M.2 NvME drive no faster than SSD ???

[Michaeljcox24]

So in my rig I had a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO. Last week I bought a 980 Pro. I had always believed that M.2 drives were superior to SATA drives so this felt like a logical upgrade.

Had the M.2 drive in my rig for a week now, and there is literally no difference whatsoever in boot times in Windows, or loading times of games. Literally none.

Am I missing something or doing something wrong. If not, what's the point of M.2 ?!

 

[Dicehunter]

So in my rig I had a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO. Last week I bought a 980 Pro. I had always believed that M.2 drives were superior to SATA drives so this felt like a logical upgrade.

Had the M.2 drive in my rig for a week now, and there is literally no difference whatsoever in boot times in Windows, or loading times of games. Literally none.

Am I missing something or doing something wrong. If not, what's the point of M.2 ?!

Did you do a fresh Windows install or just migrate it ? Also the point of fast NVME drives isn't just the hugely higher read/write speeds but the much lower latency.

 

[Michaeljcox24]

Fresh Windows install dude.

 

[AlienALX]

What drive did you buy?? NVME or MSATA? if it's MSATA it won't be any faster, as it uses SATA and not PCIE.

As for the loading of Windows and games loading? Firstly Windows takes a certain time to load no matter what as it has other stuff to do other than load (like syncing hardware and loading drivers etc) and unless a game is optimised for NVME (very few are ATM, but that is set to change) then it will make no difference as you are still waiting for tons of other stuff. Like copying stuff into VRAM, etc etc.

 

[Michaeljcox24]

It's the NVME version

 

[AlienALX]

Have you benched it? Crystal or ATTO. Make sure it's working as it should.

 

[Michaeljcox24]

980 Pro read is about 3000 MB/s

In the 850 Evo SSD I have it's reading at 500 MB/s

Those are crystal disk results. But it in no translates in to real world performance.

 

[Dicehunter]

980 Pro in both Crystal and ATTO has a top speed of around 7GB/s so your system is hampering it's speed by a pretty hefty margin but the everyday speed difference in day to day usage should be snappier than a traditional SSD.

Windows loading/boot times aren't really that different on an NVME vs a decent SSD as a lot of this also has to do with CPU speed, RAM speed and overall bios initialisation, Loading of settings etc... and game loading times will only be marginally better, Maybe 20s on an NVME vs 25s on an SSD.

The reason for this is games don't tend to take advantage of the massive amounts of extra performance due to most of the "loading" being done via processing/decmopressing etc... on the CPU and eventually on GPU memory, This is a relic left over from devs having to work around consoles slow storage drives, Prior to the PS5 and XBSX of course, And it's only when devs implement Microsofts DirectStorage API that we'll see high speed drives properly utilised.

 

[Warchild]

980 Pro read is about 3000 MB/s

In the 850 Evo SSD I have it's reading at 500 MB/s

Those are crystal disk results. But it in no translates in to real world performance.

I have 2 NVme drives and I rarely see "real world" improvements on some games. Applications like Fusion360 do show some benefits though. I guess it depends on what games/applications you are comparing.

 

[AlienALX]

Yup some games (nearly all) show no difference. It is how the storage is addressed. Usually through the CPU and memory for the game to get what it needs into the VRAM.

This is what the new components in DX12 aim to change, with the GPU being able to address the storage directly. AMD even made a GPU with SSDs on it ages ago in a precursor to this, though it needs support.

It'll be a while before it happens. Mainly as you are waiting on the consoles to do it first. It's very rare these days (incredibly) for a company to add specific PC stuff to a PC game.

 

[robbiec]

Strange one, you should feel a nice speedup going from SATA to NVMe. A 980Pro is in theory about 13X faster than your SATA drive - personally I don't think you feel anything once you go above 1500MB/s but it is dependent on applications. Do a startup test on MS Teams and you'll see / feel a good difference. As has been suggested before, clean Windows Install and use the M.2 closest to the CPU and not the lower one.