Hi, I wonder if the Samsung SSD 960 EVO M.2 (250 or 500GB) will increase speed compared to my other SSD storage devices and what would it's best use. Speedwise it's very fast, but would it be faster e. g. starting the OS, programs, NI Kontakt with it's libraries and so on?

My current PC-Music-And-Animation-Rendering-System:
- Win10 x64: Samsung SSD 840 EVO Basic, 750GB
- Data: Samsung SSD 840EVO, 250GB
- Data: some SATA-3 harddisks

New, not installed yet:
- Samsung SSD 850 EVO Basic, 1TB

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- Which one to use as OS (Win10 x64)?
- What's the best use for each storage device?
- Is it useful to by the Samsung SSD 960 EVO M.2 (250 or 500GB)?
- or to buy any other SSD M.2?

Thanks for your inputs!

 

Last edited: Dec 19, 2017

With the M.2 interface will be definitely faster, I have SSD Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SATA3 only for DAW and plugins, I have samples on 6 hdd disks.

 

Interested to hear other's input on this. I'm thinking of pulling the trigger on this for my pending upgrade.
As far as I can tell from the specs, it should be significantly faster in all aspects, read, write, and access speed.
This page seems to agree...

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compar...2-256GB-vs-Samsung-850-Evo-250GB/m38570vs2977

 

oh yes, m2 is faster than ssd

i like the m2 ... 2018 there will be more ssd for pcie and also new 2 x m2 mainboards

 

Tanks for your replies so far!

I should have mentioned that I also do some animation in Adobe Character Animator, After Effects and Premiere Pro. In the future probably also in a 3D app like Blender.

I just read this review: https://www.windowscentral.com/960-evo-review
It's crazy how fast the Samsung 960 evo M.2 is for rendering in this 'real world' testing.
For my new music/animation PC I will surely already benefit from the Ryzen 7 1700 and the geforce gtx 1060 6GB. I just rendered a 3:30 long video and it took almos 4hrs to render in After Effects. 4minutes in Premiere Pro.
In case someone wonders about my recent specs:
- CPU: AMD FX-8350, 4GHz
- RAM: DDR3-1600, 32GB
- GPU: HD 7850, 2GB

 

What SSD M.2 do you use?
Am I correct, that especially this Samsung SSD 906 EVO M.2 is much faster than other M.2 SSD? I've just found out about SSD M.2 ;-)

 

OK I've got a system booting off a Samsung EVO NVMe, and it's faster but it's not a gimmee no-brainer improvement. Also, machines that boot off a Samsung won't upgrade a major Win 10 version. So, for example, upgrading to Win 10 64 1709 results in immediate BSOD on the first reboot, because the upgrader can't find the boot record properly. Samsung and M$ are arguing over who's fault this is, but basically you can end up having to do an Upgrade Over setup from Win 10 media, rather than just letting the upgrader work.

The bleeding edge of technology, always hurts.

Problem with upgrade to "Creators Update" on NVMe disk

https://social.technet.microsoft.co...ors-update-on-nvme-disk?forum=win10itprosetup

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 19, 2017

my experience is that if you have any projects with pieces or samples left on any HD your setup will STILL suffer from delays. but the difference between different ssd shouldn't be very notable

even if the daw and the OS are installed on a SSD you will not have a truly fast start because project files, samples and linked shit to HD drives will want to be checked before opening projects and the system will want to wait for them drives to start spinning..

the ideal would be to have all previous projects, not currently used samples and projects etc on HD drives that are totally disconnected and have ONLY current projects and their belonging files, current samples and current libraries on SSD.

first then will all fly

 

Last edited: Dec 20, 2017

havnt had anything but ssd in years, had m.2 last year and half BIG difference

 

Still haven't plunged to ssd for kontakt library use. I mean, how much is it gunna cost to put my 5tb of samples on multiple ssds! lol

 

well, im about to install everything i need and ONLY what i truly need in 2 SSDs one 250gb for 2 daws library and then one 250gb for samples and projects. then thats it! if i need anything else it will be on a portable drive. less is more

 

If you need to copy large files (more than a few gigabytes) really often, maybe. Else there's no difference in consumer computing between NVMe and today's SATA SSDs.
Kontakt's libs are usually smaller files. But if you have something special with larger files, you could increase the load times by 0.1 - 0.5 seconds, maybe even a whole second. I don't know if it's worth it.

 

You'll feel a difference ONLY in copying files. Loading libraries and streaming samples will give minor improvement if at all which imo is not worth a money. Go with regular SATA SSD. I have M.2 for a system though but I bet I wouldn't notice a difference compared to SATA.

 

Propre logic set up is more important
Why do toi use larger ses for Windows whereas data?
Windows is 20 gig max is you keep tour desktop and dôme documents, most common softwares set up don t need more than à 256 g ses drive. Use jour bigger ssd for banks samples,projects... burger files likes vidéo and movies doesn t need to .be archivées on a ssd unless you work with it in an editor like première,final cut....
Don t put your win libraries and desktop on your os drive. Back up will be softer and lighter, and you ca n reinstall Windows or other os without any loss

 

same for me, only gain à ssd for m'y projects

 

First of all, because i see people saying "yes m2 is better" or "m2 is not much better," it was mentioned again that M2 is a form factor. M2 can be Sata, USB and NVMe. So people, please, learn to refer to ssd drives as to what type of drive they are and not what size they are as it makes no real difference.
Now, @au38wzh what I assume you are looking to learn, is how faster a NVMe ssd would be as opposed to a SATA ssd, and which drive to go for as system drive.
There are some factors to keep in mind when shopping for drives.
OS and soft (daw/plugs) installed on a system drive benefit from: better latency (seek time), a higher iops count (in-out operations per second) and a higher read/write transfer rate. In the real world (for a system drive always), average and random latency should be considered most important followed by random read (and write) transfer rate. Latency determines how fast your soft and plugs etc can be up and running. A better transfer rate ensures that larger chunks of random data to be read or written will be accordingly read or written faster. The iops is a determining real world factor as to how responsive will your drive be under heavy loads, as demanding applications may claim storage in/out performance (called queue depth) which can be in the multiple 100s i/o for just one application.
So now that we got this out of way, SATA III (6gbps) protocol maxes @ around 550mb/s. NVMe is actually a pci-e connection therefore it is capable of many times this transfer rate. So your 850 Evo SATA III drive has a max transfer rate of about 540mb/sec, whereas a 960 EVO NVMe PCIe x4, has a max transfer rate of 3200mb/sec and its bigger brother the 960 PRO is @3500mb/sec. While this difference looks big on paper, when used as system drives (which contains only OS and software) the only real benefit is the slightly better latency of the NVMe drives. The NVMe drives' higher iops count is meant to be considered only under really heavy loads. An average DAW/Video Workstation user will -most likely- not exceed the 100.000 iops of the 850EVO drive. Average latency of a 850EVO is around 0,033 ms and for the 960PRO and EVO is at about 0,024ms.
Now there is a new drive on the block, the Intel Optane 900p which uses a new type of memory (3dxpoint), and has a latency of 0,01 ms. This may be well considered a game changer, as this is a significant difference which can make a system really feel faster, especially when the user is a power user and upgrades from a sata drive. As all high end hardware though, it comes with a price tag of about 310 dlrs US for the 280gb m2/u2 model. It also bares a max rate of 2500mb/sec (on read) and random read of 550k max iops as opposed to Samsung 960 EVO&PRO 330k iops. The 960EVO is 110 dlrs for the 250gb drive and 400dlrs will get you the 1tb 960 EVO.
Still, the absolute fastest single drive is the Optane 900p if money is not an issue. It is also the only consumer drive that will make a difference as system drive since you are already coming from a good ssd system drive.
There are some other factors to keep in mind like the durability of an ssd and warranty but these are self explanatory so i'll skip these.

Also important, if your motherboard is a typical Z or H series Intel chipset series board, it may have no more than 16 pc lanes available. I read you also do video, so adding a NVMe drive to a 16pci lane motherboard will "steal" 4 pci lanes from your graphics card (assuming you have one lol) causing to work at x12 instead of x16. This depends on the motherboard series of course, mobos with Z170 and onwards chipsets allow for at least 1 NMVe PCI-E x4 drive to be installed without limitations. Earlier Z,H series boards are limited to 16 pci lanes so be cautious.

From the drives you already have the 850EVO is the best drive. So if you are not buying anything, this could be well your c drive and you may leverage the additional space to some libraries too with np, just remember to backup . You can also use your system as it is and use the 850 evo just for libraries, this will only make the sys drive backup easier though, performance wise the 850 IS faster than the 840.

Few, that was a long one lol, feel free to ask anything
Cheers

 

Last edited: Dec 20, 2017

After reading dozens of tests I've reached the conclusion that 960 Evo won't increase the speed as much as Pro - but again, only if before you had 850 Evo. I have 850 Pro and also thought about buying M2 SSD from Samsung, but as I understood it has no sense. And this is funny, bc M2 port should increase the speed dramaticly, bc SATA was created just for HDD, not for SSD and bla bla bla. So, if you hadn't used SSD before, or you just want to change your old OCZ and Intel to new gen. SSD disks, to buy 960Evo/Pro is a good idea(and better to buy Pro(if you can afford it of course)), but if you already have 850's series, it's not the best idea.
And there are couple last facts, which we need to know about SSD in our context: 1)present SSDs are almost "immortal", so there is no reasons to worry about deterioration, in meanst that you can use it for huge sample libraries, but 2)better to have at least 2 SSD - one for sys/programs(host, plugs and so on), and another for s-libs, bc sys disc always busy with some processes , what could(and, probably, will) hurt "read work" of the disk.
So, it's great that you have all those disks, all you need is to change approach(for example, you have 25 and 75, you using 75 for sys and 25 as file storage, but you should do opposite). And waiting for next generation of SSD from Samsung, bc now you won't see any serious increase of the speed.

P.S. I'll be glad if someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Last edited: Dec 20, 2017

I have few rigs running 850 EVO 500GB as system drives, best price/performance/capacity pick

 

Thanks for all advices!

What I came up for now after reading:

- Will not buy the 960 EVO M.2 (250GB or 500GB). Will buy it maybe later and use it for video rendering, since it seems so much faster.

- The 850EVO 1TB is faster than what I already have, so it would be best as OS drive.
In the past, when using a large HDD as system drive I made partitions. Since using SSD as an OS drive I stoped to partition, but 1TB is quiet large. Should I partition now if I use the 850EVO 1TB, so it's easier if I want to/have to re-install the OS?
A lot of space of my actual system drive (750GB SSD 840EVO) is taken by apps and VSTs and I don't mind to re-install them, but still: 1TB seems too large as OS to me.
Or...

- Instead of the new 1TB 850EVO I use the 250GB SSD 840EVO as the OS, but it's slower than the 850 (maybe not noticable) and probably too small (will check that).
Or...

- The benefit if I use an already activated Win10 SSD in the new system: I don't have to buy a new license unless license transfering won't work (will check that). I probably don't have to install Win and apps/VSTs again, but a fresh start is always nice

 

1) sure, if I wanted M.2 ssd, I'd definitely keep an eye on prices, and get 500GB 960 PRO when it goes on sale
2) there is no advantage of partitioning the ssd, unless you totally need to have separately formattable portions (let's say half for OS and half for personal data, which imo isn't a reliable anyway), simply put, don't partition if you don't absolutely need to
3) I'm using older 500GB 840 EVO in my mid-2012 MacBook Pro, hard to tell if there's any noticeable disadvantage over those 500GB 850 EVOs I have elsewhere - speaking of 250GB EVO series, those have roughly 1/3 slower write speeds (compared to 500GB and bigger pieces), but for an OS drive, I don't see it as a problem at all
4) I fail to see benefit of using Windows 10 completely, Microsoft's Windows pricing is a joke, so I wouldn't trouble myself with that I guess, speaking of fresh starts, Windows is badly designed so it will bloat overtime anyway, don't expect blazing speeds and snappiness for more than few years, fresh reinstalls are mandatory on Windows machines (Microsoft don't bother to fix anything even with latest Windows 10), sooner or later