SSDs and motherboards

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m looking to get an SSD for the operating system and a few programs that I access often like Chrome and possibly a game engine.

SSDs:

How to compare SSDs:
Which measure tends to be the most important, max sequential read, max sequential write, 4KB random read or 4KB random write? I know that all 4 don’t tell the whole story but is there one that tends to be a better proxy for practical performance for someone who uses it for browsing, games and a game engine on Windows 10?

Interface choice:
Is it preferable to use a SATA or PCIe SSD?

From what I understand, an SSD would likely use either SATA 3.0 or PCIe 3.0 x 16, right? If so, presume we’re comparing those two types of SSDs and the computer has those.

On the PCIe side, I’m seeing Max seq read of 2100MBps and 420 000 IOPS for reading and write speeds of 800-1200MBps and 210 000-290 000 IOPS. That’s about 4 times the read speed and 1.5-2.5 times the write speed. Are the practical speeds enhanced that much? PCIe SSDs are about twice as expensive as SATA SSDs so I’m wondering if it’s worth it.

Is SATA 3.2 common? Is there much of a practical improvement?

Would PCIe performance suffer much if the computer’s PCIe were 2.0 rather than 3.0? On GPUs, there’s only a few percents of difference but I don’t know about SSDs.

MOTHERBOARDS:

There can be quite a difference between the prices of motherboards. The 3 I’m looking at go from 170CAD to 536CAD. From their tech files, I can’t see how the differences between them could possibly justify such a price delta. There must be something I’m missing.

170$: ASUS Z97M-PLUS mATX LGA1150 DDR3 3PCI-E16 2PCI-E1 2PCI CrossFireX SATA3 USB3.0 DVI HDMI Motherboard

520$: GIGABYTE Z97M-D3H mATX LGA1150 Z97 DDR3 PCI-E16 PCI-E1 Xfire SATA3 USB3 HDMI Motherboard

536$: GIGABYTE Z97MX-GAMING 5 mATX LGA1150 Z97 DDR3 PCI-E16 PCI-E8 XFIRE/SLI SATA3 USB3 HDMI Motherboard

For a closer look at them, go here ( http://pc.ncix.com/pcbuilder/index.php?action=config&id=4851305&platformid=1001 ) then click on the “?” to the right of the motherboard menu which will pop up a window with a description.
Some of the differences:
The 520$ mobo has an Onboard Parallel Header and an Onboard Serial Header. I think the 536$ one does too.

The 536$ mobo has 3 rather than 2 PCIE x 16 slots, 2 more USB 2.0 ports, 1 more PS/2 port, a S/PDIF In port.

The 536$ mobo’s file says it supports CrossFire and SLI whereas the 170$ and 520$ mobos only mention CrossFire. That must be an oversight, right?

The 170$ mobo only has 512MB of integrated VRAM whereas the 520$ and 536$ have 1GB. Not really a big deal.

Are those the main improvements that 350CAD get you? I don’t get it.

2

The performance and interface differences between currently marketed SSDs will be almost imperceptible to most users I would focus on reliability were I you. Samsung Pro units have a good reputation. Newegg ratings are what I use as my general guideline.

3

How about SanDisk Ultra II or Samsung EVO?

4

Jesus, $500 for a DDR3 motherboard!? ASUS and Gigabyte are the brands I usually go for, but wow. Googling around, unless I’m missing something that’s part of the model, are we sure that that’s not an error or an inflated price because it’s an old model and not in current production, so people who need to replace a socket 1150 have slimmer pickings? Like how some out of print book on Amazon is $500 due to either a bug in the autoseller or in the hops that someone might really need it. Or it looks like you’re in Canada? Maybe they’re US-only or something, inflating the price?

You don’t mention games except in passing, so it probably doesn’t matter what you get. All will be an advantage over a traditional HD. You could pore over the technical details, but perhaps it might be easiest to look at the model. Using Western Digital as an example: their current lines are given color names. The “Green” model is designed for low energy use, which means that it is less powerful than the Black (Blue is somewhere in the middle; Red and Purple are special-purpose).

I just bought one and went with the SATA because it was almost half the price of the PCI (also, that’s what I’m used to…)

5

1USD= 1.33CAD right now.

It could be an error, I hope so. You’re free to follow the link and peruse the site. That website sells PCs you can custom order. I got mine there nearly 5 years ago and it was a great buy.

I see that a mobo on another PC option is 300CAD. Some are as low as 96CAD.
More generally, I’m wondering what tend to be worth paying more for in a mobo.

I intend to get a hybrid drive for games. Hosting my Steam library on an SSD would be extravagant.

So, green is beneficial if you pay a lot for electrical power or your PSU is near its limit? Any other benefit?

I know what Black is. What is Red for?

6

EVO is what I got I think. The main difference I see is that the EVO/ESATA is e.g. 250 GB, the Pro/PCIE is 256.
But the former is $92, the latter is $192, so any benefit of the Pro is not worth it to me.

For example, on Newegg:
Z97M-D3H is $109 and out of stock (or $94 in stock, open box).
Z97MX-GAMING 5 is $135. Again, I might’ve not picked the exact same models, but that’s what came up with a search.

What brand? I don’t recommend you buy some off-brand one. That’s the one area I would say never cheap out. Otherwise, you are paying a more for if you want to do SLI/Crossfire, etc.

I mean for like the one game that you’re playing a lot currently and it’s pretty PC-intensive. And I use Steam Mover to move it to D: when I’m mostly done.

Semi-WAG: or if you’re building a compact system and want to limit heat, wear, or noise?

Network-attached storage, apparently. I can’t say what makes those drives different (better RAID options?) Purple is for recording of surveillance.

7

Those prices are out of the ball park. Ive got stuff from NCIX before they seemed legit but…

Here is your $536 mobo for $170 cad.

8

Apparently it was a bug/mistake. After I replied yesterday, I went back and they had no motherboard option on their custom build menus so they must have realized something was wrong.

9

You want a SATA SSD because they are the most cost effective. At the current time, 2015, you want the manufacturer to be either Samsung or Intel. No other brands are considered credible. Here’sa decent price for one, it’s 500 gigabytes for $144. Also happens to include a game that you could sell on ebay for a few bucks to reduce your net price to probably about $135.

The reason why the faster SSDs, above merely “really fast” off the shelf samsungs, are not worth it, is because the bottleneck becomes your processor once you have a pretty fast SSD. The only reason for the extreme performance PCIe SSDs is for high end servers that are exclusively doing massive amounts of disk IO all the time, and the applications they are running are not particularly CPU intensive.

10

WTF are you talking about? No other brands are considered credible?

Sandisk is a huge name in disk hardware, and their stuff is quite up to snuff.
Crucial is another one.

In all, look for reviews at anandtech.com and you will usually get more info on them that you will ever want.

11

Yes, and anandtech’s position is consistently that the good ones are Intel and Samsung. Samsung is what Apple uses, Intel is the best one. The other brands have higher failure rates.

12

There is nothing in this review that indicates that SanDisk is not considered highly reliable in a consumer-grade drive, and it even gets the “Recommended by AnandTech” seal of approval.

so I challenge you to cite any actually worrying differences in reliability between Sandisk, Crucial, Intel, and Samsung.

13

SensibleJoe,
Which specifications matter most in SSDs?

Are PCIe SSDs not worth it?

Can it be worthwhile to have several smaller SSDs linked up so that their bandwidth is multiplied? I.e.: Instead of having 1 512GB SSD with 550MB/s of read, I can use 2 256GB SSDs with 550MB/s of read each and effectively get more than 550MB/s if the data for the task(s) is spread across both SSDs?

14

  1. The brand of the drive. The cheaper brands die like flies. Worst offenders are OCZs and generic brands.

  2. No, PCIe SSDs are not worth it. I explained this to you earlier - the CPU becomes the bottleneck in almost all “waiting on your computer” cases once you have a fast SSD.

  3. You can RAID smaller SSDs together but this is not recommended as it means there is a much greater chance the RAID will fail and you lose all your data. (either drive can fail OR the software of the RAID can fail OR you can screw up during recovery OR the RAID card can fail OR you have trouble accessing the volume if windows fails)
    Do not do this. If you absolutely have to have more performance, pay for one of those PCIe SSDs as you mentioned, I’m just telling you it is not worth the extra money. A fast SSD (even a 5 years old Intel 80 gig) reduces application load times to a few seconds at most, and it reduces game load times to about 80%.

A ridiculously fast SSD…makes application load times imperceptibly quicker and game load times are not any faster. It does make massive file transfers faster but both drives in the file transfer must be blazing fast, and this rarely happens. If you do a transfer from SSD to thumbdrive, or thumbdrive to SSD, the thumbdrive is the bottleneck. Ditto for to and from a hard drive. Basically the only time it helps to have blazing speeds is file COPY (not move) from one spot on the other on the same SSD. And how often do you want to copy a gigantic file instead of moving it, with the destination being the same disk it is currently stored on? Almost never.

Don’t waste your money.