Is PCIE SSD worth investing in yet?

Forums › Desktop computing › Is PCIE SSD worth investing in yet?

Ronsoak

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Master Geek
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Topic # 165897 23-Feb-2015 22:47

As title, if I was planning my new gaming rig should I look into a PCIE SSD?

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166 posts

Master Geek
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Reply # 1245274 23-Feb-2015 23:02

I would say that would depend on your budget. Yes you should look at it if that is a bottle neck in your system.

A good compromise could be a motherboard with m.2.

In reality though for a gaming PC it should only make a difference for game loads and not the actual in game itself (if you have the rest of the specs right)

lNomNoml

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Ultimate Geek
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Reply # 1245275 23-Feb-2015 23:03

Personally no, if you can afford it and really want it, yes.

Max out CPU, GPU first then look into it again.

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JWR

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Ultimate Geek
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Reply # 1245307 24-Feb-2015 00:17

Not there yet.

But, I think they will be when Samsung (and others) start releasing new generation retail products.

Check out Samsung's OEM drives... http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-sm951-m.2-pcie-ssd,4045.html

Ronsoak

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Reply # 1245318 24-Feb-2015 06:45

Thanks team I really appreciate it

raytaylor

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Reply # 1245794 24-Feb-2015 18:39

If you want a faster SSD, then RAID is the way to go.
Check out this awesome video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Ray Taylor
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networkn

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Reply # 1245806 24-Feb-2015 18:55

I am getting 1.4GB/s from 3 x Samsung EVO's in a RAID0 :)

Ronsoak

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Reply # 1245861 24-Feb-2015 20:20

Can someone please explain how raid works and why its faster? And why should I buy 3 SSD's when I could buy a PCIE ssd?

Gozer

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Reply # 1245878 24-Feb-2015 20:31

It would be good to have more information like budget and your use case to tailor answers better to you.

Ronsoak

202 posts

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Reply # 1245881 24-Feb-2015 20:36

Oh I'm going to spend $2000-$4000 in a years time or over the next year, so budget is fluid.

Gozer

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Reply # 1245882 24-Feb-2015 20:36

M00S3: Can someone please explain how raid works and why its faster? And why should I buy 3 SSD's when I could buy a PCIE ssd?

Raid is many things but the others are talking about RAID 0 specifically that increases speed by writing segments of data to different disks at the same time.
In theory (not accurate) 2 disks in RAID 0 will write twice as fast as a single disk and 3 will be 3 times.
The down side is with RAID 0 if 1 disk dies all the data is lost, so the more disks you have the more likely 1 failure will bring down all the data.

Jase2985

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Reply # 1245885 24-Feb-2015 20:37

M00S3: Can someone please explain how raid works and why its faster? And why should I buy 3 SSD's when I could buy a PCIE ssd?

because it cant write the 1mb of data to x numbers of drives at the same time, and when reading it it reads from x drives at the same time. so this speeds things up as it has to write/read less data from each drive but the transfer speed for each drive is added together (near enough) to give a significantly faster speed to one drive.

Google how raid works, its worth the read if your interested as there are multiple different forms of raid

Gozer

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Reply # 1245899 24-Feb-2015 20:40

M00S3: Oh I'm going to spend $2000-$4000 in a years time or over the next year, so budget is fluid.

and do you want the fastest games possible (you say its a gaming PC) or are you doing other things, as said before gaming isn't really disk intensive.

timmmay

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Reply # 1245906 24-Feb-2015 20:53

I think you're best off getting a Samsung 850 pro in whatever size you need - Windows only needs 60GB, 120GB max, so 256 or 512MB should be fine even with games. PCI SSD won't make anything faster in the real world for what most people do - for super high volume databases, maybe, but for gaming, nah.

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Ronsoak

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Reply # 1245914 24-Feb-2015 21:04

So you guys have given really good input and yea you've touched on the crux of this all, that I want to build an expensive gaming rig that will last me a while so of course I see things like Raid and PCIE SSD and i guess Im wanting to know whether its worth my time and money in regards to gaming performance. Yes I do other stuff but gaming is the primary focus.

Currently I have the OS on a 128GB SSD and then everything else goes on a 1TB HDD. <- What would you do to speed that up? (storage wise?)

Also what about M.2 SSD?

raytaylor

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Reply # 1245915 24-Feb-2015 21:05

M00S3: Can someone please explain how raid works and why its faster? And why should I buy 3 SSD's when I could buy a PCIE ssd?

There are different "levels" or types of raid that do different things.

The two basic concepts are mirroring and striping.

Mirroring
This is where data goes into the raid controller chip, it is duplicated and goes out to two hard drives of the same specifications.
So if you write a file to the hard drive, it gets duplicated and goes to two hard drives.
If one hard drive fails, the other one continues to work.
This is good in a business server environment because it means that if a drive fails, you can replace a drive, and copy the good data onto the new drive without shutting down the server/computer.

Striping
As a file is written, it is broken up into segments. The first 16 kilobytes might be written to one drive, the second 16 kilobytes might be written to the second drive, the third 16 kilobytes might be written to the third or first drive again.
This speeds up file writing and reading because each drive only needs to perform a small amount of work, while all doing it at the same time means it happens super super fast.
The raid controller usually does all this at the hardware level, so the operating system just sees one standard hard drive and doesnt know they work behind the raid controller that does all this smart stuff.

The basic RAID 0 level uses two or more drives.
When data is written or read, it does it to all drives at once. This gives you redundancy. But not any extra speed. Good for mission critical servers.

The next basic level is striping
This is where you get the extra speed from, and the storage capacity of all the drives is added up (since the files are evenly dispersed in parts across the drives)

And the next level above that does mirroring and striping
This is where it gets interesting.
A) You can stripe across 30 drives as seen in the video I posted above, which gives you 30x the speed.
B) You can mirror across 30 drives as seen in the video which means 29 drives can fail but your 30th drive will keep the system going
C) You can customise which drives are striped and which are mirrored. The two common types are RAID5 which allows you to stripe across 3 or more drives, and use one drive as a mirrored backup.
If you used three drives in RAID5, you would have double the storage space of one drive, and double the speed of one drive, with a third drive acting as a backup. One of the three drives can fail, and the system will continue, while still running fast.
RAID6 allows you to use 5+ drives and have 4 or more acting as striped drives, so you get 4x the performance of 1x drive, with 4x the storage capacity, and two acting as mirrored backups. Any two drives can fail in the array, and all the data will still be intact and the machine will continue to run.

For a home power user I would suggest a simple pair of striped SSD drives for the OS and programs, and a 3TB+ drive (D:) for the 'my documents' storage and data files (porn/movies)
Then use a 4tb external drive to back up all the internals regularly, specifically performing a shadowcopy image backup of the raid/striped SSD drives (C:)

If you are a gamer, you would be best to spend more on a graphics card first, then get a larger SSD, then if you have spare money in the budget, a second SSD to stripe.

Ray Taylor
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