Are PCIe 4.0 SSDs worth it? SATA vs PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 4.0

hey what's up everyone danny here in this video we're going to talk about ssds now storage devices are not the most glamorous pc components to talk about compared to say graphics cards or processors they're not the first thing that people look at when we see these beautiful pictures of systems being posted online and there's no like super huge launch events surrounding them but they are very essential and they can easily make or break your overall computing experience so in this video let's talk about the various types of ssds there are out there the pros and cons of each of them and then test their performance in real world use cases so that you yourself can decide which one is best suited for [Music] you so micro center was kind enough to send over a few ssds for me to test out in this video and the cool thing about these are that they're actually available on amazon as well so even if you don't have a micro center nearby you can still pick one up if you like the performance you see later on in the video in this day and age you're likely going to come across these common types of ssds when searching online and the most popular form factors are the two and a half inch and the m.2 there are other form factors like add-in card and the older msata but they're not as mainstream within the m.2 form factor you have various types of ssds that are categorized by how they interface with your system and that can be via sata which is very similar to the two athletes drive with regards to speed and then you have pci gen 3 which is this one and the newer pcie gen4 these different types will determine how fast these drives can potentially be right now i would say that all these different types of ssds are relevant even though there's clearly a hierarchy to them in terms of their performance the price difference and their different use cases can still make the slower ones viable and i didn't even actually say that spinning hard disk drives are still relevant but some people may find that debatable but let's look at the pros and cons and we'll start with the hard disk drive which i know this is a ssd focused video but i do end up showing mechanical drive results later on in the video for comparison so let's talk about it these come in at higher storage capacities cost less per gigabyte and are compatible with a wider range of hardware from new to old because they use the sata interface the cons are that they're slow they consume more power they're more sensitive to impact and vibration they're noisy require two cables per drive for more wires to manage and they take up more space because how big and bulky they are next are the two and a half inch ssds which are the cheapest of the ssd bunch when it comes to gigabytes per dollar and they offer drastically improved boot up and load times as well as superior read and write speeds over mechanical drives and they're also compatible with most hardware because again they're on the sata interface the cons is that they still require two cables per drive and they're multiple times slower than their pcie counterparts when it comes to read and write performance m.2 pcie gen 3 drives are multiple times faster than sata drives and take up very low space with no extra cables needed their cons are their higher price point compared to two and a half inch data ssds and their limited compatibility to hardware with m.2 slots last are the m.2 pcie gen 4 drives which can be multiple times faster than gen 3 drives and come with all the same benefits the cons list is that they are the most expensive of the common ssds and only the newest of hardware that support pcie 4.0 can fully utilize their speeds i didn't really talk about m.2 sata ssds because i don't really recommend them they're using the same price as gen 3 nvme drives with the limited speeds of sata so they have very limited use cases for when you have an m.2 sata only slot available and you really want to avoid the two extra cables from using a two and a half inch drive the drives i'll be testing are the inland professional two and a half inch sata drive inland premium pcie gen 3 nvme drive and the inland performance plus pcie gen 4 nvme drive oh yeah and of course we do have the trusty old 7200 rpm three and a half inch mechanical drive just for reference i used this highly sophisticated test bench that's running a ryzen 9 3900x and 32 gigabytes of team group excalibur ram at 3 600 megahertz the motherboard is the x570rs elite which has dual m.2 pcie 4.0 slots and this is important so the transfers to the nvme drives aren't bottlenecked first let's take a look at the numbers in crystal dismark 8 which is a synthetic test that looks at the read write speeds and the numbers are pretty much expected for all the drives these synthetic tests should always be taken with a grain of salt because the numbers don't always translate over when it comes to real performance so the following tests i'm about to show you are what i believe to be the most relevant uh day-to-day use cases for the average person myself included the first real world test that we're going to look at has to be the boot test because who out there doesn't want to push the on button to their pc and have it ready to go as soon as possible note that the unit shown here is in minutes over here is in seconds but this last one is in 1 30th of a second because here we're measuring the time based on screen capture that i used in 30fps which is then thrown into premiere pro with the time code overlay as you can see here both the gen 3 and gen 4 nvme drives perform practically the same and the two and a half inch sata ssd comes in almost two seconds later and the hard drive well that took just shy of 47 seconds to boot to me all the ssd boot up sounds were good even the sata one two seconds isn't that big of a deal uh but yeah let's move on to the next test here we're looking at load times in a game and for this test i used the final fantasy 14 shadowbringers benchmark which is free to download and use so that you can also do the same and test your drives if you wanted i'm using this because load times is one of the metrics built into the benchmark and it makes it really convenient to test and replicate multiple times and in this test the pcie gen 4 drive wins as expected with the gen 3 drive coming in a little over a second after it and the sata ssd trailing it by almost 3 seconds the mechanical drive takes more than twice the amount of time to load as the slowest ssd i also tested the second game one that has a reputation for having really long load times and that's grand theft auto 5. i looked at the load time for story mode because it's really consistent playing online i found that the load time is very random sometimes you get that stuck in the clouds problem when loading in so i didn't want that to be an uncontrolled variable when loading in i was surprised to find that all three ssds were very close to one another i would have thought the sata drive would have been noticeably slower but nope it's just as good the hard drive comes in dead last at over 54 seconds so there's a pretty noticeable difference between final fantasy 14 and grand theft auto 5 and it goes to show that load times will be different depending on the title that you test just because the gen 4 drive is this many times faster than the other drives in one game doesn't mean it's going to be that way for all the games it's also dependent on how the game is optimized but so far what we're seeing is that you know if you have an ssd at all it doesn't matter what type you have gen forge and three sata you're pretty set but that's going to bring us now to the next test which is the file transfer test and this is a simple test where i drag and drop files into each drive and see how long it takes the first test will be with a single file and i have a video that's in 4k and it's quite big at four and a half gigabytes the gen 4 drive finishes the quickest in just under four seconds with each of the other ssds trailing subsequently one second behind and the hard drive comes in dead last at nine and a half seconds a single file transfer is pretty easy so next i did a tougher test which was a larger transfer of an entire project folder of one of my videos this folder is 200 gigabytes and is made up of over 400 different files in seven different subfolders and this is very much a real use case scenario that i deal with for my youtube workflow on this test for the gen 4 drive i copied the folder to itself because i didn't want to read speeds from the slower drives to potentially limit how fast the files could write to it which does make a difference i didn't bother doing that with the single file transfer because it was only a couple of seconds but for bigger transfers it's going to definitely matter the gen 4 drive comes in just a hair over two minutes followed by the gen 3 drive at three and a half minutes and the sata ssd at over 12 minutes and the hard drive and dead last at 23 minutes that's a very large spread across all the drives it's the biggest difference that we've seen so far compared to the other previous tests and for the last test i looked at each drive based on the user experience they gave within adobe premiere pro this is not really a quantifiable test it's pretty subjective and it's based on how snappy and quick premiere feels while jumping around and randomly scrubbing the timeline and i loaded up the 4k video file from earlier and had it stacked on itself for two different layers and for all the drives they felt more or less the same i didn't notice a difference even between the gen 4 drive and the mechanical drive working on the timeline felt identical and that's because the performance on this relies on the cpu gpu and ram more than it does the storage device i recently edited on a slower ryzen 5 3600 processor with only 16 gigabytes of system memory and even with a 1080p video file it would sometimes have noticeable delay when i'm skipping around the timeline compared to this system with the 3900x in it and the same goes for exporting as well it's negligible between the drives because the export time will be borrow neck by the speed at which the cpu and gpu are able to actually render out the video and you're gonna hit that bottleneck well before you can saturate the right speeds to the drive even for the mechanical drive but there you have it so after seeing all those results which ssd type would you pick as your go to for me personally it's going to be the m.2 pcie gen 3 ssds i think they strike the perfect sweet spot between price performance and the ease of installation with zero cable management required but with that said as i mentioned at the start of the video all these types of ssds are still very relevant as someone who frequently builds lower-end systems with older hardware i still find myself using two and a half inch sata ssds because old hardware just simply don't have m.2 slots my personal benchmarking drive that's loaded with all the games i use for testing is a two and a half inch data ssd because it's much easier to swap between systems compared to m.2 drives and again it has the best compatibility for both brand new builds and then older budget builds also one last thing to note is if you can get an ssd with a dram cache there's no easy way to tell if a drive has dram it's not usually listed in the available specs and there's no software that just flat out tells you so your best bet is to go to google and find the information i personally like to use this spreadsheet that new max from reddit put together it has information on a ton of drives and i'll have this link down below in the description it's very useful dbram doesn't make too much of a difference for buddha performance or game load times basically any read related tasks you'll be fine but for really big right workloads you're going to see a drop-off in performance as the drive fills up the two and a half inch inland professional drive tested in this video is actually a dram less drive and here's a test that we saw earlier dropping the big project folder into it when it was only a quarter full which it pretty much maintained the expected speeds throughout but when it was two thirds full and i repeated the same test there's a huge drop off in the right performance so yeah definitely be aware of this there are still some use cases for dramless ssds but if they're about the same price or like within 10 bucks of each other just go with the one with dram but yeah that's gonna wrap it up for this video hope you enjoyed and found it useful in one way or another let me know down in the comments below what types of drives you currently have in your system right now and if you're building a new system or if you're just looking for a new drive in general which type of drive are you leaning towards and why i want to thank you all as always for watching and supporting the channel i want to thank micro center for kindly sending over these drives for me to test uh and yeah i'll see you all down in the comments as well as in the next video [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Nerd on a Budget

Views: 28,774

Keywords: nerd, on, budget, noab, gamer, gaming, games, video, nerdy, computer, pc, build, console, technology, windows, killer, nvidia, amd, intel, extreme, value, super, cheap, parts, reddit, hardwareswap, deal, showcase, hardware, deals, ssd inland professional premium performance sata nvme pcie gen3 gen4 read write performance, which is best buying guide, M.2 NVME M.2 M.2 NVME vs SSD SSD vs HDD, M.2 vs HDD ssd hdd Game Loading Times windows loading, m.2 ssd vs sata ssd m.2 vs sata m.2 pci express ssd nvme ssd m.2

Id: ytLtn7awYRw

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021