Should you use PCie Gen 5 NVMe as a boot drive? Will Windows work?

hello this is the provoked prawn and a while back I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Seagate fire Cuda 540. this is a pcie Gen 5 mvme SSD but what's interesting about it is that the insane read write speeds of 10 000 megabytes per second now when I initially got my hands on this drive it'd come quick on the heels of the crucial t700 which is actually a little bit faster but was prone to running really hot now what I wanted to do was look at the Gen 5 drives and analyze the sort of performance under load I did some tests with and without heatsinks and stickers to see how it performed and I'll link to those videos in the description because they're pretty interesting if you've not seen them already and the conclusion is you need stickers and he sinks and to make sure these jars run cool but then I wanted to see how it would perform in other instances just recently got a gigabyte ITX board along with a Corsair 2000d which is a tiny little case and I wanted to combine these two things for a variety of different tests and to bring you content in interesting ways now this is obviously an ITX case with a small compact form factor and I've already said that heat is potentially an issue with pcie Gen 5 drives because although they're really fast they also get really hot under load because of it but this motherboard's interesting because it has a fan built into the mvme port so just above here is a heatsink a fan and obviously the usual thermal pads and stickers and other things going on there as well interesting stuff potentially I thought this was therefore perfect time to not only review the motherboard but also do some tests because one of the things I was curious about is how one of these drives would perform as a boot drive so as in installing Windows on a Gen 5 Drive should you do it is it logical is it safe to do so this might seem like a strange question but we with Gen 5 drives running so hot there is a thermal limit where they may well throttle if they're running really fast and potentially just shut down and start responding now if you've just got games on them or files that's fine if you've got your operating system on there that's a bit of a problem potentially so I wanted to use this motherboard in its interesting design and in a smaller case which is naturally going to be hotter than your average case to see how it would work so I took the fire code of 540 I installed it in this M2 Port here which is a Gen 5 drive as I said making the most of the cooling potential of this little fan on the gigabyte motherboard which is interesting by the way and then I went in about installing Windows on this drive and I wanted to do some tests I'm doing some benchmarks some everyday sort of normal gaming and testing on it and just to see how it Stacks up because obviously you don't want to install Windows on your main drive on your fastest drive only to find your computer is crashing all the time because your drive's overheating so I thought it was worth putting it through its tests now the first thing I did was download Hardware info 64 because I wanted to check that was actually running at the right speed so you'll notice in here that it is noticed as a Gen 5 port a Gen 5 drive and it's running with four lanes of pcie bandwidth from the CPU through the motherboard so it should indeed run at that normal speed that it will also Hardware info notes the top operating temperatures now if you go over to seagate's website you can get a couple of guides both sort of user manuals and other things which actually talk through various different things and one of them it notes is the operational temperatures so the environmental operating temperatures you'll see it won't operate at below minus 40 degrees C and it also won't operate at 85 degrees C and above so that means if it gets too hot it will either thermal throttle or just completely stop working 85 Degrees might seem really hot but actually under testing that I've done previously with the crucial t700 as a said that drive ran fast and hot this one not quite that high and be sure to check out my other five Cuda videos to see more but you'll see here that I was doing some tests with Crystal dismark I got a Max of 69 degrees at this point early on in the setup so obviously I've installed Windows on it at this point and I'm running various tests you can see I'm running cinebench I'm running Heaven Benchmark and Crystal dismark all at the same time as well as installing and recording footage and I just wanted to push the system to the limit so it was running hot because it is a small case you can see I get about 50 degrees C out some of the fans that are pushing heat out of the system but this was on purpose this is intentionally making it hot in there and even then the max temperature I got on the drive was 75 degrees C so that's 10 degrees less than the max that it would cause a problem so it was fine there was no issues with Windows and then I'm happy to report that you can game away happily on it as well so I have been testing just gaming it as well as doing the benchmarking to see if it just handled it well and kept running well and the answer is yes yes it does it does work fine now this might seem like a really specific Niche case but I think it's important to bear in mind you need good airflow in your system if you're going to use a Gen 5 nvme SSD and you need to make sure that it isn't getting too hot and that you're using the thermal pads and the heatsinks as well to make sure it's getting the good Cooling and the considerations of what to do if you're buying such Top End Hardware because you might not have even thought about it and these Gen 5 drives are really awesome but they could potentially run really hot hopefully if nothing else this is giving you some interesting thoughts on your system or on your future upgrades check out the other videos Linked In the description to find out more thanks for watching you've made it right to the end of the video you brilliant Legend you if you've enjoyed it click that subscribe button give me a thumbs up and drop me a comment down below if you've got any questions if you really enjoyed it consider joining the channel and see the benefits of doing so check out these other videos you might well find them interesting or useful and most importantly have a great life

Channel: The Provoked Prawn

Views: 26,395

Keywords: Provoked Prawn, The Provoked Prawn, Seagate Firecuda 540 install, Seagate Firecuda 540 SSD, Seagate Firecuda NVMe SSD tests

Id: QneXAFIHP90

Length: 6min 12sec (372 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 17 2023