NVMe vs SATA SSDs

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"I don't find any significant difference between these two in gaming, be it fps or load times. There was a slight difference when working with editing tools like vegas, premiere i.e. the response time was better with nvme when scrubbing through video files."

Exactly... I don't play games!
MSI z390, i7 9700k OC, Noctua Cooling, NVMe 970 Pro, 64GB 3200C16, BeQuiet PSU, W10, Cubase 10, Avenger, Spire, Nexus, iZotope, Virus TI (INTERGRATED), Yamaha CS2x (Custom Mapped).

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mitchiemasha wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 5:44 pm "I don't find any significant difference between these two in gaming, be it fps or load times. There was a slight difference when working with editing tools like vegas, premiere i.e. the response time was better with nvme when scrubbing through video files."

Exactly... I don't play games!
Be it audio or games all your SSD does is writing and reading files, games do it very intensively, DAWs do not. Video gets "a slight difference" simply cause high definition video files are huge. Audio files are not huge, even if they were, "slight difference".

You should think or research by yourself instead of having blind faith.

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BananaJoe wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 12:56 pm double of the cost.
Perhaps 2 years ago.

Pro 970 NVMe 512 £158... (1TB 314).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-V-NAND ... sd+pro+970

Pro 850 SATA 512 £202... (1TB £331).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-inch-S ... %3ASamsung

Pro 860 SATA 512 £138... (1TB £255).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Solid- ... %3ASamsung
MSI z390, i7 9700k OC, Noctua Cooling, NVMe 970 Pro, 64GB 3200C16, BeQuiet PSU, W10, Cubase 10, Avenger, Spire, Nexus, iZotope, Virus TI (INTERGRATED), Yamaha CS2x (Custom Mapped).

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BananaJoe wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 5:57 pm You should think or research by yourself instead of having blind faith.
I did a lot of research. I was upgrading from old 7200 Sata 3 in RAID 0. I used to leave my PC turned on boot times were that annoying, not any more. If I had the 850/860 already I wouldn't of changed to NVMe when I upgraded my CPU/MB. I bought the 512 970 PRO, the price was very good.
Last edited by mitchiemasha on Tue Jan 29, 2019 6:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
MSI z390, i7 9700k OC, Noctua Cooling, NVMe 970 Pro, 64GB 3200C16, BeQuiet PSU, W10, Cubase 10, Avenger, Spire, Nexus, iZotope, Virus TI (INTERGRATED), Yamaha CS2x (Custom Mapped).

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mitchiemasha wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 6:27 pm
BananaJoe wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 12:56 pm double of the cost.
Perhaps 2 years ago.

Pro 970 NVMe 512 £158... (1TB 314).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-V-NAND ... sd+pro+970

Pro 850 SATA 512 £202... (1TB £331).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-inch-S ... %3ASamsung

Pro 860 SATA 512 £138... (1TB £255).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Solid- ... %3ASamsung

Possibly right about the price but it changed this year https://www.extremetech.com/computing/2 ... se-in-2019

The performance did not change.

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BananaJoe wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 6:46 pm The performance did not change.
The performance did change. The issue you initially mentioned was more a thing on the earlier models. As shown in the links i provided. The 970 Pro is a lot better.
MSI z390, i7 9700k OC, Noctua Cooling, NVMe 970 Pro, 64GB 3200C16, BeQuiet PSU, W10, Cubase 10, Avenger, Spire, Nexus, iZotope, Virus TI (INTERGRATED), Yamaha CS2x (Custom Mapped).

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mitchiemasha wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 7:04 pm
BananaJoe wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 6:46 pm The performance did not change.
The performance did change. The issue you initially mentioned was more a thing on the earlier models. As shown in the links i provided. The 970 Pro is a lot better.
It is not a thing of early models. Advertised NVMe PCI-e speed is actually the speed of PCI-e lanes, not the the speed of the SSD. You will see improvements over the next years in real world performance, there is a lot to overcome including heat. SATA is a dead end technology(already reaching its limits) while NVMe has a lot of room for improvement but for for now nothing changed much in real world usage and i would not expect it to change any time soon, not even CPU manufacturers are being able to overcome the heat issue. With price drops i still think it is a bad deal due to other disadvantages not related to price.

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One good thing did actually come from all this...

Because everything worked once I flashed my BIOS and I was too busy messing about with OC and fan settings, I completely forgot about Samsungs Utility and Driver, it totally slipped my mind. Watching a few videos to recheck my facts for here and there it was, pure snapped back in to memory.

Now my PC is even faster. Thank you!!! It loads that quick I don't even get to see that nice windows landscape graphic. Previously it flashed on screen for a second. This thing is insanely fast. And, I've got fast boot turned off (I'm still going in the BIOS).

I'll be sticking with my original statement.
mitchiemasha wrote: Mon Jan 28, 2019 9:04 pm Throttling, whilst there is some truth to the issue, it's not one.
BananaJoe wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 7:35 pmIt is not a thing of early models.
That makes no sense! so now the earlier models are fine but the newer models aren't!
MSI z390, i7 9700k OC, Noctua Cooling, NVMe 970 Pro, 64GB 3200C16, BeQuiet PSU, W10, Cubase 10, Avenger, Spire, Nexus, iZotope, Virus TI (INTERGRATED), Yamaha CS2x (Custom Mapped).

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NVMe SSDs are faster than normal SATA ones. 970 evo has has about 3500mbps read write speed where as 860 evo has around 500mbps read and write.

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Basic advantage of a solid state drive is to avoid mechanical drive movements (seek time) though, so with an old tech SATA SSD you have that covered.
~stratum~

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BananaJoe wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 5:57 pm Be it audio or games all your SSD does is writing and reading files, games do it very intensively, DAWs do not. Video gets "a slight difference" simply cause high definition video files are huge. Audio files are not huge, even if they were, "slight difference".

You should think or research by yourself instead of having blind faith.
Loading a multi GB sample library like Galaxy Drums from an internal SATA SSD drive is painfully slow, not just because the drive is slow, but also because it's not about loading 3 files of 1GB size each, but rather thousands of little files. They all need to be requested, looked up, fetched, provided, transferred, received, stored, indexed. If the drive (incl. its controller) is slow, you can wait minutes for Galaxy Drums to load. With a faster drive with faster cells with a faster controller with a faster bus, it takes mere seconds. And that's just a single drum library, things get a lot uglier if possibly a scoring project contains a multitude of heavyweight sample libraries. I know, I know, Kontakt will only pre-load partial files and then stream from disk later. But it doesn't matter if it only pre-loads a single Byte of each sample, the sample files still need to be requested, looked up, fetched, provided... etc. Possibly even decompressed and decrypted if in a monolith file. And later when the samples are played, the not pre-loaded parts have to be requested, looked up, fetched, provided, etc. yet again.

So obviously, if you load two rendered 44.1 kHz mp3 backing tracks from your drive so you can rap over them, you won't need an NVMe drive for that. But if you work with larger project at decent sample rates, with either lots of small samples or many long tracks (like actual music with microphones, recorded drums, guitars, vocals, etc.), a fast NVMe drive can be a huge time saver and noticeable performance improvement.

Looks like maybe you should have done some research yourself.
BananaJoe wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 7:35 pm Advertised NVMe PCI-e speed is actually the speed of PCI-e lanes, not the the speed of the SSD.
Nonsense, at least as a generic statement. Advertised speeds vary between manufacturers and models.
DarkERA wrote: Wed Jan 30, 2019 6:41 pm NVMe SSDs are faster than normal SATA ones. 970 evo has has about 3500mbps read write speed where as 860 evo has around 500mbps read and write.
Careful about such statements. Advertisers being advertisers, the mentioned speeds will be the maximum speeds reached usually by only the largest models of a line. If it says somewhere "up to 3500 MB/s", then that's probably only for the 1TB or 2TB model, and only under certain conditions. But the 250GB model will probably only have 600-800 MB/s, or something along those lines. Fast enough, but not much of an improvement over regular SATA drives.
keyman_sam wrote: Sun Jan 13, 2019 6:29 pm How can you hook up a NVMe to an iMac or Mac mini without spending $300 on an enclosure? Any reliable enclosures that are cheap and do the job just fine?
You really can't, unfortunately. There are some Thunderbolt 3 compatible 1-slot USB3.1/USB-C enclosures by companies like Intenso, but they are still quite expensive (I think around 200€) and probably don't provide full PCIe X4 speed for the drive, so forget it. You'll have to spend money, but if you spend it wisely (and if the market for Thunderbolt 3 NVMe enclosures finally gets a few more competitors) it will be worth it. If you don't want to spend the necessary cash, or can't, then you might just as well get a regular SATA drive in a USB-C case.

If you're considering NVMe drives in an external Thunderbolt/USB3-C enclosure: always make sure that the enclosure can provide a full x4 PCIe lane per NVMe slot, otherwise you will not be able to max out the transfer speed! I made the mistake of getting an OWC 4M2 case that only provides PCIe x1 per NVMe slot, so essentially the case will not be able to provide any transfer speeds above the regular ~ 600 MB/s per drive, at least not without a software RAID. So in that specific enclosure, NVMe drives are of absolutely zero value, I could just as well fill it up with lame regular non-NVMe M.2 drives at SATA speeds and get the same results.
Confucamus.

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Any thoughts about this combo on Amazon - a $199 2TB NVMe SSD and a $49.95 T3 enclosure (for use with a late 2018 T3 Mac Mini)?

Intel 660p M.2 2280 2TB NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDPEKNW020T8X1
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07GCLLKDC/ ... _lig_dp_it (https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07GCLLKDC/?coliid=I32VWDDO22WA74&colid=38CONVJNXV8W8&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it)

Plugable USB C to M.2 NVMe Tool-free Enclosure USB C and Thunderbolt 3 Compatible up to USB 3.1 Gen 2 Speeds (10Gbps). Adapter Includes USB-C and USB 3.0 Cables (Supports M.2 NVMe SSDs 2280 2260 2242)
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07N48N5GR/ ... _lig_dp_it (https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07N48N5GR/?coliid=I2JGK6RGC6U9L7&colid=38CONVJNXV8W8&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it)

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Should work, the 660's are one of the newer budget models that tend to be higher capacity with far lower read/writes than the class leaders but ultimately cheap for what it is in comparison to the rest of the market.

I've been using them as cheaper back-up drives for a while now and I would imagine they'd make pretty decent portable drives.

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Rockatansky wrote: Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:02 am If you're considering NVMe drives in an external Thunderbolt/USB3-C enclosure: always make sure that the enclosure can provide a full x4 PCIe lane per NVMe slot, otherwise you will not be able to max out the transfer speed! I made the mistake of getting an OWC 4M2 case that only provides PCIe x1 per NVMe slot, so essentially the case will not be able to provide any transfer speeds above the regular ~ 600 MB/s per drive, at least not without a software RAID. So in that specific enclosure, NVMe drives are of absolutely zero value, I could just as well fill it up with lame regular non-NVMe M.2 drives at SATA speeds and get the same results.
Thank you! Very important to know this.

I'm thinking about to improve my equipment in the next months and one of the things that I’m trying to decide is if I should still go for Sata SSDs or it’s already a good moment to go for NVMe SSDs.

My computer is an iMac, so I can only go for Thunderbolt 3 enclosures.

I would like to achieve 8 TB of SSDs which is a lot of space (and a lot of money). But today, the difference at this high capacities is not so big as some months/years before.

At this moment in my country, a 8 TB SATA configuration with a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure like the OWC Thunderbay Mini (262 €, already difficult to find in my country) and four Samsung 860 EVO SSD 2 TB (278 € each) costs a total of 1.374 €.

An alternative 8 TB configuration with NVMe drives and also a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure like the OWC Express 4M2 (298,49 €) with four ADATA XPG SX8200 PRO 2 TB (252 € each) costs a total of 1306,49 €. Yes, cheaper than the SATA configuration.

I know that I’m comparing ADATA vs SAMSUNG. Samsung is a reference, considered probably the best SSDs at this moment. But ADATA has very good reviews and very good performing tests, so although is not Samsung, I think it’s a very good and recomendable NVMe drive. And this means that I can get a 8 TB NVMe configuration cheaper than the same capacity in SATA configuration, at least when talking about disks into Thunderbolt enclosures.

Taking in consideration the limits of the OWC Express 4M2, maybe should be interesting to configure it in Raid 0 (always having a backup of the samples in another HDD to restore everything if one SSD fails). Anyway, other alternatives like the OWC Thunderblade 8TB (2.265 €, about 1.000 € more), considered probably one of the fastest external storages at this moment, already comes preconfigured in Raid 0 to achieve the fastest speeds possible.

Another option that I have discovered recently and maybe better alternative than the OWC Express 4M2 is the Netstor NA622TB3. Also a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with 4 PCIe slots for 4 NVMe SSDs, but in this case is PCIe x2 per slot, so disks should be able to transfer data at double speed than the OWC in a non raid configuration. But what I like the most about the NA622TB3 is that its fan has 3 different speeds with which I hope it will be quieter than the OWC 4M2, considered very noisy by those who have it and something really annoying for us that we want to use it for music.

In this case, the same 8 TB NVME configuration, with the four XPG SX8200 PRO 2 TB (252 € each) but the Netstor NA622TB3 (about 495 €) instead of the OWC Express 4M2, costs a total of 1.500 €. This is 200 € more than the configuration with the OWC, but maybe worth it if it’s really quiet and can handle double speed without Raid. In Raid mode, I think they should achieve near the same.

So, at this moment I’m not sure what to do. For a very similar price it seems I can go for NVMe. SATA probably is more than enough now for my purposes and maybe I will not notice a big improvement with NVMe drives, although I usually work with large orchestral templates that takes some minutes to load and I suppose they will load faster with NVMe drives. I’m also taking in consideration that maybe the software will improve in the next months/years to get advantage of the NVMe drives, that are undeniably the future, and maybe then the difference will be more evident.

The price will increase a lot if I only consider NMVe Samsung disks, but opting for those ADATA, the price is very, very similar to a SATA SSD configuration.

What you think? NMVe or not NMVe?

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BananaJoe wrote: Sun Jan 13, 2019 3:27 pm You only see a difference if you completely run out of RAM memory as the dump to virtual memory will be much faster but still slow.

NMVMe requires dedicated cooling to work properly under heavy load, standard SSDs do not.
NVMe only advantage is saving space, it is designed for laptops and other forms of small form factor computers. And by the time you add proper cooling to the NVMe SSD you lose this advantage.
Jesus f**k, what a bullshit :o
And then he doesn't stop... not sure if trolling, or just very stupid.

So, to put things straight:

NVMe drives use very fast PCIe lines just like GPUs and other peripherals, while SATA SSDs are limited to SATA speed. SATA is limited to less than 600 MB/s, while PCIe 3.0 4x achieves almost 3500 MB's on paper (actual result often depends on price). New PCIe 4.0 is twice a fast, but that's likely and overkill for music production.

Now, what does benefit from it?

- Everything that takes significant time to load, such as DAWs itself, projects and sample libraries.
- Operating system and various programs that you launch every now and then.
- Copying large files. Not that important for audio usually, more for video / renders.
- Computer game files are often single compressed archives, meaning they are not limited by drive speed as much as by CPU decompression speed. Either way, you only load resources once and not stream them constantly (though next gen console are about to change that).

NVMe in general consume less power than SATA drives. Either way, SSDs often need only few watts of power, so they don't heat up much - unless under heavy stress. But that's not common for audio, you only load and save files from time to time.

Unfortunatelly, due to their principle of operation SSDs always have limited lifecycle and therefore are not recommended as permanent data storage.
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