Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
Thread: M2.SSDs and system speed
Harrison 23:15 17th October 2022
I've been considering building a new PC but this raised a few questions, and wondered if any of you know the answers.

I will want to use an M2. SSD Gen 4.0 to get maximum speed for booting and applications. But I have older slower M2.SSD Gen 3.0 to hold games and other stuff that I would want to also move to the new system. But I've read that if you install 2 M2 SSDs of different speeds they both get reduced to the slowest drive. If this true? Or only for certain motherboards? Some motherboards now have support for 4 M2s to be installed. But would this be the same, With the slowest of the 4 dictating speed, or are the seperated to prevent this.

I've also been reading that when more then 1 M2 is installed it slows the overall system bus down and reduces GPU performance because it takes a hit to the PCI-E bus. Is this true? That's not something I had considered or even thought about before.

I've also read that some motherboards disable SATA ports when M2s are installed.

I normally buy Asus motherboards and read that slots are routed through the chipset, so there are no impacts on your GPU PCIe lanes.. If you ran all M.2 slots at pci-e x4 bandwdith you'd lose some SATA Ports and one of the smaller pci-express slots . Hmm...

Do some motherboards have the option to select M2 slot mode?
[Reply]
J T 23:24 17th October 2022
I only just read how much faster NVME is than SATA..... gadzooks

Sounds blazingly quick.
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Harrison 00:30 18th October 2022
Yes, really fast. In a system that can handle full Gen 4 NVME M2 the system can boot in a couple of seconds.

And the Gen 4 M2 used in the Playstation 5 is really fast. Able to sustain 7000MB/s read and 5000MB/s write. That is what allows games to seemlessly load game levels seemlessly (no load screens). It is quite a big jump in storage technology

Obviously it comes at a price. PS5 compatible M2s, you are looking at £179 for 1TB and £280+ for 2TB. But even slower Gen 3 M2s are still much faster then an SATA drive and are dropping in price. You can get one with 3500MB/s read speed and 1TB storage for about £79.
[Reply]
Stephen Coates 12:27 18th October 2022
Originally Posted by J T:
I only just read how much faster NVME is than SATA..... gadzooks

Sounds blazingly quick.
Yup, my Samsung NVME SSD can easily do a couple of gigabytes per second.
[Reply]
Demon Cleaner 14:48 18th October 2022
I put the Gigabyte AORUS 1TB M.2 GP-AG70S1TB (PCIe Gen 4.0 x4/NVMe) in my PS5, it's crazy fast!!
[Reply]
Harrison 09:02 19th October 2022
It is mad how fast they are.

Remember many years ago (2006 onwards) PC gamers were going mad over those Rapter drives? Hitting over 200MB/s on the right setup. Now the fastest NVMe Gen 4 M2s can achieve 7000MB/s, or 6.8GB/s.

That's just mad numbers and importantly for game designers removes all data transfer speed limits between storage and ram. You can literally just swap out between ram and storage in realtime. So no load times. This is what was so revolutionary about the PS5 design.
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Demon Cleaner 14:35 19th October 2022
If I copy f.e.x a 50GB game on the PS5 from one disk to another it takes less than 30 seconds. On the PS4 you could have a longer coffee break.
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J T 22:58 20th October 2022
Originally Posted by Harrison:
It is mad how fast they are.

Remember many years ago (2006 onwards) PC gamers were going mad over those Rapter drives?
Were they the 10,000rpm ones? I remember that. Were they noisier than a regular (a regular is what, 7200? 5400? something like that)
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