M.2 NVME and Asus Maximus VIII Hero

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nilepez

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Quick question. Samsung's 970 evos are onsale (though tonight) and I'm thinking of grabbing one, but I can't figure out if this MB can take full advantage of the R/W speeds or not. I've never used NVME, so on this front I'm a newb.

I'm fairly certain I'll get the read speed, but not sure and don't want to waste money if I'm not going to notice any difference -- I'm assuming that if I get 5x ready/write of my normal SSD it'll be noticeably faster during boot, patching and presumably s/w installs and large file reads/writes.

Thanks all
 
I may be too late for this, but the M.2 NVME slot on your motherboard is PCIe 3.0 x4, which is full speed.

With that said, I've typed this next bit up before so I'm going to post it here again:

Additionally, and I've said this before in other threads, the point of diminishing returns has easily been hit in terms of drive speed for consumer use. A huge bulk of the perceived speed increase in SSDs came from a reduction in access times versus conventional hard drives, not from the actual transfer time of data. Modern, SATA SSDs are 4-5x faster than modern 7200 RPM HDDs (550+ MB/s vs 150 MB/s), but they are orders of magnitude faster in their access times (an 850 Pro is 0.04 ms access time, whereas modern HGST 7200 RPM drives are in the 12 MS range, or 300x slower). The incredible reduction in seek time is what truly fueled the "life changing" experience of SSDs, since data from all across the drive was seemingly instantly accessible rather than having to wait on the drive to physically spin itself around to get data from different parts of the disk.

Moving to modern NVMe SSDs is a huge increase in the first metric - 2 GB/s instead of 550 MB/s - but that performance increase is *not* reflected in their access times. This is hammered home to me in the fact that Storagereview, one of my favorite websites for truly in-depth reviews of storage infrastructure, *didn't even bother testing access times* when they reviewed the 960 EVO drive. The access times on modern SSDs are already so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from each other, and a non-factor in their performance.

That's not to say NVMe drives aren't faster - they are and the differences are measurable for sure. They just aren't as big a deal and are *not* the second coming of the revelation that was the replacing of mechanical drives with SSDs.​

If you are buying a SSD anyways, feel free to grab one of the NVME drives, especially if they're price competitive. If you've already got a competent SATA SSD that's big enough, don't expect a huge perceived difference in performance from a straight upgrade.
 
sinisterDei said:
I may be too late for this, but the M.2 NVME slot on your motherboard is PCIe 3.0 x4, which is full speed.

With that said, I've typed this next bit up before so I'm going to post it here again:

Additionally, and I've said this before in other threads, the point of diminishing returns has easily been hit in terms of drive speed for consumer use. A huge bulk of the perceived speed increase in SSDs came from a reduction in access times versus conventional hard drives, not from the actual transfer time of data. Modern, SATA SSDs are 4-5x faster than modern 7200 RPM HDDs (550+ MB/s vs 150 MB/s), but they are orders of magnitude faster in their access times (an 850 Pro is 0.04 ms access time, whereas modern HGST 7200 RPM drives are in the 12 MS range, or 300x slower). The incredible reduction in seek time is what truly fueled the "life changing" experience of SSDs, since data from all across the drive was seemingly instantly accessible rather than having to wait on the drive to physically spin itself around to get data from different parts of the disk.

Moving to modern NVMe SSDs is a huge increase in the first metric - 2 GB/s instead of 550 MB/s - but that performance increase is *not* reflected in their access times. This is hammered home to me in the fact that Storagereview, one of my favorite websites for truly in-depth reviews of storage infrastructure, *didn't even bother testing access times* when they reviewed the 960 EVO drive. The access times on modern SSDs are already so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from each other, and a non-factor in their performance.

That's not to say NVMe drives aren't faster - they are and the differences are measurable for sure. They just aren't as big a deal and are *not* the second coming of the revelation that was the replacing of mechanical drives with SSDs.​

If you are buying a SSD anyways, feel free to grab one of the NVME drives, especially if they're price competitive. If you've already got a competent SATA SSD that's big enough, don't expect a huge perceived difference in performance from a straight upgrade.
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Thanks. That's what I generally figured. About the only area where I thought it might make a difference was boot up, patching and installs. Those are really the only time I'm sitting around and even boot time isn't really a big deal.

I guess 'll hold off on this one. It's not like the prices aren't going to go down over time (well assuming tariffs aren't too bad on these devices).
 
+1 to what sinisterDei posted. You're not going to see any gain going from a SATA to NVMe for your typical desktop/office/internet/gaming usage.

Something that I've referenced many times: Tech Report regularly tests real-world boot/load times for SSD reviews. Typical benefits of NVMe range from zilch to "I looked away for a second".

SATA SSD prices have been crashing lately. 1 TB 860 Evos and comparable drives are going for ~$160. That's about half what a like-capacity 970 Evo would cost. If you need a new drive, I'd consider looking there.
 
Yep. Slickdeals has a 1TB 860 EVO for $158 right now. As someone with a 2TB SSD for booting Windows (it's 2x 850 EVOs in RAID 0, not for performance reasons but capacity) I can tell you that *capacity* on your SSD is the way to go. Having a large enough one you don't have to think "should i install this on my SSD or my HDD?" each time you do an install is super nice. Booting Windows 5 seconds faster, less nice.
 
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