Does a Faster SSD Matter for Gamers?? - $h!t Manufacturers Say

on this episode of manufacturers say we're gonna show one way or the other if we've already reached the point where a gamer or video editor simply won't be able to tell the difference between a slow SSD and a fast one the title of this video does have some truth in it when we went from hard drives to SSDs there was a period where the single most noticeable upgrade you could make to an aging system was a storage upgrade but like CPUs Ram or anything else there is a point of seriously diminishing returns and honestly I take issue with manufacturers telling consumers that they need to upgrade their system because our new products does 4,000 megabytes per second instead of 3,000 whoa what was that EDD hair can you back that thing up a second yeah yeah that one right there you zoom in on that Wow if you look really closely you can see our sponsor instantly see your current and past Network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with glassware use offer code line is to get 25% off at the link below [Music] both manufacturers and my fellow media alike have been found suggesting that gamers or content creators like video editors might benefit in some way from the superfast PCIe gen 4 SSDs that are making their way onto the market and guys I love fast computers as much as the next person but when it comes to this I feel a little bit like the kid who finally calls out that the emperor's new clothes are a lie and he's just naked because it has been a long time since an SSD upgrade has wowed me that is aside from blazing fast benchmark numbers so to see if I'm the only one we've built up a fun little side by side by side test here these three systems are nearly identical they've all got risin 9 3,900 X processors RT X 2070 graphics cards and 32 gigs of DDR for memory but one of them has a bog-standard SATA SSD another has a last generation nvme SSD that does around 1,500 megabytes a second and finally we've got a PCIe gen four SSD tearing up our lanes at a blistering 49 50 megabytes a second it should be noted that that last one did need a motherboard upgrade to give us PCIe gen for compatibility but we've adjusted the performance parameters to ensure that it has no other advantage so let's start then by asking our test subjects where they are expecting to notice the difference between the systems the only difference I would expect is in loading the games initially or like a map changing maps but in actual gameplay I really don't expect anything in Adobe Premiere I really think the bottleneck will actually be the software I don't think I'll be able to tell the difference in games or in most applications but in something that's very heavy and like big files maybe like video editing or like transferring you might be able to feel it a little bit more my expectation with game loading times that unless I'm running the game side by side the voting time difference is be so small that it hard time remembering which one is which really from 600 megabytes a second to nine times that speed we'll see I'll probably be able to tell the difference and load up times and just snappiness to the system start with this one system number one the point of this is just to find out well you know is it obvious if we wanted to know you know which one's faster we would use benchmarks yeah that's fast because there's often hang-ups there for the loading oh wow I haven't played this game a little bit though 2015 16 16 seconds 16 seconds for mirage now that's something we're not allowing people to do is just copy files from folder to folder on the drive because yeah there will be a big difference there but is that really representative of day to day use or is gaming and video editing it's not bad it's better than playing off the network for sure I can't really imagine this getting all that much faster felt's notice will be quicker than I expect and I expect pretty fast so ok good system number 2 I really think that counting is kind of akin to benchmarking and so 9 3 11 6 1 it is a bit slower Wow yeah this is not as responsive the other time I was able to drag it it was all immediate I seemed like there was a bit of a delay when I was loading stop care you have to do it by feel yeah I'm not going to be able to tell the difference between them unless my my counting was actually pretty consistent but you won't know if you're counting was consistent no I'm just gonna assume and then I'm gonna make my guesses based on the counting and then I'll know whether or not it was consistent based on the results in whether or not I was correct right okay yeah I actually don't find this that much worse it felt like it took a little bit longer to get going are we at a point of diminishing returns oh absolutely come on that's the question we're asking system 2 is definitely overall slower I was surprised to find that in every game across the board it took just another second another 2 seconds to load not a huge deal and the grand scheme of things but it's definitely noticeable when you're looking for the details okay system 3 system 3 let's go well this one also a little bit pretty quick but I have to check the first one again very very choppy just trying to play this at full res slower slower this is low Sun okay let's see I'm not high I could be high okay so I just loaded up doom and that was pretty slow too you know there's all the marketing yeah and it's like well hold on a second where is that point of diminishing returns right I suspect we're past it PC 3 is definitely slower than the other two if that lasts 95% in Doom took a lot longer than it did on the other stations in Premiere I saw the loading bar on this one I don't even remember seeing the loading bars on the other ones system 3 felt kind of like a mixed bag it was snappy in some places but it felt a little less responsive in others that being said at some points it was like kind of the fastest system but other things that loaded the slowest so I'm kind of confused about this one the most I was pretty sure about the first two but the third ones throwing me for a bit of a loop system number 3 I noticed was a little bit slower it got hung up in doom at the 75% loading mark a little bit longer than the other systems but once premier was in there and I hit full resin play it just died it was really stuttering wait you can't bend your head to head you can tell me that got a drag race I mean it is no you can't it's a blind taste test it is not a drag race they are very different concepts very different I don't know I'm high [Laughter] I take back everything I said you got to declare it okay call it call your shot I think this is SATA Envy me Gen 4 are you ready to declare your answers I think so okay I can say pretty definitively that the second one is SATA okay it felt across the board the slowest okay I have a harder time telling between these two this one felt slower than this one this one felt consistently the fastest so my immediate guess would be that this is the Gen 4 and that's the nvme but maybe it's reversed and maybe Gen 4 is just so new that it's not consistent for sure that's the SATA I'm pretty sure gen 3 is number 2 gen 4 is number one okay this one is the fastest but only because LTTE story I'll tell you the real answer stiff we're gonna have sticker packs soon you know he'll TT Starcom anyway okay so I want to know the answer to so I'm just gonna hang around I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try this one now say that was that's been four oh okay fine whatever I'm crazy that is Gen 3 nvme okay yeah okay yeah that you're right you're one for one that is PCIe gen four no it's not that's not poss and that's a no really this was PCI you Jennifer that was done for okay okay this was PCIe gen3 really well what oh my god yes I'm not surprised that I was wrong honestly I'm I disappointed him I was wrong yes so when I use the first system I had no point of reference and so maybe it felt so fast and then I started comparing the other ones and I could kind of feel the the pause longer so I yeah I don't know I'm speechless do you think you'd had any hope of telling the difference between them if you weren't sitting in front of all three of them at once not even a little bit of a chance not even the slightest chance at all what's interesting to me though is that two men everyone who took the test picked the SATA system as the fastest one so what that indicates to me then is that the differences that we perceive once you're running an SSD are pretty much gonna come down to psychological ones like maybe just from looking at this one first that makes a bigger difference we actually had a conclusion written up for this by Colin there goes so here you have it the results show that there is a noticeable difference between SATA and nvme drives which is expected but bla bla bla bla I actually didn't necessarily think that that was gonna be the case I really wish I had been able to stay blind so that I could have taken the challenge myself but I was not expecting anyone to be able to tell the difference now with that said that's not to say that there's no reason to consider a high-quality SSD there's higher-quality flash which will be rated for more programming race cycles giving it better longevity there's firmware and controller quality which can affect the behavior of the drive when it's near max capacity and things like that there's D Ram cache which is absolutely necessary ad Ram 'less SSD will actually perform like a hard drive in many situations and then of course there is applications beyond just your typical gaming or video editing and that's where I think a lot of the fun comes in is convincing people that for gaming or for simple video editing that you need this high performance storage because the cold hard truth is that even 8k red footage it maxes out at 280 megabytes a second that is comfortably well within the realm of what SATA can handle speaking of limits there's no limit to how bad my segues can get main gears vector gaming laptop is available at 25 micro central locations as well as on Amazon it's $1,000 at Micro Center and 11 9999 on their Amazon listing it features an Intel Core i7 97 50 H at 2.6 gigahertz base a geforce gtx 1660 TI 6 gig card 16 gigs of Dean our 420 666 memory a 512 gig nvme solid-state drive whoo a 15.6 inch 144 hertz display now that's something that really will make a difference to your gaming and you can check out it and other micro Center specials at the links in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this kind of you know side by side taste test challenge maybe check out oh we did a video recently checking out key switches other veterans coming soon so make sure you're subscribed or go look for it

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,574,821

Rating: 4.9240317 out of 5

Keywords: ssd, storage, PCIe, pci-e, ram, flash, gddr5, memory, harddrive, hard drive, sata, nvme, gen4, crucial, wd, western digital, corsair, mp600, mp300, wd blue, gaming, premier, editing, blind, test

Id: 4DKLA7w9eeA

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020

Reddit Comments

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[u/PlaysForDays]

This is a point that the community, at least gamers on a moderate budget, really need to come around to. People still seem to think that NVMe:SATA::SATA:HDD and are paying out the ass for NVMe drives that are used for booting, gaming, and light editing. It hurts to see people spend upwards of $200 on an NVMe drive for a ~$1500 gaming build when a <$100 SATA SSD would not be a noticable downgrade and would either give room for upgrading other hardware or just save money.

Edit: I should slightly clarify that I'm complaining more about getting fast drives than NVMe vs older SSDs. An even simpler summary would be "don't pay more for faster drives, it's not worth the money"

[u/190n]

Did I miss the part where they said which exact models they used, or was that just left out? Because there are a lot of factors besides the interface that make a difference.

It also would've been nice to see a faster PCIe gen3 drive. Their 1500MB/s model (a QLC drive?) is a lot slower than what people looking for performance would buy. Even like a Sabrent Rocket or something else that gets past 3000MB/s and with higher IOPS.

[u/althaz]

I bought a lower-end NVMe SSD for my games (corsair MP510 1920Gb), it is noticeably faster than my old (like, 7+ years old) SATA SSD...but there's no difference between that and my higher-end boot drive (Samsung 970 Evo+) for any normal-people tasks.

The reason I bought a higher end unit anyway to be my system drive is because for compiling, the Samsung drive is quite a lot faster.

As long as you're fairly careful what you buy, a good SATA SSD is usually plenty fast enough for most people most of the time.

[u/Kozhany]

I'm not sure what point LTT are trying to make with this video.

You can skew the perceived results of this meaningless interface comparison by using different SSD models for each one (even within the same price range), so what's the point?

[u/zyck_titan]

It's very easy to disprove this entire video with a different selection of SATA SSD, PCIe Gen 3, and PCIe Gen 4 drives. Although I don't think there is a PCIe Gen 4 drive that I would use today.

Although I do agree that manufacturers claims of "more Mb/s is better" is complete and utter bullshit. Selecting drives based on their low queue depth latency and iops performance is the real trick.

[u/_TheEndGame]

I'd still get an NVME ssd just to saturate the slot.

[u/WhiteZero]

Game loading won't see a difference until developers start switching over to streaming huge areas in real time from storage. Supposedly that'll be the target for the new consoles, but probably not even for after a few years after their release. When that happens HDD and slow SSD will suffer.

[u/kaustix2]

So is there no workload that would benefit from these drives?