Storage Question

[BigSykeDaddy]

Hello, I hope everyone is doing well this evening! (or whatever time zone you're in).

Quick question (I haven't built a new machine in 10 years):

I purchased a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB M.2 to use as my main drive and 2x 16TB HDDs to run in Raid 1.

I was watching a video the other day and I saw someone mention that rather than use a single M.2 for your OS / Programs and Scratch Disk, that it would be better to split it up and use one M.2 for your OS / Programs and use the other for a Scratch Disk (Photoshop / Premiere ETC)

So would I be better off returning this 2TB 980 Pro and purchasing 2x 1TB 980 Pros and use one for the main OS etc and the other for a Scratch Disk?

Thank you very much in advance!

 

[VersionMonkey]

I'd suggest that replacing your existing drive with two identical drives would not give you much advantage. Compared to buying two identical M.2 drives, you could probably achieve almost the same results by simply partitioning the drive you have into two (and give you the option of changing the split in the future).

If you are truely only thinking about scratch (i.e. temporary) data, which you don't want to store long term; you might want to consider drives with different performance and/or usage profiles. OS and programs will change much less frequently than your working data, so you want a drive with the best read performance and you will be less concerned about the lifetime. For your scratch disk, you need good write performance as well and it will have a much heavier workload so you'll the longest lifetime (total TBW) you can get.

Otherwise, separating out OS+Programs and data is about management - it makes things like backups more straight forward. And from that point of view two partitions gives you the same degree of managabliltiy.

 

[Craig_d1]

agree with above, just partition your 2tb m.2 drive if you want to keep things separate(didn't bother myself). You don't get that many m.2 nvme slots on the mobo as it

 

[Buttkicker]

also agree just split your m.2 drive with a partition job done

and if your a real heavy video editor get plenty of memory
this a guy pretty sums up the way to go
https://www.danielgrindrod.com/blog/the-best-premiere-pro-scratch-disk-and-media-cache-setup

 

[Trickle]

The problem with having multiple M.2s is that motherboards start to run out of sockets fast.

Partitioning won't solve the thread's question of whether multiple programs need to access the single drive at the same time exceeding its maximum transfer rate.

 

[BigSykeDaddy]

Thank you everyone for the replies! I forgot to ask if partitioning the drive would do the same thing, appreciate everyone for pointing that out.
I too, didn't see a NEED to go this way, but this guy swore by it so I thought I was ask the pro's.

Thank you for that link, I will definitely check it out today. As to the ram, I currently have 32GB DDR5 sitting in my closet ready to go, I wanted at least 64GB this go around but you know how the DDR5 supply is. The plan is to wait a bit until it becomes a bit more readily available and then bump the capacity / speed up.


Thanks again.

 

[EsaT]

Partitioning won't solve the thread's question of whether multiple programs need to access the single drive at the same time exceeding its maximum transfer rate.

Which is non-issue.

You could basically cut IOPS of higher up NMVe to one hundredth and that would be still in level of 50 to 100 times faster than HDD.
Basically only time those IOPS numbers would be maxed is if you have some server with like hundred/throusands of simultaneous users doing random accesses.

And for sequential transfer rates anything involving processing of data is likely magnitudes slower than NVMe write speeds.

 

[Craig_d1]

https://nascompares.com/seagate-firecuda-530-vs-samsung-980-pro-pcie4-m-2-ssd-comparison/

If you're doing a lot of writing etc I'd seriously consider the Firecuda 530 over the 980 pro... it has far better indurance...below is from above review, bold is the Firecuda, normal on right the 980 ro....2tb models
2TB Model ZP2000GM3A013 MZ-V8P2T0BW
Total Terabytes Written (TBW) 2550TB 1200TB
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF, hours) 1,800,000 1,500,000
DWPD 0.7DWPD 0.3DWPD

 

[EsaT]

this a guy pretty sums up the way to go
https://www.danielgrindrod.com/blog/the-best-premiere-pro-scratch-disk-and-media-cache-setup

That's more like sum up of low technical knowledge:

• Once loaded up OS and program have only very low bandwidth/IOPS load compared to capabilities of any modern SSD.
  Unless having wasted too much of budget into mass storage and not having enough RAM...
  
  And if speaking about the highest performance you don't get the smallest drive:
  Smallest drives of the model serie have always lower IOPS capability and write speed and sometimes even read speed.
  With fewer NAND chips they simply lack internal parallelism to max controller's capabilities.​
• Talking about performance again and using bottlenecking old HDD era SATA as connection?
  With the load distribution during use between cache/scratch drive and OS drive, it would be better to have SATA drive as OS drive!
  
  And once again that small slowest of the serie drive...​
• And if doing direct stream copying not involving encoding/effects, then SATA is also bottleneck for source drive.

He may be pro cinematographer, but that doesn't automatically mean anything for PC hardware knowledge.

 

[Quartz]

So would I be better off returning this 2TB 980 Pro and purchasing 2x 1TB 980 Pros and use one for the main OS etc and the other for a Scratch Disk?

Most motherboards have sockets for two M.2 drives. You clearly have lots of data so keep that 2 TB drive and buy yourself a small 250 GB or 500 GB drive and install Windows on that.