not impressed - nvme vs ssd

[inquisitor1]

so bought lexar sata ssd for 5600x pc. batch editing 4000 wedding images in acdsee pro , its a smidge faster then i7 6700 pc with firecuda 520 nvme. around the same or maybe 5% faster to my eyes. it batch processes sharpening at around 1 picture per second on both pc.

so I also reinstalled win10 on new lexar nm790 nvme on 5600x pc (1 week apart) tested again...not impressed. its not bad, but just the same. sharpening takes just under a sec and resizing is around 2-2.3 images per sec to my eyes. the same with sata and the same with nvme on i7 6700 pc. didnt expect much difference.

a lot of fluff hype and marketing bs for pc hardware. I love that I never fall for any of it. at least I got the ssd/nvme for good prices.

 

[Assimilator]

So because an NVMe SSD isn't many times faster than a SATA drive in one specific task, NVMe SSDs are "fluff hype and marketing bs" and you are the smartest man alive.

 

[dgianstefani]

It's likely you're CPU limited not storage limited.

 

[chrcoluk]

I get the OPs point.

Go from HDD to SSD, you feel the difference in many workloads, its night and day.
Go from SATA SSD to NVME, it will really shine in specific workloads, but outside of that it will maybe feel slightly faster, OS boot time, generic desktop use, non direct storage games. The trade off, more cumbersome to install, run hotter, consume more power, might need cooling.

Currently SATA remains an option if its preferred, although product development for it seems to be almost dead. I expect out of the 3 storages HDD, SATA SSD, NVME SSD its the one with quickest market collapse.

One such workload where its clearly better than SATA is simply downloading a steam game on a gigabit or faster connection. I did this on my 9900k test bed, which has 2 SATA SSD attached as storage, and the SSD was bottlenecking the download once OS write cache was exhausted, 100% load on the drive. The drive was a MX 500 TLC a respected SATA model. NVME can handle high speed steam downloads without a problem for the full download.

I expect when working on media files NVME is a wet dream. I need to move twitch leecher to use NVME, it downloads fast and then its grinding on HDD for ages.

 

[Bill_Bright]

didnt expect much difference

I love that I never fall for any of it.

Oh? Your title for this thread would suggest you did expect more and did fall for the marketing hype.

There is a HUGE difference between the fastest hard drive and the slowest SSD. But once you step into the realm of SSDs, the differences become much smaller and often unnoticeable - except on paper, or, maybe, in a double blind, side by side, simultaneous (and definitely not a week, day or even hour apart, but simultaneous!) comparison.

And when it comes to disk activities, there are other variables that come into play - in particular, the amount of RAM you have available, other variables too.

When you are sitting in the stands, the difference between a car going 100mph and and another car going 200mph is readily apparent. But the difference between 200mph and 210mph (unless side by side) is not.

 

[GerKNG]

you bulk edit photos on a quadcore with an architecture from 8 years ago.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Yeah, you're running into CPU/processing limitations, not storage access limitations. When processing images, pull up task manager and see what's pegging at 100%, and I'd bet it's the CPU and maybe GPU, depending on what your editing program uses to import RAW images. You might actually be GPU bound. I edit with On1, and it's totally CPU limited when doing large imports.

 

[inquisitor1]

blah blah blah. always the same replies

its this and because of that and that and this. sheesh

>Oh? Your title for this thread would suggest you did expect more and did fall for the marketing hype.

not at all. it was the same speed on i7 6700 pc. I didnt expect it to be twice as fast. I did expect some boost over the i7

but its like ddr5 ram. all hype. and tons of pr reps here trying to push for the newset.

me, I never buy the newest right away. I didnt fall for "get am5 cause its amazing"

hype and fluff. I got the nvme cause it was a cheap price.

 

[cvaldes]

Darmok N Jalad is correct.

Task Manager will likely show very little disk activity relative to CPU and/or GPU activity. I frequently do video and image conversions/transcodes both on my Mac and Windows PC and there is actually very little disk activity involved.

The easiest way to peg the disk activity graph is to do a copy of a large file, like a 5 GB video or a videogame archive. Even something like a 5 GB Windows ISO or macOS DMG will do it.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Sorry, I misunderstood the point of this thread. I'll see myself out.

 

[freeagent]

I loves me NVMe. Do you know how long it takes to move multiple 120GB game folders between two SATA drives

 

[Wirko]

Try to run a batch processing job that puts as much load as possible on the SSD, and as little as possible on the CPU, GPU and memory. Load photo + save photo, nothing more than that. Your NVMe SSD should be able to outperform your SATA SSD substantially. You can use these results as your baseline; everything that's slower is caused by slow processing.

 

[Marcus L]

I loves me NVMe. Do you know how long it takes to move multiple 120GB game folders between two SATA drives

Did this the other day as one of my drives was inadvertently (by me ) changed from a primary partition to a simple volume, tbh I left it like that for a while until Alan Wake 2 complained that the game was loaded to a HDD instead of SSD and could affect performance (it is a PCI-E 4 NVME) so I copied the entire contents (500GB) to my C: drive which is a pci-e 3 NVME and speeds during the SLC cache of about 120GB were around 2GB/s, the rest of the data was between 600MB-1.2GBps, converted the drive in question to a primary partition and the write rates going the other way were between 2-3GBps constant, is a joy to behold, obviously would have been faster if both drives were PCIE-4, nonetheless still much more impressive than SATA SSD, as is Windows boot up time, game loading times etc

 

[Psychoholic]

I can tell a difference.. its not HUGE in daily use.
Also, even if there was no difference i like not having to deal with cables (Sata and Power)

 

[Toothless]

PEBCAK issue 100%. You're not fully using the NVME drive so no wonder you're not seeing a proper difference. 500MB/s to around 6000MB/s your storage isn't the issue.

 

[AsRock]

But if you have 4000 pictures to edit and you see about 1 second improvement isn't like like a hour in time saving ?.

Knowing me i am just reading it wrong haha.

EDIT:

Either way the lexar nm790 don't even have Dram so wouldn't that make it slower too ?.

 

[P4-630]

You might want to borrow my i7 12700K p-cores @ 5Ghz and my 980 Pro.

 

[ir_cow]

blah blah blah. always the same replies

I love it. Tell us more about your extensive knowledge of NVMe and SSDs.

 

[chrcoluk]

blah blah blah. always the same replies

its this and because of that and that and this. sheesh

>Oh? Your title for this thread would suggest you did expect more and did fall for the marketing hype.

not at all. it was the same speed on i7 6700 pc. I didnt expect it to be twice as fast. I did expect some boost over the i7

but its like ddr5 ram. all hype. and tons of pr reps here trying to push for the newset.

me, I never buy the newest right away. I didnt fall for "get am5 cause its amazing"

hype and fluff. I got the nvme cause it was a cheap price.

4k i/o on NVME is actually often CPU bound on lower spec machines.

See here the 4k was unable to meet the PCIe gen 3 limit.

On this one however it can exceed the gen 3 limit as its now running on a much more powerful CPU/platform
Both shots are from the same drive and same firmware a 1TB 980 Pro. The single threaded 4k also improved as well.

 

[lawood]

NVME speed is CPU bound and ram speed/timmings also play a big role.

My results on my top end 4.0 nvme are affected by low speed ram and loose timmings.

View a nvme review on DDR4 vs DDR5, the differences can be pretty big.

Hell, nvme performance can also be affected heavily by windows installation itself. A drive without OS running will perform better vs the same drive with OS running.


Many many factors on nvme speed/performance.

 

[Dr. Dro]

So because an NVMe SSD isn't many times faster than a SATA drive in one specific task, NVMe SSDs are "fluff hype and marketing bs" and you are the smartest man alive.

That's pretty much all there is to this thread.

 

[Keullo-e]

A M.2 drive is a SSD as well as a SATA one.

Personally even my first SSD (ADATA SP900 64GB) which I bought in 2012 was already more than enough for me.

 

[#22]

I once just clicked wrong and installed Windows on SATA SSD instead of NVMe. Both were good ones in their categories (2TB versions of 870 EVO and KC3000) and due to context I even remember beefy specs of this pc: 12900 and 128GB RAM. After installing the system I started doing typical stuff like configuring it when downloading things and it felt kinda weird, like it's responsiveness wasn't as good as should be to the point of me suspecting something being wrong here. That made me check the drives and notice my fault. After reinstalling the system everything felt as it should be. It's this kind of differences reviews don't show, but you notice on daily basis.

 

[azrael]

so bought lexar sata ssd for 5600x pc. batch editing 4000 wedding images in acdsee pro , its a smidge faster then i7 6700 pc with firecuda 520 nvme. around the same or maybe 5% faster to my eyes. it batch processes sharpening at around 1 picture per second on both pc.

so I also reinstalled win10 on new lexar nm790 nvme on 5600x pc (1 week apart) tested again...not impressed. its not bad, but just the same. sharpening takes just under a sec and resizing is around 2-2.3 images per sec to my eyes. the same with sata and the same with nvme on i7 6700 pc. didnt expect much difference.

a lot of fluff hype and marketing bs for pc hardware. I love that I never fall for any of it. at least I got the ssd/nvme for good prices.

Dumb question: Which chipset is your motherboard using? Reason I'm asking is that the NM790 is a PCIe 4.0 drive and running it on a board like mine (see specs) which only supports PCIe 3.0 will of course result in a certain speed limitation. Talking from experience btw.

 

[mb194dc]

Just another example of how much use cases matter for various hardware.

The raw transfer speed doesn't translate to real world gains as there are other bottlenecks.

Also see CPU game benches at low with a 4090 when you have a much weaker graphics card and play at 1440p or higher...