Question 2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives on a B550 motherboard

[Dave3000]

I hopefully will be upgrading to a system with a 5800x CPU later this month or within the 1st half of next month. I plan on have a 980 Pro 250GB NVMe as a dedicated OS drive to replace my 860 EVO 250GB SATA SSD, and then later on a 980 Pro 2TB NVMe (not yet released) as a Games/Data drive (currently using a 850 EVO 2TB SATA SSD). I understand that the B550 motherboards only support PCIe 4.0 on the 1st NVMe slot (closest to the CPU) and the lower NVMe slot is run via the chipset lanes at PCIe 3.0. Is it worth getting an X570 motherboard over a B550 one if I'm going to use a 2nd NVMe drive for just the Windows 10 operating system plus a few basic programs such as Libre Office, Photoshop, and the Steam launcher? Is the OS disk duties of Windows 10 really sequential bandwidth intensive that it will benefit from PCIe 4.0 over PCIe 3.0 or random access time way more important than sequential transfer rates for an OS drive?

 

[KentState]

Absolutely not worth it in your situation. I would also not waste your money on the 980 Pro and get a regular 970 Evo Plus.

 

[Dave3000]

Well from a review I read online, the 980 Pro 1TB has better 4k read and write performance than the 970 EVO Plus 1TB. Not sure if the same pertains to the 250GB versions of these drives. I'm not talking about 4k as in 4k video. I'm talking about 4k file size. I don't think I need PCIe 4.0 bandwidth to take advantage of the higher 4k performance of the 980 Pro as it's well below even SATA 6 bandwidth for the 4k performance. So won't I still get the fast 4k performance of the 980 Pro at PCIe 3.0 on the lower NVMe slot on a B550 motherboard?

 

[Zoozuu]

I switched from the 500gb plus to the 500gb 980 pro and I can tell you it would be a better choice..im not talking about any benchmarks either or its 7k read speed. I don't really use its top speed much anyways. it boots quicker and runs cooler than my old 500gb 970 evo plus. going to be getting my dad a 2tb 980 pro when its released to replace his 1tb evo plus.

 

[KentState]

Well from a review I read online, the 980 Pro 1TB has better 4k read and write performance than the 970 EVO Plus 1TB. Not sure if the same pertains to the 250GB versions of these drives. I'm not talking about 4k as in 4k video. I'm talking about 4k file size. I don't think I need PCIe 4.0 bandwidth to take advantage of the higher 4k performance of the 980 Pro as it's well below even SATA 6 bandwidth for the 4k performance. So won't I still get the fast 4k performance of the 980 Pro at PCIe 3.0 on the lower NVMe slot on a B550 motherboard?

With your use cases, it won’t make a noticeable difference. Maybe once Direct Storage is fleshed out but that’s still a few years away.

 

[Dave3000]

With your use cases, it won’t make a noticeable difference. Maybe once Direct Storage is fleshed out but that’s still a few years away.

I plan to stick with my 850 EVO 2TB for games/data for the time being and swap out my 860 EVO 250GB for the 970 EVO Plus or 980 Pro 250GB as the OS drive for my next build. I'm in no rush for a new SSD for games/data as the Youtube video I watched comparing NVMe drives to SATA 6 drive and it shows that games only a few seconds quicker loading from an NVMe PCI 3.0 drive than a SATA 6 SSD. Maybe I'll wait until Direct Storage comes before purchasing a PCIe 4.0 NVMe for games.

 

[Dave3000]

Is an NVMe drive that is installed on the lower NVMe slot recognized as Drive 1 and the NVMe drive installed on the upper NVMe slot as Drive 0 in the Windows 10 setup, assuming that the only drives in the system are those two NVMe drives? I prefer to have my OS drive recognized as Drive 0 by the OS and my Games/Data drive recognized as Drive 1 by the OS.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I prefer to have my OS drive recognized as Drive 0 by the OS and my Games/Data drive recognized as Drive 1 by the OS.

Speaking from experience, you will only get frustrated trying to impose your will on Windows (10) in this manner. BTW, on most AM4 mobos, drive numbers in Windows start with the SATA drives, not NVMe.

A drive doesn't have to be "disk 0" to be C:, but it is a nice symmetry to humans who care about "touchy-feely" things in their OSes.