Planning for a new PC build, need clarify a few things

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pstar008

362 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1554740 18-May-2016 12:03

Jase2985:

nothing has SATA2 these days anyway, only place you will really find it is in 3-4+ year old kit.

Or make sure that I don't trying to using my old SATA cable laying around...

Again, just trying to understanding the difference between M.2 NVMe and normal SATA SSD.

pstar008

362 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1554748 18-May-2016 12:11

Jase2985:

pstar008:

Jase2985:

SATA 2 VS SATA 3 on a SSD the difference is a few seconds (aprox 5) on bootup (I have an old laptop which only has SATA 2)

the difference between a spinning disk and a SSD would be a lot more noticeable than the difference between a SATA and PCIe M.2 drive or even SATA 2 and SATA 3.

Seems I caused a bit confusion, I was thinking most of the case the difference between SATA 2 and SATA 3 wouldn't have significant different, as it's only about double the bandwidth, and it wasn't that often for a SSD to exceed SATA2 bandwidth (probably wasn't hold true anymore as SSD are getting even faster). Where the difference between SSD and HDD is orders of magnitude, and difference between M.2 NVMe SSD and SATA must be between those two situation. But what I don't know is how easy it is for current SSD to exceed the bandwidth of SATA 3 thus we can benefit from M.2 NVMe bus on normal usage or just Windows boot time difference.

i think your missing that a PCIe SSD and a SATA SSD are not made they same, they have the same connector but the working of it are completely different.

the PCIe Drives are different machines to the SATA ones so its easy to get upwards of 2000MB/S write speed on a PCIe interface vs a max of 600MB/s on a SATA one, and like Rich said add in overheads etc and you will probably get in the mid to low 500's.

why you are still worrying about it, i dont know, you either want a drive that goes 600MB/s or you want one that does 2000MB/s. This then dictates the type of motherboard you need to support the SSD format you choose.

Are there real world gains from it, possibly, but PCIe and NVMe drives look like they are the future, so you could say future proofing your system isnt a bad idea, and they are currently about double the price of a standard M.2 SATA drive.

I was trying to justify the reason to buy a NVMe M.2 SSD even if it is (I thought) slightly more expensive than the SATA one, because the consensus in this thread was it is faster but normal usasge can hardly notice the difference. But just discovered that a reasonable NVMe M.2 SSD will about double the price/GB. Which probably stop me from buying it, as I was planning to get a 512 GB SSD just for furture proof. But yes, will have a mother board with M.2 PCIe regardless.

Givent that I have multi-OSs to consider, not saying I want all of them on the fastest storage I can have, I probably will end up buying a larger SSD, rather than a faster one.

richms

28168 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1554750 18-May-2016 12:16

You can stripe 2 cheaper smaller SSDs in the intel raid to get a larger faster one for your VM's. Ive done that for my steam library and video editing drives. One uses the 120 gig drives that I got for a couple of other computers before finding that it is hopelessly too small, stripe 2 of them for a 240 gig that does close to a gig a second on reads. Games still load too slowly tho.

Richard rich.ms

StructureDr

77 posts

Master Geek

#1554752 18-May-2016 12:20

pstar008:

I can see that if ITX can have every thing you want, Full size motherboard/case seems like a waste of space/ money.

But I am still consider expandability is important to me, which brings the point, as I am going to have a SSD and HDD in my initial build, I probably want the SSD as M.2 as I consider only one 2.5/3.5 left doesn't seems really expandable to me. And I still consider that I might need a optical drive as I always had one.

Again, I don't think I will ever need SLI, and after looked yesterday myself, for same amount of total RAM, two memory stick are not much expensive than four sticks, so I don't really need four slots as I consider my RAM usage will be topped at 32 GB.

Look at a Fractal Designs Node 304 - mini ITX, about the size of a large shoe box, and takes up to 6 drives (2.5 or 3.5 inch). No optical drive - but if absolutely necessary external ones are cheap and simple. I have this at home, it is a pretty smart looking case.

Cooler Master do some good options too - with support for optical drive but less other drives, e.g. the Elite 130

In your initial post you mentioned Linux in relation to a preference for Asus motherboards - only a single data point, but I run Manjaro on an Asrock MB with no issues. I may be missing your reasoning though - if so apologies.

pstar008

362 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1555167 18-May-2016 20:41

richms:

You can stripe 2 cheaper smaller SSDs in the intel raid to get a larger faster one for your VM's. Ive done that for my steam library and video editing drives. One uses the 120 gig drives that I got for a couple of other computers before finding that it is hopelessly too small, stripe 2 of them for a 240 gig that does close to a gig a second on reads. Games still load too slowly tho.

Might doing that, and one of my colleague is doing the exact same thing, the only thing is I need work out an reasonable good way to doing automatically backup.

pstar008

362 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1555169 18-May-2016 20:51

StructureDr:

pstar008:

I can see that if ITX can have every thing you want, Full size motherboard/case seems like a waste of space/ money.

But I am still consider expandability is important to me, which brings the point, as I am going to have a SSD and HDD in my initial build, I probably want the SSD as M.2 as I consider only one 2.5/3.5 left doesn't seems really expandable to me. And I still consider that I might need a optical drive as I always had one.

Again, I don't think I will ever need SLI, and after looked yesterday myself, for same amount of total RAM, two memory stick are not much expensive than four sticks, so I don't really need four slots as I consider my RAM usage will be topped at 32 GB.

Look at a Fractal Designs Node 304 - mini ITX, about the size of a large shoe box, and takes up to 6 drives (2.5 or 3.5 inch). No optical drive - but if absolutely necessary external ones are cheap and simple. I have this at home, it is a pretty smart looking case.

Cooler Master do some good options too - with support for optical drive but less other drives, e.g. the Elite 130

In your initial post you mentioned Linux in relation to a preference for Asus motherboards - only a single data point, but I run Manjaro on an Asrock MB with no issues. I may be missing your reasoning though - if so apologies.

Thanks, nice ITX case, might be using that if not going to overclocking and decided to use a non-K CPU.

Yes, for simplicity, don't expect anything will went wrong if I pick any reputable brand for motherboard, but to me ASUS is easier choice, and I do have slightly issue with my last Gigabyte motherboard. But might be consider Asrock.

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