m.2 SSD on Asus Hero Z97, input needed

XanderTheGoober

XanderTheGoober

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Oct 15, 2014
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I have never been much for in depth introductions so here's my issue.
I want more SSD storage on my pc and I am thinking of going m.2 PCIE ssd such as a 960 samsung 500gb. I currently only have a 250GB samsung 850 evo sata ssd.
here is the system specs:

cpu: i7 4770k @4.0ghz
ram: 16GB gskill 186mhz ddr3
motherboard: Asus Z970 Hero LGA 1150
gpu1: msi gtx 1070 8gb
gpu2: msi gtx 650ti 1GB (for aux displays)

I am running an additional nvidia card to run aux displays due to the intel onboard graphics being very slow to alt+tab while I am in a full screen game. we're talking 10+ seconds vs 1 second while running all monitors off of nvidia cards. I use all the outputs available on both cards to run 7 monitors, yes i know it's overkill and no I don't care. for those of you that are curious here's an image of my setup.

LIjncxL.jpg



So back to the core issue, I want faster and more ssd capacity in my system and I do plan on upgrading the system in the next 1 to 2 years. I want to go with an m.2 ssd as pcie will be faster than a single sata ssd. I know the m.2 on this board was when the technology for m.2 pcie was still rather young so the throughput tops out at 1250MB/s or something along those lines. with that said it would only be rivaled by putting 2 ssds in raid 0, which would still require me purchasing an additional ssd.
My first question is with only 16 pcie lanes on the chip and having 2 cards in the system will I have to manually set the secondary 650ti to 4x pcie to have enough available lanes for the ssd?
second question: does it make sense to go with an m.2 pcie 3.0 4x with the intent of upgrading the whole system down the road and migrating the ssd to the new system to improve speeds from 1250MB/s to 3000+Mb/s?

with the 9th gen coming out very soon it is a gray area of what cpu will be best going forward (i7 9700 or 8700k) as I game and stream and the system overall is starting to feel a bit on the sluggish side when i am trying to stream gameplay, and then watch back the stream for monitoring purposes, and then the playback lags off of twitch. This could be a limitation of the ethernet itself but you would think uploading at 4mb/s and downloading at 5mb/s wouldn't be a problem as I should have plenty of headroom with a gigabit ethernet port, and a full gigabit network. to monitor my stream from twitch i usually have to fire up my laptop which is kinda inconvenient, especially since i have plenty of monitor real estate on the desktop as it is. Sorry for getting slightly side tracked but I thought I would express the reasons for wanting to upgrade in case anyone wants to know.

Let me know your thoughts on the situation. Thanks!

-Xander
 
There's a dedicated 4 PCIe lanes for the chipset, s you have twenty total. Unfortunately for Haswell, those 4 lanes run at pcie 2.0 speeds, so half theoretical bandwidth for that 4x nvme SSD.

But you probably won't notice the difference between 8Gb/s NVMe (it's limited to 2 lanes) and 6Gbps SATA, so there's not much point in grabbing such a fast drive. You should just upgrade to a larger 860 PRo.

But you really need to share what you use the SSD for, so we can figure out if you really need the storage speed or you just need something bigger.
 
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I have my OS and most played games on there. want more storage as I have been cleaning up my OS every month or so just to keep the free space at a reasonable amount above 15GB free.
I am also looking for faster boot times. My buddy was running 2 sammy SSDs in raid 0 and his computer boots up significantly faster and games seem to launch faster as well.
also as stated if I am upgrading to a board soonish that is not limited to 2x pcie lanes on the m.2 slot wouldn't it make sense to grab the fast nvme drive even if it will be handicapped until i upgrade? it will still be faster than a single sata ssd.

also the m.2 running at pci 2.0 speeds is what limits the bandwidth to 1250Mb/s if i recall from another forum i ran across regarding running the m.2 ssd on this particular board.
 
His PC booting significantly faster will likely not be fixed with an NVMe bootdrive, also what is significatly? 2-3 sec? SSD's on win 10 on fastboot should get you started in 15 sec orso.

Games loading faster is also not that likely as a lot of the waiting is more on the CPU unpacking the data then loading it from the disk, but this may depend also somewhat on the game and how it's optimised.

But if you are going to keep using it after an upgrade I don't see a reason not to get it, just don't expect miracles HDD to SSD is great, SSD to NVMe is a lot less noticable.
 
Larger drives tend to have better performance, because you add more chips to address. A 265GB 850 EVO ssd is really going to castrate the performance.
 
defaultluser said:
Larger drives tend to have better performance, because you add more chips to address. A 265GB 850 EVO ssd is really going to castrate the performance.
Click to expand...
makes sense to me, 1 of a few reasons my buddie's pc boots and performs faster would be because he has 2X 500GB sammy ssds in raid 0 and I am running an almost full 250gb 850 evo.
I am reaching out to him to get some timed boot times for comparison to get a real world number.
 
boot times also depend on the motherboard BIOS (some take much longer to hand-off the boot process to Windows). So if you don'y have the same motherboard, then that could ne the big difference maker.

Once you get to the Windows load screen, you probably won't have any difference in boot time past that. That's the timing you should use to evaluate your SSD's boot.
 
Well my buddy got back to me with his boot times. 22 seconds from power button press to password prompt. He disabled fast startup and he got 52 seconds from power button press to password prompt. I will try to get around to testing my boot times tonight to compare.
 
I tested my boot time only with fast boot enabled and was about 5 seconds slower than my buddy. now the next thing I want to compare with his PC are game loading times with the same title.
at this point I am leaning more towards just getting a second 2.5 ssd for my most used steam games. could even be a cheaper brand like adata.
 
I think you should save your money and get another monitor. :p (JK Nice setup)

The Samsung EVO M.2 drives are not that expensive and the R/W time is less but not significantly less than the Pro drives. Unless you are just looking to squeeze every bit per second out of your system. Save the cash.

But to be honest...

defaultluser said:
There's a dedicated 4 PCIe lanes for the chipset, s you have twenty total. Unfortunately for Haswell, those 4 lanes run at pcie 2.0 speeds, so half theoretical bandwidth for that 4x nvme SSD.

But you probably won't notice the difference between 8Gb/s NVMe (it's limited to 2 lanes) and 6Gbps SATA, so there's not much point in grabbing such a fast drive. You should just upgrade to a larger 860 PRo.

But you really need to share what you use the SSD for, so we can figure out if you really need the storage speed or you just need something bigger.
Click to expand...

#this

If it were me...and I have no clue what your budget looks like...I'd be looking to upgrade my CPU to something with more and faster PCI-E support. Then come back and revisit the M.2 storage.
 
AngeloBJ said:
I think you should save your money and get another monitor. :p (JK Nice setup)

The Samsung EVO M.2 drives are not that expensive and the R/W time is less but not significantly less than the Pro drives. Unless you are just looking to squeeze every bit per second out of your system. Save the cash.

But to be honest...



#this

If it were me...and I have no clue what your budget looks like...I'd be looking to upgrade my CPU to something with more and faster PCI-E support. Then come back and revisit the M.2 storage.
Click to expand...


As of right now my PC upgrades are on hold due to car repairs. also I am not terribly impressed with 9000 series thus far but still waiting on benchmarks. as of right now my plan is to wait for the next generation of intel cpus that come with the die shrink to have hopefully fair improvements in ipc over their current offerings. The other side of that coin would be if I find a good deal on a used 8700k system I may jump at that as I will likely be waiting 1+ years for the next intel cpu.
to satisfy my upgrade itch i am likely just upgrading to a larger SSD as a games drive.
 
go figure, as soon as I have car repairs to do I find a deal on some hardware. I couldn't help myself but re-distribute some funds to go for an upgrade as I noticed just how hard my 4770k was working trying to keep 144fps going. even without streaming it was pegged at 100% while in rainbow 6 siege.
So i found a user on another forum with an i7 7700k delidded and re-sealed, asus strix atx motherboard, and 16 gb of ram for $365, with that i bought a new case and 500GB SATA SSD as a 500gb m.2 Pcie nvme ssd would be twice the price and I am already taking a hit in the wallet real good with this upgrade. so overall I am getting a new PC save for the cpu cooler, PSU, GPU, and some drives.
Thanks all for the input and putting my bonehead idea of getting a nvme ssd to rest for now. in the future the benefits of nvme may be much greater than they are currently so i may get one then.

-Xander
 
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