Storage Performance Roundup: Mechanical Disk Drives to PCIe 4.0 SSDs and Everything In...

[Julio Franco]

Computer storage has come a long way since our last roundup. We have new PCIe 4.0 SSDs, NVMe drives are becoming the de facto standard for new machines, and prices for legacy drives have plummeted. Rather than just focusing on high-end drives, this time we decided to take a step back and explore the entire storage market from top to bottom.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1956-storage-performance/

 

[newstark2042]

Use 4t hdd+256 ssd with StoreMI= fast and big size

 

[0dium]

I used to play skyrim and doom 2016 off of IDE HDD and had no problems. Seems I'm lucky. If you see something better, there is no going back.

 

[dirtyferret]

Will a PCI-E x4 SSD let me play Crysis?

 

[Squid Surprise]

Every PC should come with 2 HDs nowadays (at least). Your boot drive should be SSD, while your data drive should be mechanical.

If you don't need a lot of storage, then simply a 1TB SSD might be enough... but I'd prefer the option of having more space - even 10TB mechanical drives aren't that pricy!

 

[stewi0001]

I used to play skyrim and doom 2016 off of IDE HDD and had no problems. Seems I'm lucky. If you see something better, there is no going back.

I honestly was expecting a joke here. XD

 

[QuantumPhysics]

I modified my computer to be SSD only. I have five x 2TB Crucial MX500. Each one was just $180 on sale.

As far as I'm concerned, $100 is my breaking point for a 1TB Sata or M.2 while $200 is my breaking point for a 2TB model Sata or M.2.

Crucial, Samsung, Intel (660p) and a few other companies offer a 1TB for $100 and 2TB for $200 while the only company I see offering 4TB under $500 is the Samsung QVO.

I'm more interested in capacity than I am in theoretical read/write speeds.

I feel it ridiculous to spend more than necessary.

Furthermore, I don't see the need for the large heatsink since most M.2 will likely be used in laptops that don't have space for them. I think companies should make the sink seperate so you can choose whether or not to add it on.

 

[Squid Surprise]

I modified my computer to be SSD only. I have five x 2TB Crucial MX500. Each one was just $180 on sale.

As far as I'm concerned, $100 is my breaking point for a 1TB Sata or M.2 while $200 is my breaking point for a 2TB model Sata or M.2.

Crucial, Samsung, Intel (660p) and a few other companies offer a 1TB for $100 and 2TB for $200 while the only company I see offering 4TB under $500 is the Samsung QVO.

I'm more interested in capacity than I am in theoretical read/write speeds.

I feel it ridiculous to spend more than necessary.

Furthermore, I don't see the need for the large heatsink since most M.2 will likely be used in laptops that don't have space for them. I think companies should make the sink seperate so you can choose whether or not to add it on.

Don't see the need for 10TB of SSD.... that's about $1000 when you could get a single 10TB mechanical for about $300.... then get a boot drive for $100 and you've got the same storage for less than half the price.

 

[BSim500]

Nice test though I'll admit I now scroll straight past the synthetics in SSD reviews to the real-world game-load times. So much pointless theoretical bandwidth saturation test number chasing as if if everything is one pure sequential read when in reality games load a chunk of data, then do various things (decompress, initialize some stuff, etc) before requesting another chunk.

Same go with the "trace" tests that are often hilariously unrealistic as they are based on basically accelerating everything except the SSD 500x as if to say "If you had a 500GHz CPU, and could do 8hrs of work in 5 minutes when using Office and can read at 125,000x words per minute, this is how each drive would bottleneck it". A: 'Well I don't and can't...'

End result = the 900% faster theoretical read speed translates to barely +15% in Tomb Raider 8s (MX500) vs 7s (MP600 Gen 4.0) Raider or 20.8s CS:GO (MX500) vs 19.6s (MP600 Gen 4), etc, and ends up mattering far less to me than 2TB MX500 vs 1TB MP600 for the same price.

 

[cliffordcooley]

As far as I'm concerned, $100 is my breaking point for a 1TB Sata or M.2 while $200 is my breaking point for a 2TB model Sata or M.2.

Same here.

 

[mat9v]

I feel the distinct absence of any drives based on Phison E12 or comparable offerings. Samsung 970 is very fast (in PCIEx 3.0/4.0 space) but pricey - cheaper drives offer "up to Samsung" performance for much lower price - it would be nice to see at least one in this test.

 

[mat9v]

Nice test though I'll admit I now scroll straight past the synthetics in SSD reviews to the real-world game-load times. So much pointless theoretical bandwidth saturation test number chasing as if if everything is one pure sequential read when in reality games load a chunk of data, then do various things (decompress, initialize some stuff, etc) before requesting another chunk.

Same go with the "trace" tests that are often hilariously unrealistic as they are based on basically accelerating everything except the SSD 500x as if to say "If you had a 500GHz CPU, and could do 8hrs of work in 5 minutes when using Office and can read at 125,000x words per minute, this is how each drive would bottleneck it". A: 'Well I don't and can't...'

End result = the 900% faster theoretical read speed translates to barely +15% in Tomb Raider 8s (MX500) vs 7s (MP600 Gen 4.0) Raider or 20.8s CS:GO (MX500) vs 19.6s (MP600 Gen 4), etc, and ends up mattering far less to me than 2TB MX500 vs 1TB MP600 for the same price.

Simply because reading of the data from drives takes comparably small time compared to CPU working on the data. I have 4x NVMe RAID0 with speeds over 10GB/s and the load time for most cases is the same as with one fast NVMe drive
It only matters for working on large data files where CPU is not a bottleneck.
In my opinion, the best user friendly case is relatively small but very fast NVMe drive coupled with large SSD or even HDD managed by StoreMi or FuzeDrive (for Intel).
Backup required as always (only fool does not use this).

 

[vayeate]

I appreciate the inclusion of the various storage devices, not just the latest and greatest.
You should fix the Nvidia-esque CSGO graph, though.

 

[Danny101]

Drives aren't the bottleneck anymore. I had an old laptop with a dual-core 1.2 Ghz CPU/AMD HD 6300 iGPU, 4GB of memory and a 500 GB IDE Sata. I upgraded the memory to 8 GB and the HDD to a Crucial MX300 500GB SSD. The only thing that got faster was the boot up time while every other metric stayed the same. Very disappointing. I moved that same drive to a quad-core 2.0/2.4 boost CPU/ AMD R4 iGPU also upgraded to 8GB from the initial 4GB and from the initial 500GB IDE and everything got faster. So there should be a formula to determine a good match among hardware devices. Without a fast enough CPU/GPU tandem, a faster storage drive won't help that much. It will just load faster than your processors will know what to to do with. You just need a fast enough drive to feed them enough data for their workload. Finding that balance is the key to a well budgeted system.

 

[ilovetohateyou]

Don't see the need for 10TB of SSD.... that's about $1000 when you could get a single 10TB mechanical for about $300.... then get a boot drive for $100 and you've got the same storage for less than half the price.

Yeah, without specifying their need for filling up with SSD I don't see the utility here.

 

[Danny101]

Open world games would seem to benefit the most from SSD drives. Pre-defined linear play games could probably be relegated to HDD drives and not suffer much performance loss. I thus far haven't tried this split with Steam but I expect it to not be much of an issue. Of course, with techniques such as StoreMi, it may not be necessary. My main hold back with StoreMi is that changing out drives may be a bit more complicated than just better allocation of data.

 

[cliffordcooley]

I had an old laptop with a dual-core 1.2 Ghz CPU/AMD HD 6300 iGPU, 4GB of memory and a 500 GB IDE Sata. I upgraded the memory to 8 GB and the HDD to a Crucial MX300 500GB SSD.

Which revision SATA does the laptop support. SATA1 and SATA2 would bottleneck the SSD.

 

[Squid Surprise]

Yeah, without specifying their need for filling up with SSD I don't see the utility here.

Exactly! He actually stated the exact opposite - he said he cared more for capacity than speed...

If all you are using the HD for is storing files - like movies, pictures, etc., the difference between an SSD and a mechanical HD will be virtually nonexistent.

On the other hand, if you have a ton of applications / games installed, then you'll want all of those on SSDs, as you will notice a difference.

Most people, I suspect, don't have enough installed to require more than 1-2TB of SSD storage... of course, there ARE exceptions, but those people probably know exactly what they need anyways and this guide isn't for them.

 

[Danny101]

Which revision SATA does the laptop support. SATA1 and SATA2 would bottleneck the SSD.

Sata II, but I suspect that it was also hampered by the chipset. But the real bottleneck based on real-world experience was the CPU. The internet experience did not get any better which was what I was after to begin with. On the newer system everything got better. I definitely recommend 8 GB memory for internet browsing if you typically have a lot of tabs. SSD could help if you only have 4 GB of memory.

 

[Danny101]

Sata II, but I suspect that it was also hampered by the chipset. But the real bottleneck based on real-world experience was the CPU. The internet experience did not get any better which was what I was after to begin with. On the newer system everything got better. I definitely recommend 8 GB memory for internet browsing if you typically have a lot of tabs. SSD could help if you only have 4 GB of memory.

Updated. I do that alot.

 

[Danny101]

For internet browsing this appears to be the minimum CPU standard:

Don't Spend More on a PC Than You Really Need To

Wondering what processor you need for your PC or how fast your computer really has to be for certain tasks? We take a look at this question here.

www.lifewire.com

Intel Core i3 6100U vs AMD A6 7310

I have the 7310 with a Crucial MX300 500GB and 8 GB of memory. This is the minimum I can recommend. I would hope that Techspot would do a minimum recommendation on this front every so often.

 

[Bullwinkle M]

I think you are misinterpreting the copy / paste tests
Sequential speeds did not put the PCIe 4.0 SSD on top for this test

Using a 4GB file for "MY" tests....
A 1st gen OCZ SSD's did not outperform 7200RPM laptop hard drives or even 5400RPM laptop hard drives when copying from and pasting to the same drive

On the same computer, an OCZ SSD copied and pasted @ 3.6 MB/sec
A 5400RPM Western Digital Laptop hard drive copied and pasted (the same file) @ just over 17 MB/sec

A Samsung Planar 840 Pro copied and pasted the same file @ nearly 60Mb /sec

A Samsung 850 Pro with 3D Flash copied and pasted the same file @ nearly 120 MB/sec
(twice the speed of the 840 Pro)

It is entirely possible for a PCIe 3.0 SSD to outperform a PCIe 4.0 SSD as the copy / paste test (to and from the same drive) does not depend on the sequential throughput of the drive

I have tested many drives with faster sequential throughput doing worse on a copy/paste test than other drives with slower sequential throughput

You are confusing the speed to, or from the drive with the internal speed of the drive

They are 2 entirely different things

Disclaimer:
All tests were run using Windows XP-SP2 on a SATA 2 port (not SATA 3)
Running the same tests using Windows 7/8 or 10 gave me incorrect speed values as I was getting the same internal speeds for almost every drive

Only Windows XP gave me correct / reliable and repeatable numbers on the specific test hardware
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By the way, 1st gen OCZ SSD's were in no way a massive improvement on hard drives!

 

[p51d007]

My laptop came with a gen3 NVME. I thought the SSD I swapped out of my old laptop i5 was fast, but coupled with the i7 and NVME, it's so fast it's just hard to believe.
My home PC has an SSD & a 2TB HDD for storage. It's ok for now, but every time Adobe updates photoshop versions, it appears to be to the point it's about time to build a new one, since the old one is 5 years old.

 

[Mugsy]

When HDDs were the standard default devices, I used tape as a cheap backup storage.

Now that SSDs are the new standard, I use mechanical HDDs as a cheap means of backup.

I look forward to the days Gen 4 M.2 drives become the preferred means of "cheap backup".

 

[SethNW]

Personally, between SSDs, I would say it depends on the use. If you are building gaming PC or just se omething gor everyday use and yiu aren't already on high end components, then I would recommend bigger SATA SSD or equivalently priced NVMe, like Intel 660P 1TB. Game loading wise it is close enough and everyday stuff aren't that demanding, so you will notice bigger size far more than second or two off loading times. Plus extra money can be better spent on CPU and graphic card, if it allows you to go one tier up.

If it is high end build, like you already have i9 or R9 and 2080 or 2080Ti, then by all means get best, this clearly is Cadillac build and you got money to burn, so you might as well get best.

Otherwise only real reason to prioritize good NVMe drive simply is work. If it allows you to do your work faster or smoother, it always is good investment and beside that, when it comes to work, we are talking about return on investment too.

As for regular HDDs, if you need big 3TB+ storage, they are stil worth it. But otherwise SDS got cheap enough to where 1TB SATA SSD is affordable and miles better investment. And even 2TB is not that terrible. Only reason to do it is really low end build, where it is still worth combining 256GB SSD and HDD, to cut costs as much as possible.

As for StoreMI, personally I don't like idea of losing control over where stuff are. Also it highly depends on training to load stuff faster and it depends on consistency of your habits. It does fix fundamental flaw if SSHDs, which was that SSD portion was too small and they had to do too much swapping to be useful. But still, I would prefer to have everything on SSD, so I never have penalty of something not being on SSD.

In my PC, I just have 512GB SATA SSD for OS and 1TB SATA SSD for games. For long term storage I have 4TB external USB 3.0 drive, with classic HDD inside, which I just plug in when I need it.