Anyone with a reasonably sized Steam collection knows how precious storage space can be. Samsung's latest SSD solves that issue.
Samsung 860 Pro 4TB SSD Review
I'd love that could fit all my games just about on that but I think my Mrs would kill me for spending that much money, maybe now we are getting to the max speed of sata we might see the price per GB coming down hopefully
I'd love that could fit all my games just about on that but I think my Mrs would kill me for spending that much money, maybe now we are getting to the max speed of sata we might see the price per GB coming down hopefully
I always prefer SATA SSDs to M.2 NVMe drives as the former don't use up PCI-E lanes.
Most of them are wired trough PCH so you don't loose GPU lanes. And if you are on HEDT you have few of the lanes to spare.
Most of them are wired trough PCH so you don't loose GPU lanes. And if you are on HEDT you have few of the lanes to spare.
Unless you often run 4xGPUs, which Kaap has been known to do.![]()
But the GPUs are still taking up the PCI-e lanes, which means you can't have a huge PCI-e SSD array without impacting those PCI-e lanes.
PLX chips are taking care of that. SSDs won't use full bandwidth 90% of the time. Full blown GPU may reserve 16 lanes on standard boards, but in real world they use maybe few % over 8X. So basically 45% of that lane remains unused. Even if you try to saturate all lanes with running benchmarks on all GPUs and SSDs PLX won't even break a sweat, because you can theoretically count GPUs to use 9 PCIE lanes, and SSD will saturate their 4X lanes only when you copy massive files, and that never happens at the same time if you don't intentionally try to pull it off. PLX will sort all that bandwidth which in normal cases reserves much more lanes than needed. It may introduce some lag, but it is minor and only if there is massive surge of data through it. (I haven't seen benchmarks or researched new chips and drivers but i hope they have sorted it out by now.)
In short. You can run all that on this board and it will be really hard (impossible) to bottleneck PCIE lanes with GPUs and SSDs.
I always thought PCI-e lanes were set in the BIOS by the motherboard. As in, if you have more devices than the motherboard/CPU allows, the motherboard will cut the bandwidth in half or at whatever increment is appropriate. So if you have two x16 PCI-e slots and you use them for a pair of graphics cards, the system will run at x8 for both slots because you only have x16 lanes for PCI-e devices. I didn't know it would throttle your devices in a variable fashion.