, and placement of the drives is more about convenience than performance.

I have also stated many times that I think the M.2 format on the desktop is a bad idea. It's convenient when building a system, but aside from that it's pretty awful. You have no real choice to actively cool the drive and the surrounding components become a factor that you can't really control. Traditional 2.5" form factors using U.2 cables would be my choice were it up to me, but SSD companies producing consumer drives want devices that fit in laptops and desktops alike as the latter has become a niche market.
 
I love the conveneince of the M.2 form factor when building... and being able to have that same PCI-E speed in my laptop is a nice bonus. But I agree that the position and options for active cooling suck. I wonder now if they make after market NVME coolers.
 
Grimlaking said:
I love the conveneince of the M.2 form factor when building... and being able to have that same PCI-E speed in my laptop is a nice bonus. But I agree that the position and options for active cooling suck. I wonder now if they make after market NVME coolers.
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When I'm building a system, you bet it's convenient. When I'm upgrading one or having to repair one, I hate it. Also, the drive bays usually have some sort of fan providing air flow to them or it's at least an option in the case. M.2 drives lay flat against the motherboard and sometimes end up under a GPU. Lets not forget, the form factor also limits the size of the storage device. We could have drives with greater capacities by now were it not for the limiting form factor. In fact, this is why you see larger PCIe SSD's like Intel's SSD 750 1.2TB which was only possible in the 2.5" form factor at the time. I've seen some after market heat sinks but they don't always work well. You have to get them in contact with the semi-conductors on the SSD which requires removing labels and existing covers. Not a great idea if you need to send the drive back for RMA.
 
I have to imagine even @ [H], storage is a relatively minor issue these days. X25-M -> X25-M RAID 0 -> Vertex 3 -> 850 PRO -> 960 EVO. All were awesome drives worth the $ spent however each step saved me 1-2 seconds on storage related activities I only do once a day or maybe a few times a day. Storage at the server level is still interesting I think.
 
Dan_D said:
When I'm building a system, you bet it's convenient. When I'm upgrading one or having to repair one, I hate it. Also, the drive bays usually have some sort of fan providing air flow to them or it's at least an option in the case. M.2 drives lay flat against the motherboard and sometimes end up under a GPU. Lets not forget, the form factor also limits the size of the storage device. We could have drives with greater capacities by now were it not for the limiting form factor. In fact, this is why you see larger PCIe SSD's like Intel's SSD 750 1.2TB which was only possible in the 2.5" form factor at the time. I've seen some after market heat sinks but they don't always work well. You have to get them in contact with the semi-conductors on the SSD which requires removing labels and existing covers. Not a great idea if you need to send the drive back for RMA.
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So... it sounds to me... and I'm just spitballing here... that there is actually content for an article that calls out NVME in the Enthusiest arena and how it can be improved by vendors, not to mention the testing and how to's of placement and cooling of the same devices.

I'm not saying we should see a new article each time an NVME drive is released.... But one every year or two would be handy for people building systems today.

What if people didn't know you could get an M.2 extender cable and a mini enclosure for your NVME drive to make it fit into a 2.5 inch disk bay allowing it to have enhanced cooling and NOT be directly under your video card and still maintain PCI-E 3.0 x4 speed throughput?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=2WG-000Y-00043

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...nvme_m.2_ssd_enclosure-_-17-801-139-_-Product

Now I'm not saying these are best of breed.. but what I turned up with a google search... a brief one at that.

Dan, I bet you can find better, and I'm betting if [H] reached out to someone like Corsair and said. "Hey, do you have a product like this so we can have stable NVME performance and speed.. and even larger capacity NVME drives that can sit in a 2.5 inch actively cooled slot for enthusiest people... they would be all over it.

If I can drop 50ish bucks on a solid and supported setup from Corsair to move my NVME drive away from the motherboard and still have great performance AND get better cooling and less chance of a reduction in speed.. I would be ALL OVER IT. Then you would open the market as you said above to larger capacity NVME drives, heck perhaps even faster ones because you can have more channels to access memory due to less PCB crowding.
 
The cooling angle and form factors are definitely something that motherboard manufacturers are attempting to deal with. The M.2 to PCIe adapters with multiple slots and active cooling are attempts to solve these issues.

And I agree with you, this is a subject that deserves some attention. I'll continue to cover this topic on the motherboard side as best I can. As for the rest, that's up to Kyle.
 
The cooling angle and form factors are definitely something that motherboard manufacturers are attempting to deal with. The M.2 to PCIe adapters with multiple slots and active cooling are attempts to solve these issues.

And I agree with you, this is a subject that deserves some attention. I'll continue to cover this topic on the motherboard side as best I can. As for the rest, that's up to Kyle.
 
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