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SATA SSD or PCIe NVME SSD?


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Hello,

I have DCS World installed on my secondary HDD drive since my boot drive (SATA SSD) that contains Windows 10 Home does not have enough space. 
 

What would be the best solution if I want to move DCS to the boot SSD to have faster load times etc? Buy a larger SATA SSD or buy a larger PCIe NVME SSD? From what I read on the internet concerning benchmarks, there seems to be almost NO performance gain by going to the PCIe version. 
 

Thanks

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NVME drives have much higher sequential read and write values since SATA 3 is capped at 550 MB/s roughly, but these are mostly useful when copying large files only. In loading games, random reads matter and these still didn't reach levels that would saturate SATA3. So, the NVME drives might be slightly faster in loading DCS, but judging from those older game loading tests, that's probably barely measurable, let alone noticeable (I for one didn't notice any difference when moving DCS from SATA to NVME).

 

On the other hand, the NVME prices have gone down significantly so I'm not sure a SATA drive gives you a better deal anymore. Just be sure to get a TLC drive, most of the QLC drives are not there yet.

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To avoid potential future performance problems try not to completely fill any SSD or NVME. 

For running and loading DCS you should not see much if any difference between a GOOD SSD and an NVME. (You would have to do Benchmarking with a stopwatch to Notice)  

  • Look at a minimum 500 GB or 1TB (if you have other games and Lots of Mods and skins in your Saved Games) if you can. Go with what is on Sale and what has good reviews and performance with read and write.  
  • I have a 1 TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD and it is Half Used now with DCS, IL2 and a few other things. 
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I have a Nvme now with everything on it. I did have a small M2 for OS and then a large Sata 3 for games. I can confirm 100% that you will see no difference in load times at all. Seriously blink and you would miss the difference in time.

So I would advise get what ever suits you system/installation wise. Loading times for games don't come into it really.

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Some time ago, I went from an SATA SSD to an NVME as my games folder. In 99% you probably won´t see any difference at all.

However, in Elite Dangerous, I always had some stuttering in the hyperjump loading screens on the SATA SSD, these were gone after I moved the installation folder to the fast NVME.

 

So, if the few bucks more aren´t an issue, get an NVME. When in doubt, they are faster and you have one less cable hanging around.

 

Though I wonder, shouldn´t you notice the difference on a map like syria with several GB to load ? 

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13 hours ago, MysticEric said:

NVME ones are way better than sata

   They are for practical purposes exactly the same. They promote a bunch of impressive sounding numbers in the sales brochure you will never see, which you would know if you ever bothered to actually do any tests. I did.

 

12 hours ago, Bossco82 said:

I have a Nvme now with everything on it. I did have a small M2 for OS and then a large Sata 3 for games. I can confirm 100% that you will see no difference in load times at all. Seriously blink and you would miss the difference in time.

So I would advise get what ever suits you system/installation wise. Loading times for games don't come into it really.

  Yep. If you are transferring single, large files or performing certain functions, you may see the difference. For normal usage, it isn't any faster than SATA.

 

7 hours ago, Eugel said:

Though I wonder, shouldn´t you notice the difference on a map like syria with several GB to load ? 

  The map is not a single large file, it's large numbers of smaller files. Drives (regardless of type) are much slower in this regard. Think of it as a racetrack. The cars go real fast on the straights but slow down for corners, and only burst briefly here and there through twisty roads. Exact same principle.

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Buy the biggest you can get for the price you can afford.

That'll be a normal SATA SSD.

 

NVMe are good, I have one for a boot drive, but honestly the performance difference for random access betwen NVMe and SATA is nothing in comparison from the jump from HDD to SSD.

 

You'll want the space for DCS too, it's far bigger that it needs to be (yay for maps, uncompressed textures and silly big liveries!) and it'll only get bigger.

Plus as mentioned, you 100% do not ever want to max out a SSD, 80% usage tops.

 

I'd recommend a 1TB or more SATA really, you'll want the space.


Edited by Buzzles
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Hey would like to connect here ,so i dont need open new topic

 

I want to buy a Samsung SSD 870 Evo /=109€ or Samsung SSD 870 QVO  / =85€

 

I read QVO slow down the write after some data as it has no 4bit QLC and no 3bit TLC as the EVO.

I mean i could wait 2-5 min longer for an install or copy files or some.

 

But just for Gaming, would i notice any difference here? Like loading times or maybe some more micro-stutter with the QVO or something like that?

 

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8 hours ago, Buzzles said:

Plus as mentioned, you 100% do not ever want to max out a SSD, 80% usage tops.

  This was something else I tested. A 500gb SSD all the way down to 15-20gb, running R/W tests all the way down. It made no significant difference. But for practical purposes, you should never max a drive out completely anyway, they do need room to shuffle files around and so forth.

 

Quote

I'd recommend a 1TB or more SATA really, you'll want the space.

  The way DCS is growing, yeah, I'd recommend absolute minimum 500gb JUST for DCS, and it's likely to grow beyond that sooner rather than later.


Edited by Mars Exulte
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On 3/21/2021 at 9:10 AM, Hmmerhead said:

Hello,

I have DCS World installed on my secondary HDD drive since my boot drive (SATA SSD) that contains Windows 10 Home does not have enough space. 
 

What would be the best solution if I want to move DCS to the boot SSD to have faster load times etc? Buy a larger SATA SSD or buy a larger PCIe NVME SSD? From what I read on the internet concerning benchmarks, there seems to be almost NO performance gain by going to the PCIe version. 
 

Thanks

 

Hmmerhead,

 

In my own experience installing DCS on both SATA3 and NVMe drives, it makes very little difference. NVMe is best for tranferring very large files, but makes little difference in gaming. Load times for missions are about the same.

 

If you don't have much room left on your NVMe boot drive, get a SATA3 SSD for DCS. It works just as well. A great improvement can be had in DCS with more and faster memory (system RAM), though.

 

By the way, "performance" (framerates, FPS) are NOT affected by the storage device you use. Just loading times and texture streaming in-sim as you fly around the map. I run mostly high settings and find a SATA drive fine for this.

 

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12 hours ago, -Relax- said:

 

But just for Gaming, would i notice any difference here? Like loading times or maybe some more micro-stutter with the QVO or something like that?

Not really. The read times are very similar and don't make much difference anyway, even when you compare with much faster NVMe drive. For writes, QVO disks have relatively large buffers of "fast" memory (like 20-80 GB, depending on the model) so in most scenarios they behave just like a normal SSD. 

Main issue is longevity because of limited write cycles. But for a disk intended for games storage it's really a non-issue. 

 

6 hours ago, Mars Exulte said:

The way DCS is growing, yeah, I'd recommend absolute minimum 500gb JUST for DCS, and it's likely to grow beyond that sooner rather than later.

Only if you buy all the maps. The aircraft don't use that much space. 

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4 hours ago, some1 said:

Only if you buy all the maps. The aircraft don't use that much space. 

  Yeah, of course, not everyone has the Pokemon approach I do :p The planes are usually only few gb apiece, if that.

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22 hours ago, Mars Exulte said:

   They are for practical purposes exactly the same. They promote a bunch of impressive sounding numbers in the sales brochure you will never see, which you would know if you ever bothered to actually do any tests. I did.

 

  Yep. If you are transferring single, large files or performing certain functions, you may see the difference. For normal usage, it isn't any faster than SATA.

Pretty much my experience. I went with a NVME main drive when I got my new PC in 2020 and SSD backup. I wanted to see for myself what the pros and cons were. There is no real improvement for DCS, but moving lots of files around feels faster on my main drive. One definite advantage to NVME is packaging. It's easy to install and totally unobtrusive, though they do run hot.

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  • 2 months later...

I always like to put the O/S on its own drive, but only bc it isolates it from other system use, makes for cleaner backup & restore procedures, and keeps I/O swaps off the app drive/s.

 

Regarding O/S swaps, you can tell Windows not to use or allocate a swap file, which is what I would RX. If you have to buy more RAM memory, so be it (unless you're already capped out, which eliminates this option) 

 

Samsung's Rapid Mode can be helpful, but only if you're going after the same data again and again and it isn't changing between fetches. That's true for ALL caching.

 

Larger SSDs are almost always faster bc the controller is throwing pieces into more and more buckets, which running in parallel, speeds up the process based on how many buckets there are to receive those pieces. This is not usually more than a 10% gain, but read the reviews.

 

Samsung Pro drives, unlike Eco, don't depend on caching for their performance, so on sustained Writes they are much faster. They also last longer, but that's not usually an issue, especially if you've turned off O/S swapping. I've managed systems many yrs ago where 99.8% of all the system I/O was page file swaps by the O/S. In that case, the single act of putting the O/S on it's own dedicated drive tripled overall system performance. I doubt you'd see anything like that performance improvement with any modern PC system, but it's something to watch for.

 

Once you shut off page file swapping, the O/S doesn't need a fast drive. Once up and running, O/S file loads are rare in this age of monolithic O/Ss, and they're mostly just large sequential reads anyway. (page file swaps are NOT, they're random I/O). Microsoft put simultaneous, overlapping, asynchronous file I/O in Windows in 1999, so I/O happens in the background all the time in little snippets if developers are smart enough to allow it. Surprising how many developers think loading up a gig of disk to a RAM data structure all at once is good practice. SMH. This is one case where the O/S gets it right.

 

Always buy the next gen tech when upgrading old systems so it will still relevant when you upgrade the rest of your system.

 

At any given point in time there's a sweet spot for SSDs (and most other things as well) where you get the most performance & capacity for the least per-capacity cost. This usually is a good tie-breaker when trying to decide how much to buy of what.

 

Samsung's quality is top notch. It's won more awards than you can shake a stick at, and the Pro series has massively outperformed its rated lifetime of I/Os. If that changes I'd consider something else, but until then, Samsung is the one to beat. (not much of a premium for their quality either)

 

If DCS were a database app I might recommend a RAID system, but from the comments above (with the possible exception of servers) it's not going to make any difference.

 

Cheers!

 


Edited by Repiv-V
simlification, spelling
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I run DCS from a tripple Samsung 850/860 Pro 256GB Raid-0, read/write is 1.5GB/sec either way but access time and Random IO is that of a single drive, those numbers stay at the level of

a single drive, usually a tiny bit less even. The reason why I raided them was to combine the volume and tzhe reason it's Pro over Evo is that I run a few VMs from that Raid-0 which is write heavy. I dont think it makes a noticable difference.

 

But if I had to buy again I would definitely go NVMe 1-2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus or 980 Pro. The 980 Pro was at an all time low yesterday btw for 329€ 2TB or 140€ 1TB at amazon.

NVMe is so much sleeker, no cables, no nothing, a much cleaner PC with mainly NVMe over my 6 drives + 1 NVMe, wished it was 3 x NVMe and done.

 


Edited by BitMaster
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That makes sense, since striping across drives won't improve the rate of random accesses bc even a random access has to be assimilated by reading all stripes, and since the RAID has its own overhead, probably a tiny bit less as you indicate. 

 

Probably not an issue for user terminals, but maybe on a DCS server, a nice trick for loading databases is to load the data onto RAID 5 but build the indicies simultaneously on a RAID 0. This is bc RAID 5 provides protection for the data which you don't need for indicies bc if you have the data you can always rebuild the indicies. What you DO want for indicies is max write speed when building (or retrieving) them so when the data pages are in main memory they're also available to build the indicies. Nickel Knowledge for DB geeks.

 

I too noticed Amazon Prime Day had them on sale cheap, and I too would go with the NVMe, which Samsung now has a Gen 4 version of. They're always backwards compatible, and you can probably buy a special card (with a heat sink if you like) to plug into the PCI bus if you need to. (probably the best option for the OP here). If you go low, instead of state-of-the-art you're really kicking yourself in the butt in the near future when you have to buy what you should have bought now bc what you did buy is now obsolete and a big fat bottleneck on your new system.

 

Cheers!

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19 hours ago, Repiv-V said:

That makes sense, since striping across drives won't improve the rate of random accesses bc even a random access has to be assimilated by reading all stripes, and since the RAID has its own overhead, probably a tiny bit less as you indicate. 

 

Probably not an issue for user terminals, but maybe on a DCS server, a nice trick for loading databases is to load the data onto RAID 5 but build the indicies simultaneously on a RAID 0. This is bc RAID 5 provides protection for the data which you don't need for indicies bc if you have the data you can always rebuild the indicies. What you DO want for indicies is max write speed when building (or retrieving) them so when the data pages are in main memory they're also available to build the indicies. Nickel Knowledge for DB geeks.

 

I too noticed Amazon Prime Day had them on sale cheap, and I too would go with the NVMe, which Samsung now has a Gen 4 version of. They're always backwards compatible, and you can probably buy a special card (with a heat sink if you like) to plug into the PCI bus if you need to. (probably the best option for the OP here). If you go low, instead of state-of-the-art you're really kicking yourself in the butt in the near future when you have to buy what you should have bought now bc what you did buy is now obsolete and a big fat bottleneck on your new system.

 

Cheers!

 

Raid-5... I never liked that specific type, it's not bad but imho if you can go Raid-6 then do that. Not seldomly multiple drives fail in an array in relative short time, rebuild speed etc.. Global Hot Spare(s) etc... Raid-6 for critical stuff, or Raid1or10 for OS  ...and Raid-0 for pure speed Gaming etc. ala F... Data Security  LoL

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hardware Unboxed did a comparison between SATA, nVME, nVME PCIe 4.0, and HDD for gaming a while back. Basically any SSD will be better than good enough for gaming, and otherwise indistinguishable. 

 

And HDDs will all be poor. 

 

 

Addendum: this will not be as applicable when AAA titles start taking advantage of the things consoles are doing, but those titles don't exist yet, and the nVME drives to support them aren't available either, so not worth even attempting to future proof here. Just keep a high bandwidth nVME slot on your MB free for when they do become a thing. 


Edited by Voyager
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On 3/21/2021 at 7:30 PM, Dudikoff said:

NVME drives have much higher sequential read and write values since SATA 3 is capped at 550 MB/s roughly, but these are mostly useful when copying large files only. In loading games, random reads matter and these still didn't reach levels that would saturate SATA3. So, the NVME drives might be slightly faster in loading DCS, but judging from those older game loading tests, that's probably barely measurable, let alone noticeable (I for one didn't notice any difference when moving DCS from SATA to NVME).

 

On the other hand, the NVME prices have gone down significantly so I'm not sure a SATA drive gives you a better deal anymore. Just be sure to get a TLC drive, most of the QLC drives are not there yet.


Pretty much this.
At this point, so long as you have an NVMe slot ready to be used, it just makes more sense to get an NVMe drive.

Too close in price now, it doesn't compensate anymore to go for SATA SSDs.

 

I'm a sucker for Western Digital, and that's what I'd personally recommend - either the "Blue" SN550 for a pure gaming system, or "Black" SN750 if it's a system also used for frequent heavy file transfers, and in 1TB or 2TB capacities. Haven't found better for the price yet.


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  • 5 months later...

Rendering of textures when changing views - has anybody noticed any difference with NVME vs SATA?

I always notice that when I change between units that DCS wants to build up the layers of textures each time and this typically takes around 1-3 seconds. 

I got a fast CPU and GPU so that would not be the bottleneck. I would assume it would be either memory (size and/or speed) or reading in the data from the disk that causes this slow process. 

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In my understanding it's a mix of them all, load-decompress-process. There's some I/O on the disc and memory and afaik it needs to be decompressed as well but I might be wrong.

 

Throw in a NVMe and check yourself but I doubt it will make a noticable difference if you say "1-3 seconds". The difference I could imagine is maybe 0.1-0.5sec difference between an average Sata SSD and the fastest NVMe you can get.

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