Hello! I'm planning a build that will be only used for gaming and for nothing else. I want to keep it to a minimum: no ODD, mini-ITX, minimum cables inside and outside the case... BUT, performance is the top priority. Regarding the storage I had one doubt. I've always used one drive for the OS and all the apps were installed in a different drive. This gave me an advantage in performance and also easier troubleshooting. Now, with this one-use PC and SSDs around, I don't know if this is worth the time/space/money. Do I loose significant performance if I have only one SSD drive with the OS and the games instead of having theme in different drives? Both drives would be SSDs, but I get the feeling that one speedy and big enough drive in the M2 port will give me what I want. It's a pity I couldn't find any benchmarks on this. Could you share your experiences? Thanks!
The short answer to your question is no, you won't lose any noticeableperformance by having a single SSD for everything.
In practical terms, any modern SATA 3 SSD will give you a very similar 'feel' in day to day use, including gaming and productivity. The only time you will ever really notice speed differences between competing SSDs is when copying files from A to B, which the majority of us don't do enough to care. The minimal improvement in speeds you might achieve from having your OS on one and your games on another would be barely noticeable in the real world. Of course, there are other arguments for having a couple of SSDs in a rig - I personally use a very large 1TB SSD with mediocre performance as my storage drive, and then a very fast 256GB SSD as my OS drive where my current games and daily apps reside. Depending on the SSD, M2 is a great option with its less limited bandwidth. Did you have any specific options in mind?
Thanks Shirty. M2 will be the way to go. Even if it's only because of the space (and cables) saved inside the case. I've yet to investigate which SSD to pick because I don't know if a faster SSD is going to make a huge difference installing and playing games. It will probably be worth it. The only two models I know right now are the new Kingston SSDNow and the Plextor ones, which seem to be A LOT faster.
The starting sentence here certainly isn't true for all usage scenarios... ignoring the random copying of large files back & forth, at it's most extreme either very sequential tasks (ie some batch a/v encoding/transcoding are still disk bound, not CPU bound) or very high QD random tasks (ie many database processes) can be disk bound even with a high end 6Gb/s SSD... ...whilst, in the middle, for less specialised tasks, there is still a difference - as indicated by something like Anand's 2011 b/ms - see here for an example - but it will depend upon your usage. These cumulative differences also can have a significant impact upon power usage - where if the SSD can complete it's tasks quicker the power can be reduced to the drive earlier. Now, obviously there are other reasons why a drive might use more or less power than another & it 'could' potentially be seen as not being hugely relevant for desktop usage (it's kind of small beer power wise in a reasonable system), but it naturally is for portable devices. Moving on from commenting on Shirty's post, a decent M.2 drive is obviously likely to be faster than a single 6Gb/s SATA one (model dependent of course) &, from a speed perspective, providing you buy something large enough for all you needs + a reasonable amount of free space + ideally some extra over provisioning, it would be the best choice atm. However, naturally there will be pcie SSDs coming in the next 6 months or so that will be much faster &, being more mainstream, should be cheaper than the current M.2 ones... ...&, perhaps more importantly, high end M.2 SSDs are currently far more expensive than SATA ones. Well, ttbomk, the fastest M.2 SSD that can actually be gotten hold of atm is the Samsung XP941 - however i can't immediately see a 512GB one from anywhere vaguely reliable for less than £400... ...whilst the noticeably slower Plextor M6e M.2, is ~£310 for a 512GB. Whereas, for a little under £330, you could get a 1TB Crucial M550 if SSD storage space were the key metric... ...or, if you actually had a usage that needed the (esp sequential &/or high QD) speeds of the XP941, you could look at a pair of 256GB 850 Pros in R0 for under a little under £300 that wouldn't be that far out from the XP941 (slightly faster & slightly slower in different things). With a gaming only usage, there really is no point in buying anything top end though, as it really won't make a difference - & for that reason alone i really wouldn't spend the extra for a high end M.2 atm. Much better to look at more budget orientated drives - so maybe a 512GB Crucial MX100 for ~£150, a pair of them in R0 for ~£300 or the 1TB M550. However 'if', along with your gaming usage, you also have some other tasks that would benefit from a faster SSD (even if it's just photoshop temp folders or odd encoding tasks that are disk bound or whatever), you could obviously mix'n'match in whatever way best suits - & that'd probably be the only reason you personally might have for wanting two different SSDs for the OS/apps & games. As Shirty rightly says, there are other reasons of course, so, for example, in my proper machine, i use a pair of old 256GB 830s in R0 solely for encoding & transcoding & whatnot - though, with ivy bridge, there's obviously only the two 6Gb/s intel ports (which are used for other SSDs for other tasks) & so they have to be on the 3Gb/s ones... ...ie so the sequential speeds are equivalent to maxing out a single 6Gb/s port - & as indicated above, some tasks that i use them for are disk bound... (there's an issue with the 830s on a raid card if you really hammer them with 100s of GBs of writes, so it's less hassle to have a some tasks being disk bound but have trim with them so there's no arsing about) ...but you've not mentioned any other tasks.
PocketDemon, thanks for your time giving that huge and helpful answer. I'm completely sure about the use of this PC. I'm a Mac user and I do everything with my MBPro. I'm building the PC just for gaming. You come to confirm what I suspected: there's no need for a high end M2 drive as it won't be noticed that much at loading times or during the game. I still want an M2 drive because of the space and cables I save. As I wait to buy everything (I think I will do it by the end of the year) I expect prices to go down. I don't think I need more than 256GB for the OS and the games, so the price won't be that high. It will be expensive in comparison though. I'll keep searching for benchmarks about the two drives question. But for now the decision is one drive.
Scanning through what i'd written earlier, i've realised that i need to clarify something. i was meaning that a top notch M.2 SSD would be faster overall than a single high end SATA drive - not that it would necessarily be faster for every i/o type... ...as the current models are noticeably slower for very small r/ws, both at low & higher QDs, than the top end SATA ones. This didn't appear to be relevant for the OP's usage (& looking that the reply then it isn't) so i'd omitted it, but i really should have made this clear. No problem... Well, it's obviously your decision, though i really wouldn't spend the extra for a M.2 for the stated usage & 512GB will give you much more room to play with so that you can have bunches of games installed; rather than having to uninstall & reinstall to swap between them. Just as a word of advice, make sure that the test systems are comparable within whatever reviews... For example both 256GB models are on legitreviews however, although the Plextor is on a Z97 board, the Samsung's in some odd notebook that's not showing anything like it's full speeds. Well, whilst the 512GB versions of each are a little quicker than the 256GB versions, testing both on a Z97 board gives completely different results - which shows that the notebook in the previous review isn't using the full bandwidth... My assumption being that it's only 2x internally. Now i don't actually like the b/ms used on either of those sites, as to a large extent they tell you little about the overall performance - unless a primary i/o happened to be exactly what one of the b/ms was testing - however Anandtech, as normally the best site for SSD reviews & their 2011 b/ms are very useful for most users, haven't tested any capacity of the Plextor... ...just the 512GB Samsung. Again though, your stated usage is different from the norm as it is solely for gaming, & that usage type really won't gain enough from the extra speed of any higher end SSD to justify the extra cost. Well, having 2 machines, there's no discernable difference between load times of games using either the single 840 Evo (without rapid enabled) that's in this machine atm or the pair of 840 Pros in R0 (that outclass the 512GB XP941 overall) that are in the other one... ...though, naturally, i didn't buy the Pros with any belief that they'd make any odds to game loading times (i'm not that much of a gamer anyway); instead i have various creative usages where the extra speed will significantly help... ...much as having some 15K7 enterprise SAS HDDs really help with some specific usages i have, but would be a real waste of money for many other people.
