Samsung 960 EVO NVMe performance...

Enjoy the drive, I was one of the lucky few who pre ordered one of these and had it delivered the day they were available to the public. If you ever raid drives, one drive is the primary drive and the other is the secondary. the primary drive always gets used more so its performance numbers will show a bit lower.

Your post got me wondering about what numbers my drive would post. I have one 2TB drive. (no raid) I had a tun of crap running, so my test wasn't optimal and my server hasn't been rebooted in about two weeks, so you get the idea. I think the larger drive has something to do with the better numbers, but i might be wrong. I hope my screenshot helps.

The storage size of the drive does impact the performance to a certain extent, at least in the case of Samsung EVOs. The 250GBs EVO has a write speed of 1,500 MB/s, while the larger EVOs do 1,900 MB/s. All EVOs have the read speed 3,200 MB/s.

For backup and restore purposes, I like to separate the OS/programs from the data. It's easier to manage and marginally faster in the case of the ~20GBs database. Hence the two separate 250 GBs EVO drives. Cost wise, it's a wash when compared to a single 500 GBs EVO that provide an increase in write speed.

I am not even convinced that overall performance wise the system is much better than my SSD based system. Yes with PCIe 3.0 x4 drives Windows boots in a jiffy, large programs start faster, loads up large databases faster, etc., with Samsung EVO/PRO drives. but beyond that in everyday use of the system, the performance increase isn't as noticeable. Certainly, there is a performance increase, but it's nowhere close to moving from the HDD to SSD drives, despite the six fold increase in read speed. My guess is that accessing small, around couple of MB or so programs/files with the PCIe drives isn't that much different from doing the same with an SSD drive...

Your 2 TBs PCIe 3.0 x4 drive is probably a Samsung Pro that has a nominal read speed of 3,500 MB/s and write speed of 2,100 MB/s. Your benchmark results are right around that.

I've looked at the Samsung Pro, but for less than the 2 TBs Pro cost nowadays, I've built the whole system and glad I did. It's doubtful, if the performance of this system would be better with a single, large PCIe drive...

Hi,

I am not even convinced that overall performance wise the system is much better than my SSD based system. Yes with PCIe 3.0 x4 drives Windows boots in a jiffy, large programs start faster, loads up large databases faster, etc., with Samsung EVO/PRO drives. but beyond that in everyday use of the system, the performance increase isn't as noticeable. Certainly, there is a performance increase, but it's nowhere close to moving from the HDD to SSD drives, despite the six fold increase in read speed. My guess is that accessing small, around couple of MB or so programs/files with the PCIe drives isn't that much different from doing the same with an SSD drive...

That's generally true and to be expected.
One major factor is proper cooling of NVMe drives which is crucial to prevent thermal throttling. A cooler that only lowers the drive's temp by a few degrees is useless if you're talking degrees Celcius.
Much depends of the size of the casing the motherboard resides in and the airflow present.

For my next build I'll also pick a motherboard with two M2 PCIe x4 slots that I'll configure in raid 0 for maximum I/O throughput. Either using Samsung's 960 Pro's or Intel's Optane modules. Not decided yet but in everyday use the Intels may well beat the PRO's from Samsung and are much cheaper too although of course much smaller in capacity.

Cheers,

Cr00zng said:

I am not even convinced that overall performance wise the system is much better than my SSD based system. <snip> My guess is that accessing small, around couple of MB or so programs/files with the PCIe drives isn't that much different from doing the same with an SSD drive...

Most likely they will be kept in memory anyway so it is irrelevant.

You'll see the benefit in benchmarks (or loading/searching big things) but not in normal use.

I used to write back office software for banks. Until about mid 2000s I would force currency exchange rates to stay in RAM. This was a file less than 1KB. After that there was no point as memory management kept it RAM anyway.

Usually if a program is slow is because it is written badly - for example looking to read todays date (or USD/EUR rate or whatever) for each of 10 million records rather than once for all. Not much you can do about that except ask the developers to change their program.

The problem with most PC programs (including games) is they don't bother - just up the requirements to cover crappy programming.

Im sorry, my drive is a Samsung's 960 Pro. That's the added speed. (I would love to buy a 2nd drive but my board only has one slot) Its a Asus Rampage V Edition 10.

fdegrove said:

Hi,
That's generally true and to be expected.
One major factor is proper cooling of NVMe drives which is crucial to prevent thermal throttling. A cooler that only lowers the drive's temp by a few degrees is useless if you're talking degrees Celcius.
Much depends of the size of the casing the motherboard resides in and the airflow present.

In case of Samsung EVOs, the operating temperature range is 0 - 70 °C. In my system, it is 35-37 °C in normal use, during CrystalDisk testing the increase was to 44-46 °C. That's pretty far from throttling...

fdegrove said:

For my next build I'll also pick a motherboard with two M2 PCIe x4 slots that I'll configure in raid 0 for maximum I/O throughput. Either using Samsung's 960 Pro's or Intel's Optane modules. Not decided yet but in everyday use the Intels may well beat the PRO's from Samsung and are much cheaper too although of course much smaller in capacity.

Cheers,

The Intel Optane M.2 drives are slower than the Samsung EVOs by a large margin and also have less in capacity. I believe that the 32 GBs is the largest size....

Hi,

The Intel Optane M.2 drives are slower than the Samsung EVOs by a large margin and also have less in capacity. I believe that the 32 GBs is the largest size....

The Optane modules and drives outperform anything where it matters most thanks to amongst other factors, their very low latency.
Yes, 32 Gb is the largest module but two as raid 0 will make for a 64Gb drive which is more than ample for the OS.

Cheers,

fdegrove said:

Hi,
The Optane modules and drives outperform anything where it matters most thanks to amongst other factors, their very low latency.
Yes, 32 Gb is the largest module but two as raid 0 will make for a 64Gb drive which is more than ample for the OS.

Cheers,

Where it matter most is at the latency, the 4K random read performance and that's where the Intel Optane cards are fast. Well, as long as accessed programs and files are on the small side that is. I did look at that option, but the couple of database sizes currently on the E drive changed my mind. The chances are it would have worked, just didn't want to take a chance. Then there's the system requirements for the Optane memory cache, albeit the current system would've met the requirements.

If you build your system, I'd like to see some benchmark from it.

I was wrong about the temperatures for the Samsung EVO on my system; idle/business use temperature:



Running CrystalDisk benchmark on E drive:



This is an air cooled system and the ambient temperature is 21 ℃.

The "C" and "E" drives are the Samsung EVO NVMe drives...

Cr00zng said:

My new system is based on the Asus Prime Z370-A MB, that has two PCIe (x4), M.2_1 and M.2_2. Both of the sockets are populated with Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250 GB M.2 cards.

Checking the performance of the "C" drive with CrystalDisk looks good:

Attachment 175000

Well, until the other NVMe drive is checked that is:

Attachment 175001

In every category, the "E" drive performs better than the the "C" drive, especially in write performance , and it puzzles me.

The only difference visible between the two is the used space; "C" has 47 while "E" has 7GBs used space.

Could the disk space utilization be responsible for the different performance, or the "C" drive came with some slight factory fault(s)?

While there are temperature differences between the two NVMe cards, the "C" drive has a heatsink and actually runs 2-4 degree cooler than the "E" drive:

Attachment 175002

Any advice would be appreciated, TIA...

Yea this computer came with the 2 x 256 GB M.2 NVME= 512 GB They were in RAID 0 together. I would install the IRST software and put them back in RAID O

you can run any benchmark and at different times and get different results a lot has to do with whats going on behind the background. I just use them for reference. To me, you read is great but your write sucks about 961 speeds. RAID 0 will fix that slow write speed but won't change your read speed much is anything from where you are.