SSD Battle, PCIe 4.0 Versus 3.0
X570 Required
TechSpot grabbed a few of the newer PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs to see how well they take advantage of the extra bandwidth PCIe 4.0 offers, with the Corsair MP600, Sabrent Rocket and Gigabyte Aorus all included. They compared them to two of the better alternatives on the market, Samsung’s 970 Pro SSD and Intel’s Optane SSD 905P.
Intel’s Optane takes top spot for both performance and price, if you are willing to spend over $2000 for 1.5TB and are running a new Intel system it will give you impressive performance. For those that lack an unlimited budget, the Sabrent costs 1/10th as much as the Optane drive and edged out the other drives in most of the tests they ran. It is worth noting that in most real world tests, there is still little difference between the drives and we still have some work to do on optimizing Windows for this much storage bandwidth.
Yes, those are indeed heatpipes on the Sabrent.
In this roundup, we'll be taking a look at the new Corsair MP600, Sabrent Rocket and Gigabyte Aorus SSDs, all new PCIe NVMe 4.0 drives pitted against the excellent Samsung 970 Pro SSD and Intel's top of the line Optane SSD 905P.
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Confirms what others have found in 1 on 1 SSD reviews: If you are running some crazy server workload with lots of concurrent requests, then these new PCIe4 drives keep up generally better than PCIe3.
But for que depth of 1, we have completely saturated what the physical nand cells are capable of. Hardware Deals (youtube site with a gloriously akward presenter) has some great real-world testing that shows there is little to no difference between a cheap Intel 660p and a high end Saberent or Auros SSD.
As mentioned in this article, moving to other technologies like 3dXPoint really helps, and will benefit users when it moves to PCIe4 due to its crazy low latency times… but then you are talking about insane costs for storage.
I think what we really learn from PCIe4 drives is that we don’t need a new controller, or a faster interface; we need a better way to store bits… or maybe a new way for file systems to access drives to help with small-file transfers. Regardless, it makes me want to wait for the cheaper AMD motherboards to come out before upgrading. They will lack PCIe4, but won’t have a fan, and will be just as good for those of us who need 1 SSD and 1 GPU, but still want a cheap high-core count CPU
I think it’s a mistake to use 4x PCI-E 4.0 for an M.2 form factor drive. That’s way more BW that you need for PC level storage. They should have given the use 2x as many slots with just 2x PCI-E 4.0. That would have saved power on the drives and given us twice as many drive slots with the same BW as 4x PCI-E 3.0 (with was almost too much anyway).
The thing I like most about the X570 chipset is that even the 1x slots are 4.0. So, you can actually use them for something serioius if you wanted.
There really is almost no real world benefit to the gamer, internet surfer, or otherwise causal everyday normal person using their PC. Buying a $300 1TB 4.0 NVMe won’t give you a noticeable boost in performance from a $95 1TB Intel 660p. I’ve watched too many youtube videos that have shown this to be true, which is great, because I almost bought a Samsung 970 EVO Plus for $220, and wow what a waste that would’ve been!
Would be interested if you guys did a performance comparison to heat sink, vs no heat sink on drives.
Thanks, Jeremy. Could you possibly telephone Allyn to ask him, quietly, if/when Intel plans to release an M.2 Optane with x4 PCie 4.0 lanes? I looked around today, and the only x4 M.2 Optane is the 905P, but it’s Gen3.
p.s. Almost forgot to say: KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!!
Thanks again, and best regards to the entire crew at pcper.com !
and thank you!
First we need to saturate what we have … the 905P ain’t quite there yet. As we mentioned on a few podcasts, we almost need to find faster storage media to keep up with the new PCIe spec.