Question Fastest storage solution for an Ivy Bridge era computer?

[mildewman]

My rig is a 3570K @ 4.8 gig with a 1070ti and an 860EVO on a MATX size motherboard. My gaming requirements are only 60fps @ 1080p, so im expecting to still get a few more years out of this box. But one area where i severely lack is storage bandwidth. As newer games start to assume that they can stream in data at gigabytes a second my paltry SATA3 connection might become a bottleneck.

I have no free PCI-E slots , so cant use a PCI to M2 adaptor storage solution. Ideas i have had...

1. Add a second 860EVO and run them in RAID. Should double my speeds to around 900 MB/S if it works. Is intel motherboard raid able to use 2 x 860EVO's ? - or would the Samsung management software (Samsung Magician) freak out ?

2. The SSD management software has a ramdisk to fake silly high speeds in benchmark. If i put another 16 gig of ram in the PC for a total of 32, would Samsung Magician be able to cache enough data to meaningfully increase storage speed? Not so fussed about slow game start times, more interested in an already loaded game being able to access streaming data quickly.

Any comments on these ideas, or other suggestions on how i can improve my storage bandwidth on an Ivy Bridge era box?

 

[UsandThem]

But one area where i severely lack is storage bandwidth. As newer games start to assume that they can stream in data at gigabytes a second my paltry SATA3 connection might become a bottleneck.

Unless you are writing or reading huge files (like video editing), an 860 EVO is plenty fast for gaming purposes. In fact, the "real world" difference between a NVMe drive and a SATA SSD is close to nill, and that's not going to suddenly change any time soon.

1. Add a second 860EVO and run them in RAID. Should double my speeds to around 900 MB/S if it works. Is intel motherboard raid able to use 2 x 860EVO's ? - or would the Samsung management software (Samsung Magician) freak out ?

That's really a waste for gaming. Save your money for upgrading your motherboard and CPU.

2. The SSD management software has a ramdisk to fake silly high speeds in benchmark. If i put another 16 gig of ram in the PC for a total of 32, would Samsung Magician be able to cache enough data to meaningfully increase storage speed? Not so fussed about slow game start times, more interested in an already loaded game being able to access streaming data quickly.

Samsung Rapid Mode makes little difference outside of synthetic benchmarks. Definitely not worth upgrading your RAM to 32 GB. Once again, save the money and use it to move to a new motherboard and CPU.

https://www.techspot.com/news/67222-storage-real-world-performance-nvme-vs-sata-vs-hdd.html
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/does-nvme-ssd-offer-any-real-benefits-over-sata-ssd.3425479/

 

[mildewman]

Thanks for the info, what im mostly worried about is that with the PS5 having such ridiculous storage bandwidth, that games will start assuming that they can get assets at gigabytes per second rather than the 450mb that my SSD can do. But by the time that comes i will have "probably" gone Skylake or newer. Or hopefully Zen !

 

[VirtualLarry]

As newer games start to assume that they can stream in data at gigabytes a second my paltry SATA3 connection might become a bottleneck.

I think that this is (as of yet) a false premise. Game publishers are NOT going to alienate large swathes of potential customers, by making the minimum storage requirements RAID-0 SATA or NVMe SSD. Just not happening. Not in the next 5 years, at least.

However, point taken, that the PS5 will have an M.2 SSD in it. I think that it has yet to be clarified if it is NVMe, but you do have a valid point, slightly, that PS5 console ports may assume a minimum storage performance, for gameplay reasons. But this is much the same as assuming that every gamer has, at minimum, a 1080ti. Just not going to happem, the economics of PC gaming won't allow it.

 

[UsandThem]

Thanks for the info, what im mostly worried about is that with the PS5 having such ridiculous storage bandwidth, that games will start assuming that they can get assets at gigabytes per second rather than the 450mb that my SSD can do. But by the time that comes i will have "probably" gone Skylake or newer. Or hopefully Zen !

A PC operating system / hardware will be different (tweaked) from a console. Both Sony and Microsoft are working on this with their next gen consoles, and a lot of the work seems to be from this: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/65864/sony-ultra-high-speed-ssd-the-key-next-gen-ps5/index.html

The raw read speed is important, but so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them.

There is a lot less bloat / system resources needed to run a console system software compared to something like Windows 10. Of course we will one day be able to benefit from the faster performance of NVMe drives (or other faster storage tech), but it's something that will take some time. And by the time we can truly benefit from it, you will likely need to update/replace your system since you really have no way of adding a NVMe drive to your system. But buying another SATA SSD to run it in RAID for gaming purposes is really a waste (IMO). In fact, you will likely run into your CPU (quad core) limiting your gaming experience long before you would be held back by a SATA SSD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

In fact, you will likely run into your CPU (quad core) limiting your gaming experience long before you would be held back by a SATA SSD.

This. That's a fairly old CPU, albeit with a decent OC. Still, overall lack of cores will likely be a bigger issue than storage bandwidth.

 

[mildewman]

Regarding the ram, i had two spare 8gig 1866 sticks up for sale, put them in the box to see if any improvement, and i could swear that in AC : Odyssey having 32gig made the framerate drops caused by swinging the view 180degrees while in a city less severe. All i can assume is that the SamsungMagician ramdisk is caching more of the game. Then again it might be my imagination

 

[arandomguy]

If you're worried about next-gen console hardware impacting your system the bigger concern would be your CPU as both will be using 8c/16t Zen 2 based CPUs. Even with lower clock speeds to fit within a limited power budget that's still likely in the 3-4x minimum uplift range over current consoles.

 

[aigomorla]

The I/O storage solution and Ram solution will net you almost 0 gains.
The only benifit you will have is the ability to house more games on your storage then having to constantly delete them and redownload.
Games now a days can get massive in storage size..
Borderlands 3 for example uses a whopping 53.74GB, that means more then 1/5th of a 250gb SSD is POOF gone just for 1 game.

The benefits you net from a NVMe vs SATA SSD is also almost 0.
Does that extra 1 sec load up time matter? No, not even in competitive gaming will it matter as they have a load timer to balance players out.
Most of the time you wont really notice that extra second, and will only grief that you bought a more limited solution.

Where are you also hearing games now stream data in gb/s? Where?
Id honestly like to see ANY game publisher be that good and efficient.. seriously, most publishers are so half baked, 90% of the games you play at 0 day are very poorly optimized, and lets not even get into the GPU driver side as Nvidia's driver team is a bunch of monkeys who randomly smash the keyboard and hope good code comes out for 0 day games.

You want a good improvement?
Get a better GPU.
Your system has enough power to handle a GTX 1070 class, or a 1160.
You want to be slightly bottlenecked, you could get away with a 2070 or a 2080.
A AMD 5700 will also be a good powerhouse, or you can go with the more affordable RX580 for your reqs.

Your system is more then able to last you a few years with a more powerful GPU.
I would honestly see no need for a CPU upgrade until you charted into 1440p or you wanted all the bells and windows with full eye candy options on a 1080p.

 

[Shmee]

You should be good for a while, as you already have a 1070Ti and quad core with a good OC. Only thing to do maybe is wait for a full platform upgrade, because as mentioned earlier, you will want more cores as time goes on.

 

[mildewman]

Yes, i dont know about my cpu being outdated. At 4.8gig it compares with a stock i5-9400. In the Userbenchmark.com test im at 82.4% cpu. Plan is in a few years to get a 2nd hand Ryzen 7 3700X based machine, even then its only a 50% increase in horsepower despite a 100% increase in cores.

 

[john3850]

I used a 2500k for a few months and switched to 3770k which was much better at the same oc x47.I stayed with that 3770k way to long.
Because the 3900X were still out of stock I got a 9900k and that is were I noticed the extra cores do make a big difference as most people here know.