So i recently upgrades my system to an Asus prime x470-Pro and a 2700X and I need a new SSD as I wan't to get a clean install of windows without nuking my current version. I haven't kept up with M.2 drives so I'm unsure of what type of drive will work on my new board as a boot drive. I'm also not sure if the extra speed from the drive is worth giving up over extra space I'd get for my money getting a normal SSD. Any advice?
Perhaps do an indepth on storeMI for the site (getting company to pay or free sample ) with a small ~256GB M2 drive I think 256 is the limit for the license. https://community.amd.com/community...ge-technology-enmotus-fuzedrive-for-amd-ryzen https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/store-mi With respect to what drive any will M2 NVMe drive with do the job probably one of the latest Samsung evos would make sense if it is your only one.
The issue is finding out which drive will work with my board. I'd happily write something for the site.
Unless you know of a specific compatibility issue you should be able to drop any M.2 NVMe drive without issue and it will just work, just like adding any internal hdd.
Sweet. Is M.2 that much better than a normal SSD that losing half the capacity for the price is worth it?
Some say no, I say yes. I love my M.2 NVMe drive. Any drive will work in the slot, you just need to choose NVMe instead of AHCI... no point getting new tech and using the old standard which will only slow you down.
For gaming, I’d stick to a SATA drive as you need the storage. You may be able to get a M.2 one for a little more than a typical SATA drive which would make your system look cleaner. Look into it. You could always use NVMe as the OS drive and the SATA one for everything else.
If you're after something ~250GB SATA - Crucial MX500 ~£60 SATA, but can't be arsed with cables - m.2 version of the above [also ~£60] NVMe - Samsung 970 EVO ~£110 Someone else is paying so **** it - Intel Optane 900p ~£330
I found that AMD AM4 boards seem to have rubbish SATA performance to my old Intel Z97. The system just felt slow to me - CrystalDiskMark confirmed that although the headline speeds are about right, the random and small reads/writes were way down. .An NVME drive for Windows brought the snappiness I was used to back. If I was buying now, I'd look at Adata as well as Samsung. * edit : AMD boards were Asrock fatality and Asus CH6
An NVMe drive big enough to realistically be used a gaming+OS drive is going to be considerably more expensive than a traditional 2.5" SSD, and the performance difference negligible (when you factor in cost). For cost of a 1TB NVMe drive you could probably get a 120GB 960/970 to use for OS and applications and a 1TB 850/860 to use for games (don't hold me to that, I haven't actually checked prices!).
Decided to go with a standard SSD as I need the space for games and VMs. Thanks for the help all. I might get an NVMe drive when the prices come down. I'll look into writing up something about storeMI
buy a smaller one and use the tiered storage solution that comes with his board mentioned above, it will accelerate everything and give you a seemless large drive.
IS the speedup that noticeable though? Surely in games especially multiplayer ones it can't make that much of a difference.
For reference - ~£390 [1TB 960 EVO] vs ~£380 [250GB 970 EVO + 1TB 860 EVO] vs ~£290 [128GB 760p + 1TB MX500] ...based on Scan's current prices.
Yes, look what ever SSD you buy ( only fuddy duddys buy Sata now BTW ) you can use the software, pool all your drives even the boot one and accelerate the lot with what you have, it should be non invasive and reversible (not that I would trust this, back up before doing anything) If you are going to arse about with overclocking, I wouldn't recommend trying it, system stability is probably a sensible requirement before using this. Why would multiplayer games make any difference does their data get delivered by magic pixies rather than a hard disc? Game performance will depend entirely on the games and what the engine needs, pretty sure Optane was sold being sold with a game due to its improvements. There are latency and cpu overheads using SATA vs NVMe.
For reference £390 is close to 50% of my months pay... Clearly that's not what I was saying but in multiplayer games you don't tend to load large areas of the map which means that the main advantage of SSDs in game's (loading screens) sort of becomes a null point.
I wasn't suggesting it as an option, just posting in response to wakka's comment about small nvme + big sata being cheaper than big nvme...
