Does an M.2 drive help run a game better or...

[ricleo2]

I'm considering using a m.2 drive in a new gaming machine. Will it somehow run a game better or is it just faster load times? Thanks.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'm not convinced that the faster times on benchmarks help in real-world use over SATA 6 GB, and 2.5" SSDs don't have the overheating issues of M.2.

I doubt it will ever improve frame rates, except maybe for iD's Rage with its texture streaming experiment.

2.5 SSDs are also easier to work with if you need to copy the data off of them because of a bad Windows crash or something. You can just use a USB-to-SATA cable to connect it to anything.

 

[deustroop]

I'm considering using a m.2 drive in a new gaming machine. Will it somehow run a game better or is it just faster load times? Thanks.

First off, be careful with terminology. M.2 is a port, nothing else, albeit with access to fast data lanes. Merely looking for an "M.2" drive can get you either an AHCI (SATA) or an NVME drive, to which I assume you refer. See here for an example https://www.quietpc.com/samsung-m2-ssds.
As you suggest, re games, the NVME drive on pcie x3 rails will give faster load times and little else.
Heating does cause throttling due to prolonged load, no pun, but is unlikely under these simple conditions.See this
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Samsung-950-Pro-M-2-Throttling-Analysis-776/

"One thing we want to point out is that it is pretty uncommon to fully utilize a drive this fast to the same extent we did in this article. Very few programs will actually be able to read from a Samsung 950 Pro at full speed for more than a very short period of time - often the drive will have to regularly wait on the CPU or some other component to actually process the data. In truth, the most common situation you might run throttling is going to be if you have two M.2 drives and you are copying large amounts of data from one drive to the other."

The other minor advantage is the hook up-the NVME needs no cables.

 

[DaveSimmons]

^ very helpful link. The SATA drive is a steady 500 MB/second, while the NVME drive starts out at 2500 MB/s but could drop down to between 500-1000 MB/s under heavy gaming loads.

NVME M.2 is always faster, though I wonder about long term drive health if it is often needing to throttle. It would be interesting to see a similar review where they using more realistic gaming loads instead of the worst-case Furmark.

 

[ricleo2]

All very interesting. I think I will pass on the NVME. Thanks for the help.

 

[Carfax83]

I'm considering using a m.2 drive in a new gaming machine. Will it somehow run a game better or is it just faster load times? Thanks.

Mostly it's just faster loading times, but some games do run better yes. The games that will run better typically do a lot more storage access than most games. A good example is the Witcher 3, which is notorious for stuttering. I noticed it ran smoother on my 960 Pro than on my 850 Pro, because the game will access shaders from storage during gameplay which is the number one cause of stuttering in the game. It was likely a design decision on CDPR's part to lessen loading times, since they were already horrendously long on consoles.

You can also get around it by enabling shader cache in the driver control panel.

 

[Carfax83]

^ very helpful link. The SATA drive is a steady 500 MB/second, while the NVME drive starts out at 2500 MB/s but could drop down to between 500-1000 MB/s under heavy gaming loads.

NVME M.2 is always faster, though I wonder about long term drive health if it is often needing to throttle. It would be interesting to see a similar review where they using more realistic gaming loads instead of the worst-case Furmark.

The 960 series has much less throttling than the 950 series, due to a copper layer heatsink.

960 Pro vs 950 Pro thermal throttling.

 

[Billy Tallis]

Merely looking for an "M.2" drive can get you either an AHCI (SATA) or an NVME drive, to which I assume you refer.

Careful: There are actually three layers to be concerned with. M.2 is the physical connector. SATA and PCIe are the two options for the electrical connection between the M.2 SSD and the host system. AHCI and NVMe are the software protocols the OS uses to communicate with the drive controller. For PCIe SSDs, that controller is on the drive itself. Almost all PCIe SSDs use NVMe nowadays, but several early ones used AHCI. For SATA drives, there's a separate controller, usually the one built in to the chipset on the motherboard. The OS talks to that controller using AHCI, and that controller passes ATA commands over the SATA link to the SSD(s). SATA SSDs do not themselves implement AHCI. It's also possible to have a SATA host controller that doesn't use AHCI, such as a RAID controller. These still use ATA commands to communicate with the drive, but require different OS drivers instead of the standard AHCI driver. There are no SATA controllers that implement NVMe, and while it might be theoretically possible, there's no point. In practice, NVMe implies the drive is connected by PCIe.

So when you want to talk about what makes a Samsung 960 PRO so much faster than a Samsung 850 PRO, the most important distinction is PCIe vs SATA. The fact that the 960 uses NVMe instead of AHCI helps it be a little bit faster. (Samsung's PCIe SSDs that used AHCI were almost as fast as their first NVMe SSDs.)

 

[DaveSimmons]

The 960 series has much less throttling than the 950 series, due to a copper layer heatsink.

960 Pro vs 950 Pro thermal throttling.

Nice: "you should be able to read about 455 GB worth of data at full speed before the 960 Pro throttles down to "only" ~2.6 GB/s."

... which is still 5 times as fast as SATA.

I think the boot drive for my Coffee Lake build is going to be a 960 Pro.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Samsung 960 EVO PCIe 3.0 x 4 NVMe M.2 SSD

Boot 6 seconds
Call of Duty Infinite Warefare 11 seconds
Civilization VI 43 seconds
Premiere Pro CC 6 seconds
Z-zip 61 seconds

Crucial MX300 SATA 2.5" SSD

Boot 9 seconds
Call of Duty Infinite Warefare 25 seconds
Civilization VI 53 seconds
Premiere Pro CC 11 seconds
Z-zip 251 seconds

WD Red Pro 4TB 3.5" 7200 rpm HDD

Boot 36 seconds
Call of Duty Infinite Warefare 53 seconds
Civilization VI 66 seconds
Premiere Pro CC 63 seconds
Z-zip 585 seconds