Samsung 850 Pro to 960 Pro?

ebilcake

ebilcake

ebilcake

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Currently using a pair of 1TB 840 EVO and a pair of 850 Pro drives which were bought quite a while ago so not really looked into the newer NVMe drives at all until now.

Noticeable difference for general use? As I understand they just plug into any PCIE 3.0 slot so my Asus Hero VI should be compatible.
 
Did I notice a speed difference when I went from this setup..

850 Evo 128GB (Windows) SATA
840 Evo 128GB (Steam) SATA
840 Evo 128GB (Origin) SATA

to this..

960 Evo 256GB (Windows) NVME
Crucial MX300 525GB (Steam) M2
850 Evo 128GB (Origin) SATA

Outside of benchmarks, no I didn't notice a difference.

But I sure feel smug that I've got 2x onboard drives. :cool:
 
Okay, I won't be looking to buying one of these.

Just read I may need an adapter? I thought they were just standard 4x PCIE connections?
 
Well just to throw in my 2p ~ I noticed a very real increase in speed. Windows startup was greatly reduced, and apps now just appear instantly. But I have super fast ninja reflexes and no one else on this forum does, also I have Superfectch and Prefetch disabled, which makes a big difference ( if you don't have these disabled then you aren't really comparing the speed of your drive since Superfetch and Prefetch are effectively a RAM cache for you drives ).
In older boards they may run well below top speed, unless you put them in a graphics card slot. I have a number of boards I placed them in, including a Z97, and that seemed just as slow as a SATA SSD until I realised that the M.2 socket was an older one. I bought an Akasa M.2 adapter from OCUK and popped the SSD in to graphics card slot three and it was noticeably faster. But a quick check of the motherboard manual and I realised that I had to place it in graphics card slot 2 to get full speed out of it... and it makes a lot of difference.
Provided that your motherboard has PCIe M.2 sockets then your BIOS will support booting from them even if you place them in a graphics slot.
Personally I swear by them. They are great. However, I would only buy one to replace a SATA SSD coming to the end of it's life or for a new PC. It's not worth replacing an existing, fully working SATA SSD unless you are just looking for something to upgrade and have already upgraded everything else!
 
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personally dont think nvme is worth it for mainstream use. A decent SATA drive will easily be fast enough, and to boot it seems on most (if not all) boards will disable sata slots when m.2 is used, on my board each m.2 slot in use disables "two" sata ports so its a double penalty. Dont know why manufacturers cannot have all sata and m.2 able to be used at the same time.

Windows boot speed can be affected by more than the hardware speed.

My 8600k and 850 pro boots about 4x as long as my i3 laptop (with a samsung 830) and my older haswell kit (with a cheap kingston 60gig). I think because it has a crap ton more drivers to load up due to all the extra hardware in it. In general its a bloated installation, clean installing windows will always be faster than an old bloated install, unless the hardware is really inferior.
 
well windows will (if working properly) disable superfetch for you now if you have an ssd.
prefetch I dont know of many people who disable that specifically.

The idea of superfetch is it speculates what app you "may" open and copy it into memory ahead of time, so its an aggressive cache vs traditional passive cache.
 
The people who notice a big difference between SSD and nvme, they must be comparing old bloated installs be a fresh new system.

I barely install any software, so mine is usually pretty quick.
 
NVME is nice in that there are less wires in your system, but at the moment price can't be justified against a standard SSD. You won't notice any difference in speed in everyday use.

If you are working on large files and being paid for it, sure, but you'll need two of them to see the true benefits.
 
rotor said:
Remind me, why do people disable superfetch and prefetch?
Click to expand...

Superfetch and Prefetch speed up loading with what amounts to an intelligent RAM cache. The problem is that they are designed for a slow mechanical HDD. They do still have some benefit with an SATA SSD but it is less noticeable. The problem with Prefetch and Superfetch is that they use your system resources including your CPU cycles ~ frequently loading in stuff from your drives that you may not actually need.

I have a newly installed PC that runs both PCIe and SATA and there is a noticeable difference between loading times on the two drives. But the difference is most noticeable when Prefetch and Superfetch are disabled. In fact it would honestly be nuts to leave them enabled if you have a PCIe drive.

I also replaced the boot drive on an older PC and immediately noticed that something was wrong. It was just slow. I didn't measure it to see how slow, it was just perceptibly slow. ( This was not a new install, rather a system clone of the original SATA SSD ). The point here is that I actually noticed it was slow!! A bit of investigation revealed that the PCIe M.2 was only running at ~10Gb/s, so it needed tweaking to get it to full speed, at ~32Gb/s. The difference was very noticeable.

I know a lot of people disagree with me on this, but I think they are well worth the money as a system drive. The 250GB PCIe M.2 drives are not very expensive.
 
It's amazing how long these rumoured improvements last for. So even before Windows 8 launch (2012), Windows 7 had already been updated for SSDs.

According to this document:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/0/2/3027d574-c433-412a-a8b6-5e0a75d5b237/perfaccel.docx

Since Windows 7:

If SuperFetch detects that the system drive is a fast SSD (as measured by Windows Experience Index Disk score), then SuperFetch turns off ReadyBoot, ReadyBoost, and the SuperFetch service itself.
Caution: We recommend that OEMs and users do not manually disable the SuperFetch service (Sysmain.dll). Disabling SuperFetch disables ReadyBoot and ReadyBoost and can decrease system responsiveness.
 
I know we are a community of fiddlers and tweakers, but I genuinely don't think there is *anything* to be achieved by even a single tweak on stock Windows 10. I mean there's things like notifications that are annoying as heck, but from a pure performance point of view, I don't know of any.
 
rotor said:
I know we are a community of fiddlers and tweakers, but I genuinely don't think there is *anything* to be achieved by even a single tweak on stock Windows 10. I mean there's things like notifications that are annoying as heck, but from a pure performance point of view, I don't know of any.
Click to expand...

One was a game changer on my dads machine (very low spec with a very slow spindle)
His drive was thrashing like crazy for long periods of time, everything was laggy.
I went in task scheduler, disabled anything related to telemetry, disabled some services, and the thrashing stopped, was like going back to windows 7 for him.

On my mining rig, disabling windows defender improved performance noticeably. Same on my Win10 testing VM.
 
rotor said:
I mean, sure, but you would never disable AV on a machine you're actively using, right?
Click to expand...

I just made a post in the cpu review thread giving an idea of this, and also described in the windows security thread.

On my desktop I dont actually run a always on a/v anymore. Its inefficient security.

Instead I run anti exploit on top of a hardened OS and a hardened browser.
 
I have an 850 Evo and a 960 Pro. The latter benchmarks high AF and really does get the throughput it claims.

But...

Nothing normal can saturate it. Games just can't consume data that fast, probably because of all the post-processing of whatever they've loaded. Nothing is significantly faster. Might have shaved 1 minute off the 5 minute load time for my heavily modded Ark Survival instance. Maybe. It's borderline.

I mean, I love it for how compact it is and the lack of cable clutter, but for pure performance, the 960 Pro just isn't for us normal folks. It will shine in data centres and servers, but desktops just can't demand enough performance from it to see the difference over a SATA drive.

My 2p anyway :)
 
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