Looking for 4TB SSD for games...not NVME.

LGabrielPhoto

LGabrielPhoto

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Hello!
So from tests, it seems most games load about the same speed from the SSD as they do from NVME with small differences and both much better than HDDs.
So I figured I could get a 4TB SSD for a lower price than NVME to fill the one SATA port I still have available and move most of my slow loading games to it.
Just trying to figure out which you guys recommend for this from so many options out there.

Thanks!
 
The Samsung 870 and 860 evo have basically the same specs in Samsung Magician 860 is slightly better in Random IOPS. The 870 is QVO memory save 10.00 or so. I think I'm going to go for a M.2 drive but if I don't own two of them its rather pointless except for load speeds.
 
I second ComixBooks suggestion, i would go with Samsung 860 Evo 4tb, you will end up with a TLC drive that has very mature firmware and have good reliability, you can get cheaper but you will go into QLC.
 
I picked up a 4tb m.2 drive as it was the same price as a 4tb ssd for me. I also have 2x 2tb ssd and games show little difference in load times despite the speed increase (ms difference at best)
 
only when installing will be faster on NVME (2-4x faster on sata, but install is not an often thing), but lunching the game your CPU limited totally once you have at least a sata SSD (has to decompress the textures and stuff)
 
likeman said:
only when installing will be faster on NVME (2-4x faster on sata, but install is not an often thing), but lunching the game your CPU limited totally once you have at least a sata SSD (has to decompress the textures and stuff)
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which I think makes my idea of adding a 4TB ssd like the better option indeed
 
I wouldn't pay the same price as NVMe for an obsolete 4 TB SATA drive. The 4 TB Samsung SATA drives cost even more than NVMe. Upcoming games will be designed for 5000 MiB/s read and write speeds because of the consoles and your PC will fall behind.

I would run the GPU at x8 and use a PCIe to NVMe adapter.
 
i find that unlikely, consoles was slow because they used a HDD, with an SSD they are CPU limited

PlayStation went overboard with there non replaceable NVMe odd configuration,, chip layout is using 12 chips so cant have a 1TB model only 825GB and only about 600GB of that is usable this was really silly design should have stayed with a 8 channel setup so they can use 1TB as 500-600GB is not enough (they could have done there QOS priority subsystem with 8 channels)
 
LGabrielPhoto said:
Hello!
So from tests, it seems most games load about the same speed from the SSD as they do from NVME...
Click to expand...

Just to clarify to help you and potentially any others, everything you're describing is an SSD, however there are two major protocols used, SATA and NVMe. That's the differentiator.

Additionally, you can get SATA and NVMe SSD's in the M.2 form factor.
 
criccio said:
Just to clarify to help you and potentially any others, everything you're describing is an SSD, however there are two major protocols used, SATA and NVMe. That's the differentiator.

Additionally, you can get SATA and NVMe SSD's in the M.2 form factor.
Click to expand...
Yes I understand that...I thought it was pretty clear what I was referring to. Is like someone using bokeh as a term for the amount of background blur...
 
Edit: For my system drive and for next gen games you will want NVME when Direct Storage starts being used by future games.
 
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Blackstone said:
Edit: For my system drive and for next gen games you will want NVME when Direct Storage starts being used by future games.
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Direct storage only helps with loading. So that will require several things to have that actually matter for gaming.

As it stands now, regular HD's are fast enough to stream all the data to play a game like CP2077 on a PC. In order for DS to matter even in a game like CP2077, Texture size would have to increase dramatically. Increases in geometry won't affect it much. DS will only really start to make a difference if it's possible to have a game exceed both system memory and VRAM at the same time. Then DS becomes a "third" place of faster storage. On PC's this very specific state will happen precious few times and will likely really only affect initial loading and not really anything after that (and really RAM is so cheap, most would opt to move to 32GB of RAM before spending a huge chunk of cash on a 4TB NVME drive). Basically if a game is programmed correctly and all of the things necessary for streaming data is loaded into RAM anyway, DS will effectively do nothing.

But even then there will be other limitations like the size of the game in general and requirements needing drive speeds over 500mb/s (exceeding SATA SSDs) - again also only relevant after both system RAM and also VRAM is exceeded and needing a massive amount of streaming assets. I don't see either of those things happening any time soon on a system that otherwise is "built properly".

It also makes zero sense to try and "future proof". You'll always be chasing what is coming next. Generally if you don't want to spend excessive amounts of money, just buy what you need now. By the time DS becomes relevant on the PC side (where games actually can exceed RAM) it will be at minimum a few years (if ever - because really you're also betting that this technology is the future and will also be relevant), and you can update your drive(s) at that point for far less than you would spend now. People are holding out for PCIE-4 and DDR5. Neither of those things will be relevant to the speed of games for likely at least 3 years (if not longer, the big benefit to PCIE-4 really is lanes, far more than bandwidth. Graphics cards as an example don't need anymore bandwidth. And only storage will be directly affected in terms of speed). It makes zero sense to be an early adopter on either of those technologies either.

So all that said, a "slow" 4TB SATA SSD is fine for this application, and it likely will be for at minimum 5 years.
 
I have a WD SN750 1 TB nvme for windows 10 and games. Then I have 2x 1TB WD Blue sata SSDs. Works totally fine for me. Nice and fast.
 
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