New 960 Evo 500GB - is this good?

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Wag

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 29, 2006
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Seems a bit slow compared to other benches I've seen. This is on a MSI X99A SLI Plus, 5820k @ 4.3GHz, 980Ti. Seems like especially the Seq read is too slow. I have the Samsung NVME drivers installed.

I migrated Win10 install over from my previous boot drive- should I try a clean install?
 
It's utter crap.

No, it's just fine. Honestly, unless you use the NVME for database work, video editing, or other non-gaming tasks and non-general use tasks you're not going to notice a damn bit of difference.

Average Joe gamer/user sees no almost no benefit from the fastest NVME drives.
 
Well, I know it's good relatively speaking, but compared to most of the other 960 Evo scores I've seen it's slow- especially the Seq read speed.

I'm wondering why?
 
I did a fresh install and was able to bring my scores up a bit. I guess it depends on the motherboard you're running too.
 
Wag said:
I did a fresh install and was able to bring my scores up a bit. I guess it depends on the motherboard you're running too.
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And the software (to include the OS used), drivers, and programs currently accessing the drive affect performance as well. A million and one different things affect benchmarks. That isn't even counting the hardware side of things.

And in the end getting 10%, even 50%, more sequential read / write speed won't help you as much as when you upgraded from a standard spinning hard drive to your first SATA III based SSD. It's all about that access time (which is functionally no better with NVME), along with an antiquated file system (NTFS), and how programs load with low queue depths, that all equate to almost no difference for the average gamer/user when going from a SATA III SSD to a NVME drive.

Yet it is nice to fluff the ole E-peen. Even I'm guilty of it :ROFLMAO: Then I did the benchmarks and found sites that benchmarked the differences.... Yeah, sad day.

It really is a numbers game. Say, as an example, Fallout 4 takes ~48 seconds to load on a single spinning drive, and on a SATA III SSD (with its FAST access times) the game takes just 6.8 seconds to load. A NVME drive that is up to 6X as fast does not load the game 6X faster (which would be around, what, 1 second? (I am terrible at math)). Fallout 4 actually loads in about 6.7 seconds compared to the 6.8 seconds that a good SATA III SSD can manage. Hence the other limitations that we currently face (file system, other hardware limitations, games/programs not written for deep queue depths, etc.).

THAT is why I say that it doesn't matter unless you use the drive for real work - databases, video editing, constant virus scanning (AHAHAHA!), transferring files to other media that can keep up, and other tasks that can make use of the the insane queue depth performance and sequential read/write speeds that NVME offers.
 
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Only difference I can see in every day use is that it boots faster into Windows (<10 secs as opposed to 15 or so before).

It takes longer for my PC to post than it does to boot into Win 10 now.
 
Wag said:
Only difference I can see in every day use is that it boots faster into Windows (<10 secs as opposed to 15 or so before).

It takes longer for my PC to post than it does to boot into Win 10 now.
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Did your old drive support TRIM? That can make quite the difference over time if it did not.
 
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