M.2 SSDs

[OneWorld]

A lot of my friends in the gaming community are now considering the M.2 SSDs to be an absolute must for a fast machine but I don't see much evidence of any overwhelming preference for a PCIe SSD as opposed to a SATA SSD.

Is it really the case that the PCIe SSDs are infinitely faster or are the benefits of the PCIe drives not relevant to music applications and thus the regular old SATA SSD is perfectly adequate?

[resistorman]

I'm using both types and I don't notice any difference in music production. Audio is really low data rate compared to video, for instance.

[Luke W]

There's sometimes a bit of confusion around M.2 storage. M.2 is the form factor of the device, not the interface that it uses. You can get M.2 SSDs that still use SATA, so still have the same speed limitations as any other SATA device. What a lot of people are referring to when talking about the speed of M.2 devices are those that use the NVMe interface. These are a lot faster than your "average" SSD.

As mentioned above, with the vast majority of audio applications even a SATA based SSD will have more than enough speed to do the trick.

I've got a couple of NVMe drives in the machine I use for sample libraries, the real benefit is that everything loads up very quickly, but in terms of actually streaming audio they're barely lifting a finger.

[ef37a]

I recall Mr Walker telling us many years ago that music applications run from ram and even the old 7200rpm spinners were good enough?

SSDs have many advantages including faster boot times as they load into memory faster but once done I don't think they are THAT much more of an advantage?

Dave.

[OneWorld]

There's sometimes a bit of confusion around M.2 storage. M.2 is the form factor of the device, not the interface that it uses. You can get M.2 SSDs that still use SATA, so still have the same speed limitations as any other SATA device. What a lot of people are referring to when talking about the speed of M.2 devices are those that use the NVMe interface. These are a lot faster than your "average" SSD.

As mentioned above, with the vast majority of audio applications even a SATA based SSD will have more than enough speed to do the trick.

I've got a couple of NVMe drives in the machine I use for sample libraries, the real benefit is that everything loads up very quickly, but in terms of actually streaming audio they're barely lifting a finger.

This is where I get confused. This gaming chum of mine has just built a new system and he is using the chewing gum stick RAM that slots into the mother board by way of a slot that looks like PCIe but isn't, the RAM physically clips/locks in and according to him, this kind of slot uses a faster bus than PCI or SATA. If that is the case, and I don't doubt his word, it would suggest that loading an OS, Application or in the case of music, loading up a VSTi and or samples would be somewhat faster

I am now on Cubase 11 and reluctant to go to Cubase 12 because each upgrade of Cubase has got slower and slower, I keep Cubase 6 on my machine for doing bread and butter stuff because it loads in half the time Cubase 11 does, so I get to thinking the NVMe drives would restore the previously fast loading times?

[Nazard]

I wonder whether your friend is using Intel Optane memory, which is essentially disk caching memory, that fits into an M2 slot. I can't think of anything else, really.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... emory.html

[resistorman]

Wait a minute, we've gone from talking storage to RAM? Are you sure?

Also, how old is your machine, what type of processor and how much RAM? You're comparing it to a brand new build. Do you even have M.2 slots?

Also #2: It's not likely the difference between a vanilla SATA SSD and a M.2 drive will make Cubase load_that_much faster.

[OneWorld]

I wonder whether your friend is using Intel Optane memory, which is essentially disk caching memory, that fits into an M2 slot. I can't think of anything else, really.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... emory.html

No it is quite distinct from memory. His SSD is 1TB, from the Intel website, to the question "Can Optane memory replace a system drive?"

...."No. The 16GB and 32GB Optane M.2 modules currently being sold do not function as primary computer memory, and they don’t replace a full storage drive."

Another point the Intel site makes is "The really noticeable speed enhancements come from going from a spinning drive to an Optane drive, and not from an SSD drive to an Optane"

And so with my pal going from quite an old spinning drive to an M2 SSD will perceive quite a difference.

My original confusion is whether an M2 SSD is faster than a SATA SSD and it seems there is a difference but it is negligible

[resistorman]

This gaming chum of mine has just built a new system and he is using the chewing gum stick RAM that slots into the mother board by way of a slot that looks like PCIe but isn't, the RAM physically clips/locks in and according to him, this kind of slot uses a faster bus than PCI or SATA.

This is where MY confusion came in. You started talking about RAM which is different than a storage drive. Anyhow, glad you have your answer.

[merlyn]

AS Luke W said M.2 is the form factor. The fast M.2 NVMe drives use PCIe. PCIe 5 is on the way, PCIe 3 and PCIe 4 are already on some motherboards. I have a PCIe 3 and a PCIe 4 drive in this machine, and I can't notice the difference in everyday use. Where PCIe 4 might be an advantage is moving huge files (video) inside the machine.

Ballpark figures :

Spinning SATA HDD : 50MB/s
SATA SSD : 500MB/s
PCIe 4 NVMe SSD : 5000MB/s

I did notice my machine booted faster going from SATA SSD to PCIe 3 NVMe SSD, and using a disk checking utility the PCIe 3 drive is capable of 3500MB/s sequential read. The PCIe 4 drive is 7000MB/s. So going up by a factor of ten is noticeable, going up by a factor of two not so much.

[OneWorld]

AS Luke W said M.2 is the form factor. The fast M.2 NVMe drives use PCIe. PCIe 5 is on the way, PCIe 3 and PCIe 4 are already on some motherboards. I have a PCIe 3 and a PCIe 4 drive in this machine, and I can't notice the difference in everyday use. Where PCIe 4 might be an advantage is moving huge files (video) inside the machine.

Ballpark figures :

Spinning SATA HDD : 50MB/s
SATA SSD : 500MB/s
PCIe 4 NVMe SSD : 5000MB/s

I did notice my machine booted faster going from SATA SSD to PCIe 3 NVMe SSD, and using a disk checking utility the PCIe 3 drive is capable of 3500MB/s sequential read. The PCIe 4 drive is 7000MB/s. So going up by a factor of ten is noticeable, going up by a factor of two not so much.

Oh, so a 5 second boot time remains a flight of fancy. I'll stick with my SATA SSD for now then, either hardware gets faster or OSs get smaller, can't see that happening any day soon

[merlyn]

Oh, so a 5 second boot time remains a flight of fancy.

The BIOS takes longer than that But you mean to load Windows? How much RAM is it using when you first boot up? In 5 seconds a fast M.2 PCIe 4 NVMe SSD (bit of a mouthfull) can theoretically transfer 25GB.

But the idea that any individual component can speed up your machine doesn't hold. You have to find the bottleneck.

[OneWorld]

Oh, so a 5 second boot time remains a flight of fancy.

The BIOS takes longer than that But you mean to load Windows? How much RAM is it using when you first boot up? In 5 seconds a fast M.2 PCIe 4 NVMe SSD (bit of a mouthfull) can theoretically transfer 25GB.

But the idea that any individual component can speed up your machine doesn't hold. You have to find the bottleneck.

I don’t have a particular bottleneck, it’s just the need for speed, never satisfied, generally speaking, once boot times go past say 20 seconds, then I think it’s too long. I’m sure Win7 used to be about 10 seconds and Win10+ doesn’t seem to do much that Win7 couldn’t do. If I were an OS designer and my OS took more than 15 seconds I’d say it were a work in progress

[merlyn]

As a general principle I would say if you have an M.2 slot, put a PCIe SSD in it and use that as your boot drive.

For most uses it's the random read and write speeds that are more important, and PCIe NVMe SSDs don't have ten times the random read and write speeds. They are faster and it varies from model to model, so research would be required.

For gamers loading large files quickly could be important (textures spring to mind but I don't know, not being a gamer) so it may be that the ten times faster sequential read and write speeds are important to gamers.