Fastest drive not boot drive, OK?

[bradly1101]

Despite reports of Z77 and Z87 owners having success with having the Intel 750 NVMe drive show up in their BIOS after some tweaks (I'm not sure it runs at its rated speed on these boards), I decided to not mess around with my RAID setup for my spindled disks and not surprisingly the 750 didn't show up in the BIOS of my X79 board where it does run at its fastest speed. So I just installed Windows on my existing SATA SSD and use the 750 for programs and some data.

It's really fast, but am I missing out on even greater speed by not having Windows on the fastest drive? I don't care about boot times (I rarely boot), but are there other calls out to Window's files during everyday use that would benefit from the greater bandwidth or is the bandwidth of a SATA III SSD enough?

Also to check this drive's temperature you have to run a command line utility that writes a log file with current, lowest and highest temps. Does anyone know if the highest and lowest values are for the life of the drive or for a set time relative to when the utility is run? I couldn't find anything on this.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Despite reports of Z77 and Z87 owners having success with having the Intel 750 NVMe drive show up in their BIOS after some tweaks (I'm not sure it runs at its rated speed on these boards), I decided to not mess around with my RAID setup for my spindled disks and not surprisingly the 750 didn't show up in the BIOS of my X79 board where it does run at its fastest speed. So I just installed Windows on my existing SATA SSD and use the 750 for programs and some data.

It's really fast, but am I missing out on even greater speed by not having Windows on the fastest drive? I don't care about boot times (I rarely boot), but are there other calls out to Window's files during everyday use that would benefit from the greater bandwidth or is the bandwidth of a SATA III SSD enough?

Also to check this drive's temperature you have to run a command line utility that writes a log file with current, lowest and highest temps. Does anyone know if the highest and lowest values are for the life of the drive or for a set time relative to when the utility is run? I couldn't find anything on this.

How much bigger bandwidth or speed do you get with the NVMe drive than the SATA SSD? Correct to assume SATA SSD is connected to SATA-III port? Sure -- those boards have plenty.

I have a view on this -- I could be wrong.

high-performance SSDs on SATA-III have only been in wide use over at most 4 years. There's no reason not to assume that different components of PC technology advance at different rates at different times. I can't understand why it would matter that much more to have a striped pair of SSDs in RAID0, as opposed to a single SSD installation for boot-system disk. You can cache the boot-system disk to RAM; you can choose not to do so.

So why would it matter if the NVMe technology gets a full workout at boot-time? Any number of tricks or tweaks would make any differences in the hardware less consequential.

 

[evilspoons]

Well, the Windows folder gets hit quite a lot - just look at WinSXS, all those mirrored DLL files and such - so presumably having that drive be fast is helpful, and getting rid of latency (NVMe) in there would cumulatively help you over the operational life of your PC.

It is, however, hard to quantify based on the workload you put on your PC vs the workload another person might put on theirs. If you run applications off your NVMe SSD that are 100% contained to that drive and just touch the Windows stuff a bit and then end up cached in RAM, you will see next to no benefit.

On the other hand, if you are using insane amounts of RAM (or have insufficient RAM... why are you buying a NVMe SSD? LOL) and it keeps kicking cached DLL files out of RAM to make room for whatever application is running and keeps having to run back to storage to get them when you switch between tasks, having the Windows drive be faster would be beneficial.

You've already put your pagefile on the NVMe SSD, right?

 

[bradly1101]

Well, the Windows folder gets hit quite a lot - just look at WinSXS, all those mirrored DLL files and such - so presumably having that drive be fast is helpful, and getting rid of latency (NVMe) in there would cumulatively help you over the operational life of your PC.

It is, however, hard to quantify based on the workload you put on your PC vs the workload another person might put on theirs. If you run applications off your NVMe SSD that are 100% contained to that drive and just touch the Windows stuff a bit and then end up cached in RAM, you will see next to no benefit.

On the other hand, if you are using insane amounts of RAM (or have insufficient RAM... why are you buying a NVMe SSD? LOL) and it keeps kicking cached DLL files out of RAM to make room for whatever application is running and keeps having to run back to storage to get them when you switch between tasks, having the Windows drive be faster would be beneficial.

You've already put your pagefile on the NVMe SSD, right?

Yes I forgot to mention that, it's on the 750 and I'm letting Windows manage the size.

I have 16GB of RAM on this board so I'm guessing that I don't run into your second scenario. I think I'll just leave it as it is. By not having the OS on the NVMe drive I have room for my photos there, so that speedup I'm guessing is greater than if Windows was faster. I wish I wasn't a perfectionist sometimes. Is really fast fast enough? Yes, dammit!

On X79:

 

[bradly1101]

How much bigger bandwidth or speed do you get with the NVMe drive than the SATA SSD?

It's about four times the speed of my SATA III SSD (Corsair Neutron GTX).

 

[bradly1101]

Any ideas on the temp monitoring utility? I'm asking because I can't use my first PCIe slot due to the size of the Noctua CPU cooler. Therefore I have my video card in slot 3 (x16) with the 750 in slot 2 above the rear of the video card. I think it's OK since it is a really small card (the 750) that leaves much of the back of the video card uncovered.

The temp utility always says that max temp was 40C. The data sheet online from Intel says the max operating temp is 55C but the temp monitoring utility says 85C max.??

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Not mincing words -- Every time I think I've "caught up" in understanding the full potential of hardware I already own, I find I'm behind the bleeding edge. Now we have NVMe and m.2 technologies. And I can see those specs posted for the Intel NVMe drive -- this is a whole new ballgame.

But the problem arises over booting from those drives with certain motherboards and chipset generations. That's going to drive any decision about whether to install Windows on it. You could certainly use it for page files. You could extend your C: drive's "Program Files" directory to install additional software on it.

For me, the choice is in a sort of gray-area for relevance. For instance, a regular SATA-III Samsung boot drive is bundled with the RAPID caching feature, but the benefits would only be seen the longer the windows session lasts. I suppose putting the system into "hibernate" as opposed to just shutting it down would restore the RAM cache in RAPID -- I'm not entirely sure. That sort of configuration would only rival the NVMe drive in benchmarks.

 

[bradly1101]

Not mincing words -- Every time I think I've "caught up" in understanding the full potential of hardware I already own, I find I'm behind the bleeding edge. Now we have NVMe and m.2 technologies. And I can see those specs posted for the Intel NVMe drive -- this is a whole new ballgame.

But the problem arises over booting from those drives with certain motherboards and chipset generations. That's going to drive any decision about whether to install Windows on it. You could certainly use it for page files. You could extend your C: drive's "Program Files" directory to install additional software on it.

For me, the choice is in a sort of gray-area for relevance. For instance, a regular SATA-III Samsung boot drive is bundled with the RAPID caching feature, but the benefits would only be seen the longer the windows session lasts. I suppose putting the system into "hibernate" as opposed to just shutting it down would restore the RAM cache in RAPID -- I'm not entirely sure. That sort of configuration would only rival the NVMe drive in benchmarks.

I know what you mean, there never seems to be any real catching up, such is the pursuit when everything's constantly changing.

Back in ancient times before SSD's were a thing I tried to put myself on that bleeding edge in hard drive speed (the only real bottleneck anymore) by putting four 74GB Raptors in RAID0. I achieved around 250MB/s which was great and ran well without any issues for many years. I felt no need to jump on the SSD bandwagon especially since I heard so many problems with reliability, unlike the Raptors. I eventually got one based on an endurance experiment but I was underwhelmed by its speed. The SATA bottleneck needed to be broken. I run some robust programs (DX0 Optics, Photoshop - I also work on some giant panoramas) that have some delay in some actions, which gets minimized the faster the program runs, and especially if the data is on a fast drive (there's enough room on the 400GB NVMe drive for all my programs, games and my photo collection).

So now things have indeed changed significantly (finally) in the storage area. At a little less than ten times the read speed of my old RAID array the system has a definite sprightly feel to it especially in those photography programs. These drives are 'consumer' drives and run about $1/GB in the 400GB size (a little less than $1/GB for the 1.2TB model). I wonder if they can be RAIDed ;-)