Does the mentioned drive really improve texture loading that much over a regular HDD...

 

Running heavy addons w Orbx Global and Vector LC with an i7 @4.5 and 1080 I get a slow redraw of ground texture in external view when flying below 10k...

 

My OS is on a SSD already...

3 hours ago, willy647 said:

Be aware that some of the crucial 1Tb nvme's have a read speed of only 560 Mb/s

That is because these are not NVMe drives. M.2 is just a physical layer standard. NVMe and SATA define data layer and determine the host controller interface type, and M.2 does come in both. SATA indeed caps out near 560MB/s, while NVMe can go up to full 4x PCIe 3 speeds, providing that on-device IC's provide it.

 

3 hours ago, simbol said:

The reason is because these have certified NVE drivers from Windows 10 which actually unleash the real speed of this technology.

I have actually made some extensive testing on NVMe drivers, Microsoft vs. Samsung. When the standard first came out, Samsung drivers actually yielded lower performance than Microsoft drivers. That was observed on many different platforms. Some time after Samsung 970 series was released, I re-ran the tests, albeit on a smaller subject group, and found that now Samsung drives are on par with Microsoft drivers. Depending on the test you run, one or the other can come out ahead, but only within margin of error, so averages are completely equal.

That said, I do use Samsung drivers myself because if there are no performance difference, then I always go with manufacturer's recommended drivers.

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by Evros

8 minutes ago, Evros said:

That said, I do use Samsung drivers myself because if there are no performance difference, then I always go with manufacturer's recommended drivers.

Problem is certain brands, are only detected without using NVE interface. Limiting the speed.

S.

17 minutes ago, simbol said:

Problem is certain brands, are only detected without using NVE interface. Limiting the speed.

S.

Sorry, could you clarify, please. Do you mean that NVMe drives from certain manufacturers are not detected as NVMe drives, but as SATA instead? I don't have any material in front of me right now, but I don't think you can make NVMe drive run in SATA mode. What can happen is that many motherboards have settings in BIOS where you can change the lane and protocol settings. If these are misconfigured, then you will see the performance penalty, but even a single PCIe 3 lane outperforms full speed SATA. Also, not all NVMe drives come equal. These little PCB's are like embedded computers. They have controllers and RAM on board that heavily dictate the operational characteristics and the speed of the module. Worth mentioning is that Samsung makes some of the best NVMe controllers on the market.

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by Evros

You guys are really confusing the terminology here.
M.2 by itself says nothing about the performance, it's just a physical form factor.
An M.2 SSD that uses the SATA bus is the same as a regular SATA SSD, it's just physically smaller.
There are fast such drives and there are slow such drives just as with regular 2.5" SATA SSDs.

SSDs that utilize NVMe for the communication is a totally different beast since it's no longer limited by the fairly slow SATA bus. It does however NOT mean that all NVMe drives are fast. If the SSD drive itself is slow, it doesn't matter if it's using SATA or NVMe for the communication as it's not the bus that's sets the limit. Changing from a fast SATA SSD to a slow NVMe SSD does not make any sense.
It might actually perform worse.

A fast NVMe SSD however, will get you the absolute best performance there is. It will also cost you a lot of cash.

The next question is, will it matter for Prepar3d and is it worth it? Generally speaking I'd say not at all. Initial loading times, sure, maybe noticable if you're upgrading from an older SATA SSD. We're talking a lot of cash just to cut a couple of seconds from the initial loading time.
If you think a fast NVMe SSD will make any difference in game, such as reducing stutters or improving scenery loading, you'll be disappointed. Again, I'm comparing SATA SSDs to NVMe SSDs here. Any noticable difference is likely pure placebo. They both have a seek time close to 0 and when reading small portions of data such as during a flight the throughput capability of the drive makes pretty much no difference. There are about a billion other bottlenecks in software and hardware, the storage throughput is not even close.

If you still have a spinning disk (or a "hybrid" spinning/ssd, which is pretty much a scam), get rid of it now and never look back. If you're looking for an upgrade and already have a fairly descent SATA SSD, look for a better CPU/GPU before spending lots of cash to get a premium NVMe drive just to cut a couple of seconds from the intial startup time.

 

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by tolip2

28 minutes ago, tolip2 said:

You guys are really confusing the terminology here.

 

1 hour ago, Evros said:

That is because these are not NVMe drives. M.2 is just a physical layer standard. NVMe and SATA define data layer and determine the host controller interface type, and M.2 does come in both. SATA indeed caps out near 560MB/s, while NVMe can go up to full 4x PCIe 3 speeds, providing that on-device IC's provide it.

What's so confusing about it?

1 hour ago, tolip2 said:

You guys are really confusing the terminology here.
M.2 by itself says nothing about the performance, it's just a physical form factor.
An M.2 SSD that uses the SATA bus is the same as a regular SATA SSD, it's just physically smaller.
There are fast such drives and there are slow such drives just as with regular 2.5" SATA SSDs.

SSDs that utilize NVMe for the communication is a totally different beast since it's no longer limited by the fairly slow SATA bus. It does however NOT mean that all NVMe drives are fast. If the SSD drive itself is slow, it doesn't matter if it's using SATA or NVMe for the communication as it's not the bus that's sets the limit. Changing from a fast SATA SSD to a slow NVMe SSD does not make any sense.
It might actually perform worse.

A fast NVMe SSD however, will get you the absolute best performance there is. It will also cost you a lot of cash.

The next question is, will it matter for Prepar3d and is it worth it? Generally speaking I'd say not at all. Initial loading times, sure, maybe noticable if you're upgrading from an older SATA SSD. We're talking a lot of cash just to cut a couple of seconds from the initial loading time.
If you think a fast NVMe SSD will make any difference in game, such as reducing stutters or improving scenery loading, you'll be disappointed. Again, I'm comparing SATA SSDs to NVMe SSDs here. Any noticable difference is likely pure placebo. They both have a seek time close to 0 and when reading small portions of data such as during a flight the throughput capability of the drive makes pretty much no difference. There are about a billion other bottlenecks in software and hardware, the storage throughput is not even close.

If you still have a spinning disk (or a "hybrid" spinning/ssd, which is pretty much a scam), get rid of it now and never look back. If you're looking for an upgrade and already have a fairly descent SATA SSD, look for a better CPU/GPU before spending lots of cash to get a premium NVMe drive just to cut a couple of seconds from the intial startup time.

 

So having all terrain/ airport scenery etc for instance on a HDD would load just about the same as a ssd.
 

So no gains from a ssd? 

8 minutes ago, mikeymike said:

So having all terrain/ airport scenery etc for instance on a HDD would load just about the same as a ssd.
 

So no gains from a ssd? 

That's pretty much the gist of it. I would argue that fast NVMe does initial loading considerably faster than SATA SSD, but once you are in the air, there won't be any difference what so ever.

6 hours ago, simbol said:

I do recommend Samsung .M2 key drive. The reason is because these have certified NVE drivers from Windows 10 which actually unleash the real speed of this technology.

Any drive that do not has these drivers, will run at the normal speed of an SSD drive.

That's not been my experience.  Here my Samsung 970 Pro is using the Sammy drivers while my Sabrent Rocket NVMe 1TB is using the standard Windows drivers:

I have all my add-on scenery installed on the inexpensive Sabrent, and everything works just fine.

Greg

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by lownslo
clarification of scenery installation

Going from a spinning harddrive to an SSD is a huge performance boost.

Going from an SSD to a PCi speed NVMe drive is also another magnatude of speed increase, though not as much as going from spinning disks.

I have all three types in my workstation with the NVMe drive dedicated to flight sim (P3D).

The most notable speed increases are when larger files are accessed, smaller files not so much because there is IO and O/S handling going on.

Never the less, once you used one, going back is painfull, a little like going from highspeed cable broadband back to dialup.

And I have no complaints with my Samsung NVMe and the speed of P3D loading its some 800+ Gb of data, all coming from either the NVMe or an SSD raid array.

p.s. I also have a couple of 1 TB SSD'd that are raided (striped) for a 2TB drive.

Drive Comparision    2019.10.23

Model Name    Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB
Interface    NVMe
Result    Sequential (MB/s)        Random (IOPS)
               Read    Write              Read       Write
               3568    2482               449218    346923

Model Name    Samsung SSD 850 PRO 256GB
Interface    SATA
Result    Sequential (MB/s)        Random (IOPS)
               Read    Write              Read     Write
               561       155                50292    31494

Model Name    WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0
Interface    SATA
Result    Sequential (MB/s)        Random (IOPS)
               Read    Write              Read    Write
               98         95                  244       244

A month or so back I was working onsite for a client, installing/configuring my companies software and the PC chosen had only spinning disks and took ~1/2 an hour to boot up. I had complely forgotten what it was like running and OS and software off spinning disks...haven't used one for years apart from as backup drives and as installed in NAS boxes for capacity (there are 16 TB drives now).

Cheers

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by Rogen

So there is no point of buying an expensive ssd nvme m2 for loading of scenery?

it is purely just for faster loading Of OS and P3D? 

My P3D install on the NVMe drive includes hundreds of MB of scenery for a total size on the MVMe of 769 GB plus an additional 69.5 GB on the SSD raid array.

And I'm perfectly happy with the performance in P3D and it's loading speed (with scenery) off the NVMe.

If you can afford this type of drive go for it, it's the current fastest till the PCIe version 4 standard is widely available.

Choice is your's really... if you want the best and fastest, NVMe is the current state of the art, otherwise get the highest capacity SSD you can afford as harddrive space is always something that gets used up.

You could also do things like, run caching software with the cache placed on the fastest drive.

Or move the paging file onto the fastest drive.

Many potential ways to tune for perfomance.

Cheers

Edited October 23, 20196 yr by Rogen

Yes I understand P3d or OS is on a ssd Or nvme ssd. Is going to boot and load extremely fast 
 

I have my OS on a 840 pro ssd 

and P3d on a 840 pro 

and my scenery and and airport addons on a 4tb hdd at the moment

which I am thinking of getting a 2 tb nvme for my airport addons and scenery/ terrain

 

my question is, is it worth it ?

will I get faster terrain loading?

or am I wasting My cash?

thanks 

mike 

 

42 minutes ago, mikeymike said:

Yes I understand P3d or OS is on a ssd Or nvme ssd. Is going to boot and load extremely fast 
 

I have my OS on a 840 pro ssd 

and P3d on a 840 pro 

and my scenery and and airport addons on a 4tb hdd at the moment

which I am thinking of getting a 2 tb nvme for my airport addons and scenery/ terrain

 

my question is, is it worth it ?

will I get faster terrain loading?

or am I wasting My cash?

thanks 

mike 

 

No, you will not get faster terrain loading. If you have blurry textures then problem is not a storage device but your processor, or more specifically FFTF. You said it yourself that P3D core installation is already on SSD and only addon scenery is located on HDD. You will not gain any in-flight performance. But seeing as you are itching for an upgrade, you might as well go for it if you are still on a rotating drive. If I was you, I would buy a 2TB SATA SSD, or how ever big you need, because going NVMe just for FS addons is a complete waste of your money. That said, I do have to admit that I use 2TB Samsung 970 Pro NVMe to facilitate my P3D files, but that is just because I want it that way. There are no other benefits than decent decrease of initial flight loading time.

Edited October 23, 20196 yr by Evros

19 minutes ago, Evros said:

No, you will not get faster terrain loading. If you have blurry textures then problem is not a storage device but your processor, or more specifically FFTF. You said it yourself that P3D core installation is already on SSD and only addon scenery is located on HDD. You will not gain any in-flight performance. But seeing as you are itching for an upgrade, you might as well go for it if you are still on a rotating drive. If I was you, I would buy a 2TB SATA SSD, or how ever big you need, because going NVMe just for FS addons is a complete waste of your money. That said, I do have to admit that I use 2TB Samsung 970 Pro NVMe to facilitate my P3D files, but that is just because I want it that way. There are no other benefits than decent decrease of initial flight loading time.

Thanks for your input 

I did upgrade to a i9 9900k

z390 master aorus 

32gb of ddr4 3600mhz cl16 

just wasn’t sure about the ssd for addons terrain scenery etc.

i think I’ll hold off on the drives for now and do a few fights and see how things go 

thank you all