Computers & Electronics

Pci-e SSD overkill?

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Dec 4, 2010
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OK, so nobody answered my question. I have a Dell 8300 XPS that only has ONE PCIE slot for the graphics card. Can I still use PCIe SSD or not?
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Supercooled wrote: OK, so nobody answered my question. I have a Dell 8300 XPS that only has ONE PCIE slot for the graphics card. Can I still use PCIe SSD or not?
Does it have a Sandy Bridge CPU? If so, you won't have an m.2 slot on your motherboard, as it was just introduced with the Haswell generation.

Chances are that even if you did have a spare PCI-E slot you would not be able to boot from a PCI-E NVMe SSD. This feature didn't become widely adopted till the Z97 and X99 chipsets.
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birthdaymonkey wrote: Does it have a Sandy Bridge CPU? If so, you won't have an m.2 slot on your motherboard, as it was just introduced with the Haswell generation.

Chances are that even if you did have a spare PCI-E slot you would not be able to boot from a PCI-E NVMe SSD. This feature didn't become widely adopted till the Z97 and X99 chipsets.
Even then most of the earlier versions are mapped to 1 or 2 PCI-E lanes (most Z97 is 10 Gigabit or 1250mb/s theoretical which is still fast but you'll be able to hit the ceiling) so while you'll get some boost you won't be able to see the maximum sequential on the latest drives like the Samsung 960 for unzipping of 36GB of files ;)

I would assume some of the improvement is also bypassing the SATA protocol/Drivers since NVMe will have it's own driver set.
Supercooled wrote: OK, so nobody answered my question. I have a Dell 8300 XPS that only has ONE PCIE slot for the graphics card. Can I still use PCIe SSD or not?
Not unless you like no GPU then and you'd have to add it via a PCI-E bridge card Grinning Face With Smiling Eyes
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Yep. Your only option to get a PCI-E SSD would be an upgrade to a Skylake or Kaby Lake CPU and motherboard, which would also require buying new RAM. An expensive proposition if you're happy with the performance of other aspects of your system. If you want the best performance possible, pick up a top SATA SSD like the Samsung 850 Pro or Sandisk Extreme Pro.
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birthdaymonkey wrote: Yep, it's kinda confusing. Most people talking about PCI-E drives are referring to M.2 PCI-E drives. Samsung doesn't even make consumer SSDs that you plug directly into a PCI-E slot. Intel does sell PCI-E boards for their 750-series, but those are even more expensive than the (generally faster) Samsung 950 and 960 products.

Some companies make M.2 drives but also sell them in a kit with an adapter so that you can plug them directly into a PCI-E slot (like this Plextor - if you popped off that heatsink you'd find an M.2 drive).

To make matters even more confusing, when PCI-E M.2 drives first started to hit the market (e.g. Samsung PM951), you could choose between the model that used the legacy SATA-related AHCI protocol or models that use the newer NVMe protocol. Today at least all the new models are moving to NVMe.
And manufacturers still add to the confusion:

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While I do like the placement better than wedged between 2 hot GPUs in SLI, but is it really necessary to make a dedicated DIMM slot that needs an adapter? I guess this is still evolving.
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joeyjoejoe wrote: And manufacturers still add to the confusion:

Image

While I do like the placement better than wedged between 2 hot GPUs in SLI, but is it really necessary to make a dedicated DIMM slot that needs an adapter? I guess this is still evolving.
I hadn't seen one of those before. What model(s) of motherboard does it go with?
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birthdaymonkey wrote: I hadn't seen one of those before. What model(s) of motherboard does it go with?
I saw it in news feeds from CES this year:

ASUS Maximus IX APEX

https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Motherboards ... S-IX-APEX/

Actually that adapter is kinda neat. You can add 2 M.2 NVMe dives to that adapter in the special DIMM slot and supports RAID. I do like that this is the coolest solution (in terms of temperature) for M.2 drives to date, but only 2 DIMM slots for your RAM is a dealer breaker. The type of customer (let's just call them "enthusiasts") who is looking to RAID a couple of M.2 NVMe drives is probably someone who doesn't want to be limited to just 32GB of RAM.
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joeyjoejoe wrote: Actually that adapter is kinda neat. You can add 2 M.2 NVMe dives to that adapter in the special DIMM slot and supports RAID. I do like that this is the coolest solution (in terms of temperature) for M.2 drives to date, but only 2 DIMM slots for your RAM is a dealer breaker. The type of customer (let's just call them "enthusiasts") who is looking to RAID a couple of M.2 NVMe drives is probably someone who doesn't want to be limited to just 32GB of RAM.
That's incredibly neat and incredibly stupid all at the same time.
I wonder if it's a technical limitation though. Maybe the NVMe is using the same channels RAM uses which usually have a limit in desktop CPUs.
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Nope. That's why I'm on the internet arguing with strangers. If I had anything better to do I'd probably be doing it.
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death_hawk wrote: That's incredibly neat and incredibly stupid all at the same time.
I wonder if it's a technical limitation though. Maybe the NVMe is using the same channels RAM uses which usually have a limit in desktop CPUs.
It's actually due to space limitation on that board, it's just a riser card. It's not connected to the memory controller and won't support RAM if you managed to somehow wedge one in.
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birthdaymonkey wrote:
I have not updated. Still running the December 2015 version. Let me run a CDM benchmark. Then I'll update later today and see if there's any change.

Here's the before:
Image

Will post the after with updated NVMe driver later.
Thanks man, appreciate it.

Supercooled wrote: OK, so nobody answered my question. I have a Dell 8300 XPS that only has ONE PCIE slot for the graphics card. Can I still use PCIe SSD or not?
No man, your chipset is too old. Just get a regular SATA III 2.5" SSD to replace your mechanical drive and call it a day. You will still hit speeds of upto* 500MB/s vs. that mechanical drive you have in there, and you will notice one hell of a difference. Just pick a storage size that is suitable for you and allocate your budget. Some good contenders right now are a Samsung 850 EVO or Crucial MX300.
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heyyahblah wrote: Thanks man, appreciate it.
Looks like I lost a bit of sequential read and gained a bit of sequential write with the newest Samsung 2.1 NVMe driver on a 256GB 950 Pro.

Image

In both cases the tests were run with about 40% free drive space.

In case anyone is curious, here are the benchmarks for a top-of-the-line SATA SSD (480GB Sandisk Extreme Pro... trades blows with the Samsung 850 Pro on performance metrics) on the same system with about 27% free space.

Image

Obviously, the sequential speeds are a lot slower, but the Sandisk does quite well on the random R/W tests. These are the numbers that really matter for a lot of real-world tasks, like booting an OS or opening applications.

BTW, these Sandisk Extreme Pros are great drives. Probably the best planar SATA MLC drives that ever have or will ever exist. I have one as a secondary drive in my main rig and one as the primary drive in my wife's computer. With the 10 year warranty and outstanding performance consistency I can't see myself ever selling them.
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birthdaymonkey wrote: Looks like I lost a bit of sequential read and gained a bit of sequential write with the newest Samsung 2.1 NVMe driver on a 256GB 950 Pro.

Image

In both cases the tests were run with about 40% free drive space.

In case anyone is curious, here are the benchmarks for a top-of-the-line SATA SSD (480GB Sandisk Extreme Pro... trades blows with the Samsung 850 Pro on performance metrics) on the same system with about 27% free space.

Image

Obviously, the sequential speeds are a lot slower, but the Sandisk does quite well on the random R/W tests. These are the numbers that really matter for a lot of real-world tasks, like booting an OS or opening applications.

BTW, these Sandisk Extreme Pros are great drives. Probably the best planar SATA MLC drives that ever have or will ever exist. I have one as a secondary drive in my main rig and one as the primary drive in my wife's computer. With the 10 year warranty and outstanding performance consistency I can't see myself ever selling them.
Thanks for the tests and the replies and post. So what are you going to do now? Are you going to ROLL BACK DRIVER? Or reboot/run, see how it does and check on it in a day or 2 if there are any improvements if any, or are you just planning on rolling back?

Yea the Sandisk Extreme Pro's were great drives. They are being phased out now as WD (Western Digital) has acquired SanDisk and they are now making their own line of SSD's. Right now they have 2.5" WD BLUE SSD's and regular M.2 WD BLUE SSD's. If they are using the same Sandisk controllers & NAND, that I cannot say for sure ATM there hasn't been that many reviews as they are still fairly new.

WD is supposed to be releasing on the 28th of FEB a new line of NVMe PCI-E SSD's in the M.2 format under the WD BLACK name with just your basic 5 year warranty on them. Right now its hard to tell on the pricing, but they are trying to be competitive of that vs the SATA SSD format.

On the Canadian side I am seeing: WD Black PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe M.2 2280 256GB Read:2050 Mb/s,Write: 800 MB/s SSD - $150 and the 512GB version at $270. IOPS of 170K/130K. Considering the speeds of for those prices its not too bad. Shame they didn't use MLC or a higher warranty. Just the standard 5 year. I want to see where WD is going with this as they are now technically WD-SANDISK SSD's if they are not cheaping out on the controller & NAND. That is what I want to know.

The WD Black PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe M.2 2280 256GB Read:2050 Mb/s,Write: 800 MB/s SSD is hitting the US market at just $109 USD. Pretty great price for American's for a boot drive, I tell you that much. If they will be any good, who knows. I am interested in seeing what will happen.

I've only seen a few reviews on the Corsair Force Series MP500 240GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD, ATTO Seq Read: 3,000MB/s, ATTO Seq Write: 2,400MB/s. MLC nand, that it tends to get a little hot, and one of the chips has a hot spot. Can't remember the review I read.
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Dec 4, 2010
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Dumb question but is there an SSD drive l that isn't much better than a mechanical drive? I'm currently accustomed to the performance of a fusion drive on fairly modern hardware so there are no bottlenecks except graphics. it's an imac and it's pretty well maxed out with 32gb of memory.

I have a couple of ocz ssds when they went on sale and threw them into my other Mac and it performance well but these are Sanforce from 5 years ago. hoe much has ssds progressed since then? I'm curious about the speed difference from say a 150$ SSD to a 500$ SSD. I'm looking at just 256gb.
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Mar 23, 2004
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Supercooled wrote: Dumb question but is there an SSD drive l that isn't much better than a mechanical drive?
There are some really poor bargain-basement TLC drives out there that can bog down at times to be as bad as an HDD; but, for the most part, SSDs are all leaps and bounds faster than HDDs.
Supercooled wrote: I have a couple of ocz ssds when they went on sale and threw them into my other Mac and it performance well but these are Sanforce from 5 years ago. hoe much has ssds progressed since then? I'm curious about the speed difference from say a 150$ SSD to a 500$ SSD. I'm looking at just 256gb.
SATA SSDs have not progressed all that much. Because SATA 6Gbps has been a bottle neck for solid-state storage for some time, the fact is SF-22xx drives from "way back then" are still fairly competitive with newer SATA drives. Yes they've gotten faster but nothing huge.

But then that's what this entire thread is about no? The move to m.2 and PCIe NVMe drives is where the large differences are starting to be seen. Here these drives are certainly much faster than your old Sandforce drives, yes. However they're basically only supported on newer hardware (essentially Z97 and later). While there is the idea that one could put a PCIe-slotted drive in any PC with a PCIe slot, the problem there is older BIOS won't let you boot from the drives (though they are usable otherwise). Also PCH-connected PCIe slots (and even m.2 slots) on Z97 and older boards have some degree of bottlenecking involved as DMI 2.0 does not have enough bandwidth for some of these drives' peak performance. Still that doesn't mean a PCH-connected m.2 slot on a Z97 board won't net you better-than-SATA performance with an NVMe drive--it will. It just won't give you as much performance as it would without a bottleneck. Kind of the same as if you connect a SATA 6Gbps drive to a 3 Gbps port--still fast but not as fast as it could be.

As an example, due to the Boxing Day sales I swapped my SATA m.2 drive for a NVMe Intel 600p on my Z97 board. TBH it's not really all that noticeable a speed difference. Of course I have two things going against me I suppose--one is the bandwidth limitation of my PCH-connected m.2 slot, the other is the fact that the 600p is not the speediest NVMe drive out there (but it was a lot cheaper than most of them). It's faster and it does boot up in a snap but I also didn't have a full secure-boot going on before either, so that could also have shaved a second or two off boot times along with the NVMe drive. NVMe is definitely the way to go if you don't mind paying the extra and have a newer motherboard for it. Otherwise, it's really not that big a deal IMO.

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