Best SSD for Gaming: PCIe 4.0 vs 3.0 vs SATA vs HDD Load Time Battle

[Music] welcome back todd we're unboxed today we're going to be exploring storage performance a topic that we don't often cover on the channel we're not really storage reviewers we don't have a ton of interest in benchmarking ssds but there are a couple of questions that i've been wanting some solid answers to so today we'll be getting into a bit of that this video has also been in the works for quite some time it's taken months to get the right drives on hand for today's video so a shout out to all the companies that provided drives for this video and have been waiting a long time ever since so what i want to look at in today's video is what sort of storage device do you need to play today's games specifically what sort of drive provides the best loading times so you're not sitting around and waiting ages to get into gaming part of this answer is a bit obvious everyone at this point knows that ssds are faster than hard drives so i want to dial down a bit and see what sort of ssds required do you need a pcie drive do you need something with a dram cache are certain memory technologies worse than others we'll answer that today i think this video will also serve as an interesting point to look back on as we move into a new generation of game consoles up until now most games have been built with hard drives in mind but with new consoles featuring super fast pcie ssds the storage requirements for games may change in the coming years we'll be able to look back on this testing to see just how things have changed the setup for today's video is simple we'll be loading up a variety of games and timing how long it takes to get into a playable level from the main screen loading screens are the primary thing impacted by storage performance in games everyone wants to get in and play games immediately so we'll be testing that across a selection of different titles as we have some pcie 4.0 drives in today's storage suite we will be using our amd ryzen test system it's kitted out with the ryzen 9 3900 xt for today's testing along with an msi x570 tomahawk motherboard 16 gigabytes of ddr4 3200 dual channel memory and nvidia geforce rtx 2080 ti because steve is hoarding all our rtx 30 series gpus and it's built inside this nice corsair case the storage setup sees the system running off an m.2 drive in the second slot with our games for testing running on a separate drive in the primary m.2 slot which has direct links to the cpu let's work our way through the drives we'll be testing because i have 14 different options on hand representing team hard drive in today's battle is the western digital wd-120 emaz 12 terabyte model this is a standard oem drive used for archival storage with a 5400 rpm speed 256 megabytes cache and sata 6 gigabits per second interface we're fully expecting this guy to be pretty slow team sata ssd has three contenders our entry-level model is the team group 500 gigabyte which uses sandisk tlc nand a fizen s11 controller and does not feature a dram cache one step up is the crucial mx 502 terabyte which packs micron tlc nad an smi sm-2258 controller and a dram cache then for the big data hoarders we have the samsung 870 kuvo 8 terabyte with samsung's qlc memory and controller along with an 8 gigabyte dram cache for more specs on all these drives of course you can check out detailed reviews or spec pages we have lots of pci 3.0 x 4 ssds for today's testing as well from western digital we have both the wd black sn750 and wd blue sn550 in one terabyte capacities both use sandisk tlc but the sn750 has a dram cache where the sn550 does not you'll also spot this pre-installed heatsink on the sn750 adata has provided their xpg sx8200 pro one terabyte model which has an smi controller and tlc nand from micron with a dram cache so this is an alternative to the sn750 with different components we also have the sabrent rocket two terabytes a popular option that uses the fizzin e12 controller and toshiba tlc nand with a dram cache then rounding out our pci 3.0 offerings are two qlc drives the first is the intel ssd 665p in a one terabyte capacity which uses an smi sm-2263 controller alongside intel's own qlc memory then as an alternative solution we also have the sabrent rocket q 2 terabyte which features a fison e12s controller and micron qlc net both drives also feature dram caches then we have three pci 4.0 drives all of which use essentially the same design the seagate fire cuda 521 terabyte and corsair force mp 601 terabyte both have tlc nand from toshiba and fyson e16 controllers the sabrent rocket 4.02 terabytes is similar but with a larger capacity and last but not least we have an ssd with a usb interface the samsung t5 this drive features usb 3.2 gen 2x1 and tlc memory from samsung along with as you might have guessed a samsung controller there's also a dram cache as is the case for the pci 4.0 drives i was just talking about before getting into the game data let's run a single synthetic workload crystal disk mark to see what the numbers say this is a typical workload you might fire up on your new ssd after you get it to see those super high numbers so how do these drives stack up for sequential reads it's a pretty simple story at the top with five gigabytes per second transfer speeds are the pci 4.0 drives all of the pcie 4.0 drives are in the range of 30 to 40 percent faster than the next group of higher-end pcie 3.0 drives for performance one step down from that are the more entry-level pci 3.0 offerings such as the ssd 665p and sn550 then we see the cider drives capped to around 550 megabytes per second sequential reads and the hard drive comes in last generally the difference between a pcie 3.0 drive and a cider drive is that the pci 3.0 model has up to seven times faster sequential reads for sequential writes the story doesn't change too much either although this is peak performance from writing into those dram caches things do get more interesting when it comes to random performance although at high q depths there is still an advantage going pci 4.0 over 3.0 the qlc-based pci 3.0 ssds deliver the least impressive performance here less than half that of the better tlc models cider ssds also suffer offering just a quarter of pci 3.0 performance in the best cases of course for single queue depth random reads there isn't much separating a lot of these drives except for the hard drive which is very slow in comparison to even the slowest ssd here's the random write performance as well while writing random data isn't as strenuous as reading it for some of these drives cider models do suffer again with just one fifth of performance on offer so that's a quick look at the synthetic numbers based on this it looks like pcie 4.0 drives are clearly the fastest in this test followed as expected by the higher end then more entry level pcie 3.0 drives these nvme options are then much faster than cider drives often four times faster or more with the slow mechanical hard drive rounding out the group with performance that's particularly bad for random reads and writes but does this matter for game loading well let's find out i want to start here with horizon zero dawn one of the most resource intensive games you can play on pc today however for load times it's not hugely dependent on storage performance at least when you get into the ssds the slower sata drive the samsung 870 cuvo offered a 73 speed up to load times versus the hard drive so it's clear that having an ssd is important but beyond that there's just a 36 improvement moving from the slowest to fastest ssd tested for loading horizon zero dawn there is no clear advantage to having a pci 4.0 drive over pci 3.0 despite the 4.0 drives putting in say 30 better read performance and crystal disk mark when loading this game in the best case the 4.0 drive was two seconds faster than the slowest 3.0 drive at a 15 speed up that's on the minor end of the scale and that's comparing entry-level pci 3.0 in a drive like the sn550 to the top end fire cue to 520 there is a small gap between the slider slash usb and pci 3.0 drives on average the non-pci ssds loaded in 21 seconds compared to 17 seconds for the pci-equipped models that's a respectable 24 improvement but it's not nearly in line with the huge differences in synthetic workloads we're talking drives that can pull 2 gigabytes per second reads easily versus a cap of just 500 megabytes per second for the cider models that doesn't really materialize when loading games the difference is even less pronounced in death stranding there was just a two second difference in load times between the fastest and slowest ssd models yes there is a tendency for the side of drives to be slightly slower but this is a marginal difference it's hardly worth talking about even the hard drive does reasonably well in this game loading in just 22 seconds in shadow of the tomb raider again just a two second difference between the fastest and slowest ssds so in this case up to a fifteen percent gain going from an entry-level cider drive to a blazing fast pcie 4.0 option it's also clear from the testing so far that having a dram cache as expected plays little to no role in game loading or read performance the dramless sn550 is one of the faster models for loading this game however it's clearly better to have at least some form of ssd for loading tomb raider loading from a hard drive was more than twice as slow and while overall load times aren't terrible on a hard drive a simple speed up from an ssd is worthwhile red dead redemption 2 is one of the slower loading games in our test suite which is why we chose to use it however these slow loading times do not appear to be as a result of storage bottlenecks at least with an ssd most drives loaded this game in around 40 seconds with a negligible difference between loading from a starter or pcie drive however it is worth having an ssd as you'll shave 23 seconds off the load time versus a hard drive borderlands 3 is an interesting case as we're looking at the loading time for both loading into the level and then waiting for the assets and textures to load in when loading this game you'll often have to wait a few seconds for everything to be fully rendered despite this the game doesn't appear to be storage limited during this process as all ssds took between 17 and 19 seconds to load the game and its assets fully in fact nearly all of these drives loaded into the level within about 11 seconds and then there were some small differences in texture loading times in any case with some of the entry entry-level sided drives performing well and say the saber rocket 4.0 being not quite as quick it appears the engine is more to blame for loading than the storage you're loading from this is another game where i didn't see huge speed up coming from a hard drive to ssd either yes ssds were noticeably faster but not to the extent of a game like horizon zero dawn or shadow of the tomb raider the outer worlds was a game i chose to test because it has a lot of loading screens luckily if you're playing from an ssd loading shouldn't be that painful as it was one of the quickest games to load that i tested however it only appears to require an ssd to be fast not any specific sort of ssd once you have solid state storage at hand there is only a one second difference between the fastest and slowest models and there was no preference for pcie over sata it was a bit of everything one thing is clear though get an ssd for playing out of worlds as they are more than twice as fast for game loading versus a hard drive playing this game off a hard drive would get pretty frustrating constantly having to put up with 25 second load times when you could be loading in as low as 11 seconds assassin's creed odyssey loading into the heart of athens is another title where your choice of ssd doesn't really matter pcie drives were on average just seven percent faster than non-pcie drives for loading into the game which is a pretty negligible difference and there was no clear advantage to pcie 4.0 drives at all with the additional speed of those models providing no benefit however like with outer worlds loading this game from a hard drive is much slower two and a half times slower to be exact so it's definitely worth having an ssd for loading this game next we have loading into the division two in this game we're looking at loading with all textures rendered with the time taken from after the game connects to live services to the final textures being loaded this title behaves more like horizon zero dawn in that there is a small but more noticeable advantage to some ssds over others and having faster storage can speed up your entry into the game world the differences aren't huge though an entry-level pcie 3.0 ssd like the sn550 is less than 10 faster than a value champion like the crucial mx 500 and some of the faster pcie drives load the game fully around 20 quicker than the more entry level models there is a six second difference between the best and worst ssds but we're still well off some of the results we saw in our synthetic workload from earlier still there is a moderate improvement moving from a hard drive so i suspect most gamers will want to play this game on an ssd like the others we've been looking at the final game i wanted to check out is planet coaster the reason here is that loads into simulation games with large game worlds is known to be particularly slow across pretty much all of these sorts of games so whether you're loading a big theme park or a big city in a world building game you can expect load times that take multiple minutes however what's really important to realize is that these load times are not due to slow storage speeds when loading a huge planet coaster park generally the game took at least six minutes to load on my 3900xt system with a 26 second difference between the fastest and slowest drives but as you'll see here there's really not much of a difference between a hard drive and ssd for loading this game and only somewhat of a tendency for faster pcie drives to outperform slower side of models although even that isn't guaranteed all of the time what we end up getting in planet coaster is a bit of a much of a muchness there's a seven percent difference splitting the fastest and slowest drives which when you're having to wait over six minutes even with a super fast pci 4.0 ssd isn't really worth talking about the simple fact is that in these sorts of games there is far more processing work that goes on when loading a level then there is copying from storage into system or gpu memory it's much more important to have a fast system overall for loading than is having a blazing fast ssd and i wouldn't go upgrading your drive to get faster loads in games like these it just won't happen after working through all of this data i don't think there are too many surprises in here for pc gamers most people in this community would already know that if you want to improve loading times for your games upgrading from a hard drive to an ssd is a no-brainer in all instances the hard drive was the slowest storage device for loading and in many cases upgrading to even the slowest ssd led to games loading in half the time hard drives are fine for archival storage for games but moving the game you're currently playing to faster storage makes a lot of sense however what has become blatantly clear from this testing is that it doesn't matter what sort of ssd you have for gaming so long as you have an ssd of some sort in six of the nine games we tested there was only a two second difference in load times between an entry-level sata ssd and the absolute fastest pci 4.0 drive in percentages this was usually below a 15 performance uplift moving from the fastest to the slowest drive which is hardly worth talking about in the best cases like horizon zero dawn in the division two even then it doesn't really make sense to go all out on a high performance drive for gaming i did see up to a 35 percent speed up for load times moving from entry level sata to super fast pci 4.0 but what we're talking about in raw numbers is the difference between waiting 21 seconds and 16 seconds right now even the best ssds don't offer an instant game load experience so for many buyers i don't think it's worth paying quite a large premium to shave off just a few seconds to load times there's also very little difference between different ssd specifications pcie 4.0 vs 3.0 provides essentially no benefit in most cases especially compared to a top-end pci 3.0 drive qlc memory is not slower than tlc for reading game files having a dram cache is also not important for game loading the only specification that has some influence is whether the ssd is sata or pcie with sata being slightly slower but beyond that other specs are rather meaningless for gaming why don't games benefit all that much from fast ssds well it seems pretty clear that storage performance is not the main bottleneck for loading today's games pretty much all games up to this point are designed to be run-off hard drives which are very slow after all the previous generation of consoles with the ps4 and xbox one both used slow mechanical drives to store games today's game engines simply aren't built to make full use of fast storage and so far there's been little incentive to optimize for pcie ssds instead the main limitation seems to be things like how quickly the cpu can decompress assets and how quickly it can process a level before it's ready for action rather than how fast it can read data off storage while choosing an ssd for gaming is pretty easy based on this data there are some extra elements to consider so here's where i'd end up with my recommendations if you are planning to play games off a secondary ssd in your system so separate from your boot drive buying an ssd for this task is super straightforward you're going to be better off buying say a cheap sata drive with a high capacity it's much more preferable to have more storage for games than it is to get a slight performance uplift from pcie and this is where sata drives excel with that said in today's market there often isn't a huge difference in price between say a cheap entry-level pcie m.2 ssd like say the intel ssd 665p and a cheap-sided drive an entry-level drive like this sata model from team group in a one terabyte capacity is only often 20 to 30 dollars cheaper than say we've got over here the wd blue sn550 so when you're tossing that up it's not too much of a difference where that gap extends though is in the high capacity range four terabyte drives such as the samsung ssd 870 kuvo as my secret rocket falls over is much cheaper than you'd get from a four terabyte pcie model like the sabret rocket q which actually is this model right here so this drive on my hand here four terabytes is going to cost you about 500 us dollars the saving rocket q4 terabyte is going to cost 750 dollars in this capacity range it makes much more sense to buy something like the 870 kuvo with its sighted performance the one caveat i'd make to this recommendation is that some drives are much slower to copy data to than others qlc based drives like the samsung 870 cuvo or the intel ssd 665p that we've got here can be slow to write to once you get beyond their dram or slc caches and you're writing directly to the qlc memory if you're going to copy games in and out of storage a lot from another fast source it might make more sense to avoid one of these qlc based ssds and stick with a tlc option but this likely will be more expensive though and qlc is still a great choice for an archive type ssd that you're going to play games off of if you're going to have just one drive in your system that doubles as both a boot drive and a gaming drive i'd make a somewhat different set of recommendations because in this situation you're not just game loading that you're worrying about but general system tasks and well things like app loading while we didn't really cover anything other than gaming in this video i think it's still important to talk about briefly as a boot drive it is worth paying a premium for pcie 3.0 storage especially given current pricing for one to two terabyte drives where pcie doesn't cost that much more specifically i'd be after something with a dram cache so you get that nice peak right performance so probably not the wd blue sn550 and i preferably want tlc memory as well to avoid some of the performance shortfalls of qlc but i wouldn't be going out of my way to get anything higher than that in a gaming focus build it's really not worth paying for pci 4.0 storage yet or any of the professional focus drives with high-end controllers like say samsung's pro line pricing may vary depending on the retailer you're looking at but something like the sx 8200 pro or the wd black sn750 right around the mark of good value here with both off and around 130 us dollars the sabrent rocket you'll see some of those there they've also been quite popular at times these drives are around 25 more at one terabytes than their dramless or qlc based entry-level competitors but as a boot drive i think it's worth spending that extra cash whereas for a secondary drive for gaming i wouldn't say it's worth it but in general do your research on what's available and at what specifications but you might be shouting or angrily typing into the comments right now what about this next generation of gaming don't the ps5 and xbox series x pack powerful ssds which will make ssd performance key for gaming that's definitely a possibility but we're likely talking about several years down the track apis like microsoft's direct storage which is designed to mimic the storage capabilities of these new consoles has only just been released for developers like with all technology transitions we've seen one prior example being directx 12 it'll be several years before we start to see these things harnessed in cross-platform titles on pc with that in mind and with the higher prices for pci 4.0 storage i don't think it's worth buying a fast ssd now and waiting for performance to be utilized in games because we aren't seeing any benefit today you could be waiting a few years and in that time pcie 4.0 drives will likely become a fair bit cheaper so i'd say it makes more sense to buy an ssd that's capable today you know again something like this than it is to buy a pci 4.0 drive and then i would think about upgrading to something faster when games start requiring it and those drives become cheaper so that's it for today's storage investigation as you can see lots of drives here in front of me you've got mx 500s here as well saving rockets all sorts of stuff and even trusty hard drives which we still like perhaps not for loading games from but they still can be a useful integration into your pc if you're interested in you know getting a bit of high capacity storage for cheap so anyway lots of stories that we've gone through today if there is anything else you want us to use all these dryers for testing if you want to see other sorts of testing done with ssds we've got a whole bunch of them in hand now so let us know in the comments below if you're interested in seeing more storage testing interesting swapping all those drives in and out again anyway if you're interested in supporting our testing as well we have our patreon page links to that are in the description below you get access to our monthly live streams behind the scenes videos discord chat all that sort of thing subscribe for more and i'll catch you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 420,252

Keywords: hardware unboxed, storage, best ssd for gaming, best ssd, hard drive, ssd

Id: COofLeqk_tM

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/NewMaxx]

https://www.techspot.com/review/2116-storage-speed-game-loading/

[u/Qarasaujaqti]

Tldw?

[u/thenameableone]

Would the optimisations/overhauls made on games (let's say 3+ years from now) automatically apply to SATA SSDs just as much as PCIe ones?

[u/warlock2397]

Seems pretty accurate.

[u/cwm9]

No SK Hynix Gold P31 with its 128-layer flash.