Purchasing my first NVME Inland 256GB

[alf717]

Inland 256GB

I'd like to use this as an OS drive for Windows 10 and swap in game data for games I plan on playing for faster load times. I've primary used spinning drives this whole time and was looking for something to help with load times in games. My main rig uses the Gigabyte B450 Aorus M so I'm pretty sure I have all I need to use this drive. This is a first for me so I'm just seeking some info and tips on what I should be watching out for when setting up an NVME.

 

[Dan_D]

You'll be disappointed. Games don't really see that much benefit from SSD's. The loads are sequential and that's a best case type of scenario for a traditional spinning disk. Your talking about a few seconds in most cases. I've timed it with some games and found the difference to be minute at best. 256GB isn't going to work very well for the OS and games. You'll be constantly deleting and downloading games. Unless you have Gigabit internet, this is going to get frustrating. I'd spend more and get the Inland 1TB model. That's large enough for both. Even then, I've got a 1.2TB NVMe SSD for games and it goes more quickly than you'd think.

 

[alf717]

Thanks for the info. In that case I can stick with the HDD for most games. I'm not too concerned with game load times. I was just thinking that it would be nice to get into games like GTA V and the more modern Assassin's Creed titles quicker. Granted I tend to junk up my desktop I was planning to pay the difference for the 512GB version. I just like having smaller space sized drives for OS and Office and then junk up the other two HDDs with data and games. I was impressed when I saw comparison videos of boot times and felt it was time to get with the new tech.

 

[Dan_D]

For the OS, NVMe SSD's are nice. Also keep in mind that the larger drives tend to be faster than the smaller ones.

 

[drescherjm]

I would not purchase a drive smaller than 5XX GB.

 

[Exercate]

I would not purchase a drive smaller than 5XX GB.

Just curious as to why? Is it mostly to current pricing? My 4 yr. old SSD (256 GB) has 193 GB free. It's a "good" Samsung, and I run trim about 8 to 10 times a year.

 

[Sulphademus]

Just curious as to why? Is it mostly to current pricing? My 4 yr. old SSD (256 GB) has 193 GB free. It's a "good" Samsung, and I run trim about 8 to 10 times a year.

The larger the drive the more chips it is using for storage, the more chips the more the controller can do parallel reads/writes.

 

[drescherjm]

Well for me I probably have a 1/2 dozen small SSDs like that sitting on a shelf collecting dust.

But anyways small SSDs are usually considerably slower than larger SSDs.

 

[Dan_D]

Just curious as to why? Is it mostly to current pricing? My 4 yr. old SSD (256 GB) has 193 GB free. It's a "good" Samsung, and I run trim about 8 to 10 times a year.

I don't limit mine to the OS only. I normally allow programs to be installed on it aside from games. Plug-ins and scratch disks for things like Photoshop go on other volumes as well. I had 500GB in two SSD's and had consumed probably close to 60% of that. I've since upgraded to a 1TB Inland for the OS.

 

[westrock2000]

Thanks for the info. In that case I can stick with the HDD for most games. I'm not too concerned with game load times. I was just thinking that it would be nice to get into games like GTA V and the more modern Assassin's Creed titles quicker. Granted I tend to junk up my desktop I was planning to pay the difference for the 512GB version. I just like having smaller space sized drives for OS and Office and then junk up the other two HDDs with data and games. I was impressed when I saw comparison videos of boot times and felt it was time to get with the new tech.

I still think games on an SSD is a good choice. You don't need 1000MB/s, but being able to load ANY file at ANY time at more than 50MB/s does make a better overall experience. It's those little files, or pieces of files that get loaded constantly while playing that make the difference.

Here is the solution I have come up with for the "Game" drive. I use Windows 10 Storage Spaces and make a Simple (No Resilincy) pool. This is like a "concatenate" or JBOD pool on traditional RAID. It groups the harddrives together into a pool that is the sum of all the drives combined, but the data is not expressly stripped across the drives. It is spread out across the drives, but only to keep all the drives and similar capacity usage.

So the downside is that your bandwidth is usually only a little bit faster than using 1 drive. But the upside is that data can be moved around very easily which means the physical drives can be moved around easily.

You must start with 2 drives. But then you can add a 3rd drive, or 4th drive. And once you add a 3rd drive or more, you can remove one of the previous drives.

The pool on the main game system started as a 256GB SSD and a 160GB Intel G2. Then I added another 256GB and removed the Intel since it's slow by modern SSD standards. But, I am able to spend $50 to $100 a year and the pool slowly grows as cost of storage drops and I'm getting newer hardware as time goes by.

Start: 160GB + 256GB = 416GB total (160+256)
Year 2: Replace 160GB with a 256GB = 512GB total (256+256)
Year 3: Replace a 256GB with a 512GB = 768GB total (256 + 512)
Year 4: Replace a 256GB with 1024GB = 1.5TB total (512 + 1024)

Plus, since it's an official Windows filesystem, you can put it in a new system and Windows will recognize and mount the pool with no problems. I have been able to build new systems and take the Storage Space pool to the new system with no problems. Much better track record than motherboard or hardware RAID's I have had experience with.

 

[Maxx]

The larger the drive the more chips it is using for storage, the more chips the more the controller can do parallel reads/writes.

Yep. The Inland Premium uses the Phison E12 which is an 8-channel, 4-CE/channel drive (up to 32 CEs). You want to hit at least 2 CEs per channel so the controller can switch dies which with 256Gb NAND means 16 * 32GiB = 512GiB (512GB SKU) minimum. For best write and IOPS performance you want to saturate the controller, which is 32 * 32GiB (1TiB or 1TB SKU). At 2TB these drives double dies per CE which actually reduces performance a bit.

 

[Maxx]

Just curious as to why? Is it mostly to current pricing? My 4 yr. old SSD (256 GB) has 193 GB free. It's a "good" Samsung, and I run trim about 8 to 10 times a year.

The 840 Pro is MLC-based and uses Samsung's 2D/planar NAND with the MDX controller (the tri-core ancestor, ARM-R4 @ 300 Mhz versus the 860 EVO's ARM-R5 @ 500 MHz), which is likewise an 8-channel design. Samsung's 2D MLC is not particularly dense (generally, 64Gb or 8GiB/die) so there's no issue saturating the controller even with the 128GB SKU. It's still a solid drive. Samsung's 840 EVO suffered problems because it utilized TLC and had issues with stale data reducing performance from error correction, something they attempted to fix twice and solved on the second try with a firmware update; modern TLC drives all have static data refresh algorithms.

 

[Ranulfo]

You'll be disappointed. Games don't really see that much benefit from SSD's. The loads are sequential and that's a best case type of scenario for a traditional spinning disk. Your talking about a few seconds in most cases. I've timed it with some games and found the difference to be minute at best.

Were you talking about nvme vs sata ssd Dan?

If not, my experience is completely and utterly the opposite to this. In some games the ssd might shave off 15-30s, in others 1min+. Then there is GTA5 Online where I know a hdd will take 5+ minutes to load and ssds a mere 3-5mins. World of Warcraft was a 45s-1min time savings on ssd, especially if you're loading into a city. Open world games that load assets on the fly will do much much better with ssds over a hard drive.

 

[Dan_D]

Were you talking about nvme vs sata ssd Dan?

If not, my experience is completely and utterly the opposite to this. In some games the ssd might shave off 15-30s, in others 1min+. Then there is GTA5 Online where I know a hdd will take 5+ minutes to load and ssds a mere 3-5mins. World of Warcraft was a 45s-1min time savings on ssd, especially if you're loading into a city. Open world games that load assets on the fly will do much much better with ssds over a hard drive.

Yes, but there are plenty of games that load about the same via a mechanical hard drive as long as its a fast drive. I do all my game benches on the reviews via mechanical drives and they don't take much longer to load than the NVMe drives I use in my own system. Some games are better about this than others though.