New Sabrant Rocket NVMe SSD in old motherboard

[Guest2]

I recently purchased a Sabrant Rocket drive for increased sotorage for games. To my surprise, my (2015 dated) BIOS detected it showing 'Sabrant' and NVMe drive. I then cloned my Samsung EVO 850 SSD to it and it's working fine.

I knew the speeds would be lower than rated as my motherboard (Z97) only supports PCIe 2x. Future plans are to update to Ryzen 4000, just not yet.

Crystal Disk speeds

EVO 850


Sabrant Rocket


Is it worth me picking up something like a 'StarTech.com M2 PCIe SSD Adapter - x4 PCIe 3.0 NVMe' for £20?

Though it does say on my motherboard specs that it will reduce the PCIEX16 slot to operate at x8 mode instead of x16. I do not want this to reduce the speed my GPU can run at that's in the PCIEX16 slot

When the PCIEX4 slot is populated, the PCIEX16 slot will operate at up to x8 mode and the PCIEX8 will operate at up to x4 mode.

Motherboard - https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z97X-Gaming-7-rev-10/

 

[Guest2]

Waste of money buying another adapter, leave it alone. You won't notice any difference and you can't stop the PCI-E lanes changing.

Thanks.

Would it make any different with 4k sector size instead of 512bytes?

I downloaded a tool called Sabrent sector size convertor, in the manual it says

"Sabrent’s Sector Size Converter enables you to change the drive’s sector size, which is necessary under certain data cloning scenarios. It enables re-formatting of the Rocket drive with either a 512-byte or a 4096-byte sector.
Please note that this process destroys all the data on the drive being converted. Make sure to backup your data onto another drive before you begin this process."


Edit - if my motherboard advertises this, surely if the new drives support 10 Gb/s then they should work at that?

• M.2 for SSDs drives with up to 10 Gb/s data transfer

Edit 2. Found a useful post on an MSI forum

• Like on most Z97 boards the M.2 slot can't utilize cpu lanes on the Z97s SLI Krait but just the PCI-E 2.0 lanes from the chipset which leaves it with 2.0 x2 at max.
  
  10 GB/s is the theoretical max with M.2 assuming it could run at 3.0 x4 what it doesn't on most Z97 boards. With 2.0 x2 transfer rates are just a little better than with SATA III.
  
  While on SATA III 6.0 Gb/s (750 MB/s) are the theoretical max it is 8 Gb/s (1 GB/s) on M.2 with 2.0 x2. In reality mostly not more than 6.4 Gb/s (800 MB/s) are to be seen.

 

[Guest2]

Update.

I purchased on of these 'kryoM.2 evo PCIe 3.0 x4 adapter for M.2 NGFF PCIe SSD'

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/aqua...-adapter-for-m.2-ngff-pcie-ssd-cc-003-aq.html

Drive speeds have increased by quite a lot.
One thing I don't understand it the RND4K Q32T16 speeds, they seem way higher that other screenshots of drives I have seen, including the EVO 970.

Write speed is higher than rated on the Sabrant Rocket specs too, not that im complaining...

 

[Guest2]

Yep that's right, it'll be using PCIE3 which those speeds are correct I'm using an adaptor in the PCIE3 slot and it'll always just use only 4 lanes, it's how PCIE work mate, so those speeds are what I'd expect! They're matching mine through PCIE3 based on the fact that I've got the 5000mb read write version of the rocket and assuming you have the 3000mb/s version that is? Therefore my drives in a PCIR4 system will go to 5GB however are currently limited by PCI3 limitations!

And yeah, your RND4K Q32T16 speeds are amazing nice work so overall fella, I'd be made up with that you can see mine are a lot lower? Wonder if it's the size of the SSD that dictates this, mine are 2TB drives? What size are yours 1TB?

http://www.pugheaven.co.uk/benchs/Sabrent.jpg

2TB also

 

[Guest2]

My eyes are drawn to that GPUz Bus Interface line, where it seems to confirm your RTX 2080Ti is running at x8 mode rather than x16. How many pcie lanes does your mobo and cpu combo have? I know that on my Asus x99 and i7-5820K at 28 PCIe lanes, which is a pretty old set up, I can jig the slots so that the GPU still gets 16 with the nvme ssd addon board, Hyper-X in my case, plugged into a slot. Had to go into the bios to do this. My manual says if you config the lanes this way then it disables the nvme slot on the mobo itself, may be worth looking into. I am a complete nvme ssd novice myself.

Yep, x8 also does impact fps in gaming quite a lot when using gsync & vsync.

I looked for a setting in bios so it doesn’t share the x16 pcie slot but cannot find one. The montherboard is a Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 7.
It does say when using the x8 or x4 lane, the x16 lane will operate at only x8 speed.

Looks like i’ll have to return the adapter and use the Rocket at the slower speed

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z97X-Gaming-7-rev-10/sp#sp

Edit.
If i can reconfigure the lanes to provide x16 to gpu and x4 to m2 adapter that would be fantastic.

In bios there is;

pcie slot configuration - 1,2,3,auto (on auto)
Dmi gen2 speed - auto, enabled, disabled. (On enabled)
Pcie slot configuration (cpu) - auto, x4 (on auto)

Thanks for the help guys

 

[Guest2]

Thanks both, very informative.
Does anyone know what PLX chips are?

It guess it (unfortunately) boils down to the Z97 architecture which is now quite old. It seems its not just me looking for answers to this by means of custom bios or whatever else

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...stand-these-pci-e-lanes-on-this-board.209603/

"Just to help clarify a little bit. The Z97 platform only has 16 PCI-E 3.0 lanes wired to the CPU. It has an additional 8 PCI-E 2.0 lanes wired to the Z97 chipset itself."

"They [chipset lanes] are used for extra features on the board. Extra SATA controllers, extra network controllers, SATA Express ports, M.2 Slots, etc. As well as the extra PCI-E x1 slots. Those lanes are plenty fast enough for storage and everything except graphics really."

I dont use half the stuff on my board, no sound, gpu, lan, sata express etc. I actually only have a PS2 keyboard, mouse in USB and Wifi adapter in USB

The downside of this means I would need a new motherboard, cpu, ram and soundcard to get full SSD drive speed. The soundcard I have (Xonar Essence ST - PCI) is from 11 odd years ago, when I had it in a motherboard that didnt even have PCIE slots. This drives my headphones and alone cost around £250

 

[Guest2]

Very good spot mate, yeah I didn't even look at the CPU and forgot about the lane allocation of certain CPU;'s so nice one as was scratching head on this for GUEST last night and couldn't figure out why, that PCIE3 slot at 8x should've been the indicator. So, really it's part CPU and part Mobo really, I got really lucky with the X79 as it's ancient YET still keeps on coming up with the goods.

@Guest2 - TBH mate, I'd be surprised how much going 8x to 16x really does actually make difference, will read around but it is what it is, at least youv'e fgot that rocket flying along mate.

Playing COD MW at 3440 x 1440 with everything turned up and using gsync & vsync really hammers the PCIE bandwith. I read that this is because gsync uses increased bandwidth on the pcie x16 lane (a lot more than x8)
This was easily reflected in game as I have 90fps set as the highest limited fps. With the GPU running 8x it would sometimes drop down to the 50fps-60fps range, with it running 16x it only tends to drop down to 70-80fps range. Quite a severe drop in fps which is noticable

The SSD drive runnning at the lower speeds is not noticable, but the 8x over 16x limiting the GPU certainly is. For now I have removed the SSD adapter and put the SSD in the lower speed M2 slot directly on the motherboard

Is there a benchmark / way of testing high resolution with gsync & vsync enabled to show lowest fps? I benchmarked without gsync at 3440 x 1440 and fps was identical (actually better when gpu was running 8x pcie!)

 

[Guest2]

I was sure they implemented this... so might be worth runing that as 16x and 8x and compare the twi as that's what that benchmark does.

https://benchmarks.ul.com/news/3dmark-pcie-40-bandwidth-test

https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphic...express-feature-test-3dmark-benchmarks-suite/

Also, from years ago I know, but shows how the difference can be seen in one of the early 3DMarks

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-scaling-analysis,1572-8.html

Wonderful, thanks. 12.15GB/s with gsync on and off. I'll stick my GPU in the x8 slot now and see how it does (instead of removing the m2 drive from motherboard and fitting it back into the adapter)

edit. Results in. PCIE 16x vs 8x makes a huge difference.

~6.5fps running 8x
~13.5fps running 16x

Left shows 16x, right 8x

 

[Guest2]

WOW, it does when shifting large amounts around, that's alomost twice as quick which kinda does match the numbers of the protocols so yeah, the most important here is GPU uses 16x and accept slower M2 drive mate which lets be honest is still lightening!!! IIt's just not got those glory figures we all want... but it's a fine fast machine but you're gonna lose more by 8x GPU there bigtime. Glad it helped anyway matey!

Gonna run that myseklf now and see what it says for me lol

I was surprised, based on the ither tests ive seen there wouldnt be much difference but clearly there is.
832/832 is fast enough for now and will be at least ready for when I get a new motherboard, cpu & ram (and soundcard)

Nice, pcie 4.0. I expect that will hold out for the next few generations of GPUs whereas I would probably need a new motherboard to take advantage of the bext gen / gen after if GPUs.
Is pcie 5.0 a thing yet? 4.0 is brand new isnt it?

 

[Guest2]

From what I see, over the last 5 years, little jumps here, little jumps there, but you can blow £1k on a PC and a £2k PC will not blow it away, deminishing returns is what I'm seeing, Im playing games at 4k now with a old XEON and x79 board, that says it all really tbh.

Make that closer to 10 years. i7 4790k still keeping up in games at the moment with a 2080Ti. I don't see the need just yet for a CPU change. When i do at least the Rocket will work at faster speeds, even if i need to change almost my whole PC

I decided to re-run Crystal Disk mark and it shows a slight increase in score from before (in the same PCIE2.0 M2 slot on motherboard) Maybe the benchmark is a bit random?! Strange that some of the reads and writes are faster in PCIE 2.0 than in 3.0 on the same drive