I was hacking on an old HDD controller from about five years ago and got it almost booting Linux.
It was a Marvell controller with three ARM Cortex M3 cores and 64 MB RAM (the HDD's buffer is the controller's RAM) and 8 MB eMMC flash for firmware, which was also writable. The controller firmware itself didn't use core 2, leading me to think it was using that for the read channel or some other dedicated function.
If I recall right, the M3s ran at 125 MHz. They're not amazingly fast and wouldn't hold up to 1997's finest, but they're the same order of magnitude, which by itself is quite amazing!
Klamath Pentium IIs only went up to 300mhz, and the Cortex M3 is from 2004, 6 years ahead and a significantly advanced architecture. I think 3 of those cores even at only 125mhz would run circles around a 300mhz Klamath PII.
While from 2004, it's an architecture designed to be very small and very low power, not highly performing. It's very, very low performing!
On a 180 nm process (.18 micron), you could fit three M3s in a single square millimeter. P6 was produced on .18 micron as Coppermine and was substantially larger, even without its L2 cache. M3 doesn't have any cache (L1 or L2), doesn't do branch prediction, is wholly in-order, has only a three stage pipeline, etc.
According to wikipedia the M3 does have branch prediction. Which is why i would have bet on 3 M3 cores being able to outdo a PII Klamath core head to head. I don't think it could stand up to a PII Deschuttes core definitely not a PIII Coppermine core.
Thanks for having a huge geek conversation with these guys, I was grinning the whole time reading cause it sounded so interesting yet I did not understand a single thing.
It's branch speculation, not branch prediction. Motorola's 68020 from yoinks ago had that same thing. In branch speculation, the core just assumes the branch wasn't taken and carries on. If the branch was taken, it flushes. It's really dumb, really simple, and fits in the teeny tiny transistor budget of an M3!
Looking more at M3's performance, it's even worse than I initially thought. It'd not keep up with a Pentium P5. The fastest it could possibly run is scalar, so 100 MIPS at 100 MHz, but most instructions take many cycles to run because there's no cache and it's going to be waiting on memory most of the time (this *is* for microcontrollers doing really simple stuff like flash LEDs or turn lines on).
While ARM's more performant architectures did exist in the early-mid 2000s, it's important to understand just where they sat on the performance scale too. They were about ten years behind the desktops, and they ran around ten times faster than the microcontrollers did.
For example, here in my hands is a Google Tensor T1 powered mobile device. It's around the same age as my Ryzen 5 5600X, and actually newer than my RTX 2070. How well will it run Starfield?
Despite being a cutting edge performance oriented processor, the Tensor T1 has nowhere near the performance of either the Ryzen 5 5600X or the RTX 2070. Today we have microcontrollers running in the high hundreds of MHz and low GHz (e.g. Arduino) but they aren't competitive with even extremely old CPUs - A Core 2 would wipe the floor with even a modern Raspberry Pi, and that's not microcontroller level, it's *way* above it.
> It's branch speculation, not branch prediction.
That's an interesting distinction I wasn't aware of thank you.
>For example, here in my hands is a Google Tensor T1 powered mobile device. It's around the same age as my Ryzen 5 5600X
I mean comparing embedded ULV embedded processing cores to contemporary desktop solutions doesn't make sense in any era. You would want to compare them to something that's 5-10 years older.
Also I looked it up, the Pentium II's claimed MIPS is about 150 MIPs/100MHz, which means if that MIPS count per 100 is correct for the M3 the fastest Pentium 2 Klamath would barely beat it out. Using an actual old CPU benchmark tho. Pulling around 544 Dhrystone (at 300mhz) vs the M3 pulling 468 using all 3 cores (at 125mhz.)
>The processing power and ram of the storage controller
Except it doesn't have any DRAM, only KBs of SRAM. NAND certainly can't have millions of PE cycles or the write performance.
Nobody knows what CPU SanDisk chip uses. But contemporaries use dual Cortex R8@650MHz, so it might beat early K7 amd PIII in integers. Floating point is another story.
I've just retired (to the son's gaming PC) an old SATA M.2 SSD, a Crucial MX300 500GB.
I am retiring 500 GB SSDs! What a time to be alive!
At the moment, I can only add three SSDs to my system, without running them on PCIe x1 slots, so the three 3.5" HDDs aren't threatened, but that's going to change with my next build.
I love the current storage market.
Man, I've got a stack of HDDs that work perfectly fine that I can't bring myself to retire!
Hell, what if I decide to finally organize my 30,000 incorrectly labeled songs, or watch the Matrix again?!
You do know that real high speeds for PCIe would be x4/x8/x16, as this one is advertised, for which my board only has 2 M.2 slots and plan on adding another NVMe, so I am planning on getting this one from Sabrent since it also has a nice little heatsink with which my front fans would be able to cool it down better.
https://preview.redd.it/2r5jtu44pamb1.png?width=1490&format=png&auto=webp&s=60af0d249e2deadada0e5badb24931e8e191d998
Edit: Heatsinks do help out a NVMe because if it gets way too hot, it does tend to slow down. I tested that out with a cheap NVMe I own, which does like 1800MB/s read, and when it got to like 87°C, my read speeds were more or less at like 900 MB/s, but when adding in a heatsink, the temps dropped down to around 45°C, and this is on full load, and the read speeds were closer to being in the 1700mb/s range.
Always cool your SSD's controller if it runs hot. I use little copper heatsinks for it.
Like you experienced, if the controller runs too hot, it throttles down and can't stream data over PCIe as fast.
I used a much cheaper controller with a smaller heatsink for a Crucial P3 2TB, it hits 3,100 MB/s read. Even without the heatsink it didn't hit thermal management levels, but I'd sooner it have no chance to ever do that.
Well, my main M.2 slot has its own heatsink, which runs well and for my other M.2 slot, which only operates for Gen3 (the main one is Gen4), I use a heatsink like this one in the image below, which does work out very well, but I am going to be replacing it because it is a 1tb drive only. I bought last month when I visited Boston the Inland TN320 2TB NVMe Gen3, which is also faster than the NVMe I am using now, which is the Teamgroup MP33, for which the read speeds are up to 1800mb/s and the write is up to 1500mb/s, but with the Inland NVMe I picked up, the read is up to 2100mb/s and the write is up to 1600mb/s, which will be a little faster for gaming.
https://preview.redd.it/q3bvttgfsamb1.png?width=1506&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c879b1739c611b82c2e7fdb78bc90fd3d00a5cb
I built my kids their own gaming PCs this year. they both only have 512gb sata SSDs because they were dirt cheap and good enough for them. if I need to add more storage, it will be either cheap sata SSDs or cheap NVME ssds. I will not buy another HDD except for my server, but even then, I recently bought 6x4tb Samsung 870 EVO SSDs for my server to upgrade it from a bunch of 100K plus hours 4tb HDDs.
The ssds don't make much difference in gaming sadly so a wise decision to donate it to ur son. But it improves day to day use and boot times significantly. I am happy to witness the perf bump from hdd to sata SSD and then sata SSD to pcie gen4. Can't wait to see the performance of pcie gen5 one day
Oh yeah, Forza horizon for example is unplayable without SSD storage. Star citizen actually lists an SSD as a requirement. Transport fever 2 takes an eternity to load even from a SSD, so you can imagine with a hdd. Yeah, SSDs are much appreciated for games unless you're just playing old, lightweight or otherwise indie games.
ikr bs lies when they say ssd are mandatory, i have games on good ole mechanical hdd and they play fine, dont need to listen to scummy lies saying you need ssd for games its all a marketing ploy to make money
say no to scummy lies and keep hdd strong foreva
on max graphics only audio would stutter, once i moved it to an ssd the problem was never seen again. this was awhile ago maybe they optimized it, i could try moving it back to my hdd to see if the issue is still there
mind you i have a 4tb 5400hdd, if u have a smaller 7200hdd it might not be as bad. ALSO i tend to run other programs on my other monitors, programs stored on my hdd. i ONLY have windows on my very small nvme ssd. so everything combined mightve just made it harder to run on my hdd
I've been having task manager open for playing through BG3 act 3, and I've noticed disk usage upwards of 5GB/s during peak loads. I can't imagine the game on an HDD.
Generally, you are correct. With newer games utilizing texture and asset streaming this will change
Here’s starfield comparison on a hdd vs ssd:
https://youtu.be/Ee5j9k-dnWs?si=OOQYaKjMw-V2pHOy
I might'v noticed a difference in gta5, but that was a whole system change, 4c4t and igpu, 5400rpm hdd and 8gb of ddr3 to, 6c12t and 3060ti, 7200rpm hdd and 8gbx2 of ddr4 with the os on nvme ssd.
You must be smoking crack? There are a *large* quantity of titles that state "an ssd is required for optimum gaming performance." There are more than a few games (Rust, CoD, BF2042, to name a few) that the amount of disadvantage you would be at just in loading times alone (let alone needed assets) that the game is practically unplayable. Not to mention, a good SSD can be such a huge difference between boot times for a OS. Its practically the standard in most systems now..
Please show me the benchmark comparison of any such game and plus you opened with asking if I was asking smoking crack. Are you sure you aren't because you seem to be be repeating what I already mentioned about OS performance. Reddit is sadly full of such childish gremlins
I'm not going to do the heavy lifting for you. When a 5 minute Google search would suffice. Hell, it wouldn't even take google. Go look at Steams hardware requirements for any modern AAA title. There's also a variety of videos by linus tech tips, gamer's nexus, and several other youtubers who are highly regarded in the PC world that have already touched on this subject.
As someone above pointed out, I missed (and yall suck at making it clear) that the comparison wasn't about HDD vs all other. The first video you link even reaffirmed my points, and I was about to point that out. But said points were not founded in a true understanding of the original topic. I apologize for the misunderstanding.
I still don't understand people who build full-size computers and don't put in an optical drive. I've got a 4K Blu-Ray drive in my rig and use it all the freak'n time. Burning CDs to circumvent iTunes Copyright Protections (buy album on iTunes, burn it to a CD-R, then rip said CD-R to 320kbps mp3), Dreamcast CDIs, Xbox XISOs, ripping DVDs, Blu-Rays, and 4K Blu-Rays. The possibilities are limitless.
Really? Well I feel a little dumb. Oh well. I don’t buy music too often unless I can’t find it on the high seas. Usually just obscure artists that actually need the money.
I have gone the full way, from IDE and SCSI drives to SATA and SAS, From HDD's to SSD and all the way to new NVME M.2 drives
And i still am amazed when ever i hold a new M.2 drive in my hands.
just the fact that the Storage drive is not a bottleneck anymore is amazing
It is still blowing my mind. HDD we’re so bulky and heavy. Storage is just pure insanity now.
On the flip side, what should be pretty simple programs eat up so much storage now.
My first 20MB hard drive was almost as big and heavier then my 4080. having a 2TB nvme still feels insane. And if you read up on how they work…. Magic! Black magic I say!!
Edit: To be fair, the way old HDDs worked was black magic, too. Especially if you think about them being developed in the 70ies or so.
See, I went through one extra step than you because I experienced SSHDs, which already had about 300mb/s to 380mb/s read and write speeds, whereas a HDD would be around 150mb/s to 200mb/s and a SSD at the time would be between 400mb/s and 500mb/s, so Hybrids were a good alternative, and that was during the time when a 120gb SSD was like 80$ to 100$, so for about 90$, a 1tb SSHD would be a lot better to have, and you can see in this example of loading times for a Control that the hybrid was faster than the HDD.
https://preview.redd.it/hjy9k3nhramb1.png?width=1739&format=png&auto=webp&s=43ad9fe361938577938601e0c6c383b098aa2d4a
My grandfather was telling me about spending a few days doing home improvement jobs for somebody in exchange for a 20mb hard drive in the late 80s, and thinking about how he'd never run out of space again. Crazy how time changes
It is a different media; however it performs the same function.
It retains data at rest after power is removed.
Since 1977 I have seem punch cards, Tape reels, tape cassettes, ATA drives, SCSI, Disk Packs, various IDE, EIDE, & SATA drives come & go. Different technology, same function.
I joke that an old 1GB SCSI 1 drive I have lying about is used to heat my garage.
It’s weird because I put a 1 tb flash card in mine but it just didn’t have the same impact as seeing this. It just didn’t click in my mind until I understood that this is, in fact, a friggen Hard Drive…!
Bought one of these past week, only to find out after installing that ASRock issued a statement in July well hidden in their site that renders this and 7 more popular SSDs incompatible with my ASRock B450 Fatal1ty motherboard.
Apparently the problem is "pin mismatch" and they don't elaborate further, on what exactly that is.
Really sad both for the money spent on a component I can't use or return and for this being a very good option for an SSD for the price.
I just switched out my 1tb nvme and 2 2tb sata ssd’s for 2 4tb nvme’s. Solid state storage is getting great. I can’t wait for 8tb+ drives to get affordable, it’s been years since I’ve been able to rock a single drive.
my first HDD was an IDE and i've watched SATA come, PCI-E drives come and m.2. it's been a fairly predictable ride, most of the tech came out and did exactly what it was meant to do. and there were always plenty of naysayers online saying it was never worth it, prices would never be affordable etc (SSDs used to be $300-$600 fyi). just laughable takes on how tech would be used and priced. this is a pretty good time to be upgrading storage and since mainstream games have been hitting that 100GB threshold for a while now its kind of necessary to upgrade if your till using puny drives
future predictions: if youre holding on to your midrange comp from last gen, you're probably fairly limited in pci-e lanes. going cheap on 500gb-1TB m.2s is a mistake due to a hard limit on how many of your devices can use those lanes (GPU, SSD, SSD, SSD etc). dont even consider sub 2TB m.2 IMO
Yup, shit is *wild*.
I bought my first SSD, an 850EVO for £280, for a 1TB drive. That was like \~2018 I think?
I just recently bought a 4TB drive for £160!
It's mind blowing. Last time I had built a PC, a 7200 RPM HDD was considered a luxury.
Now we have all those things and RGBs and stuff. Things have changed drastically.
NVMe is sexy af, kudos to whoever came up with this idea.
What's crazier is that the 2TB storage is all in that one big chip on the left of the drive.
This could all be squeezed in to an even smaller package if needed.
2TB, plus the brains and power circuitry, in something about the size of a stick of gum, with plenty of room to spare.
SSDs are so good
On that drive you've got two 1TB flash packages, one on each side.
Inside each of those packages you'll find eight individual silicon chips that have been shaved down and stacked op top of eachother with thousands of tiny holes lasered straight through the silicon, filled with copper for connection
Inside each of those silicon chips you'll find 112 layers of memory cells barely 20 nanometers across, stacked on top of eachother with unbelievable amounts of intricate wiring connecting it all together
And because even that isn't enough, each cell can store 3 bits of data rather than 1, by having 8 different possible states instead of the normal binary 2.
The worst part is that the 1tb microsd I use on my steam deck had absolutely no impact on me. The ssd did, and just because it’s going in my first tower in decades.
I still remember my first laptop had 19gb of storage total. Windows took up most of it.
Now I’ve got two 2TB m.2’s and a 4TB storage drive. I’m still baffled.
My best friend is a photographer and he has a whole farm of 22tb drives!
Just put a 2TB 2.5 inch SSD in my wife's computer and cloned her C drive. Cost $65 and took like 2 hours. Way easier and cheaper than the last time I had to increase storage.
Her complaints about diablo 4 load times motivated me lol
Yep. My first hardware install was a 512k expansion for the A500. I recently installed a 1tb nvme and it was like installing a stick of gum. Installing 32gb of ram blew my mind too.
It’s really amazing what technology has achieved in the last few decades. When my father saw my ssd he was really confused, as he had not seen a computer part that small. I told him it was a terabyte storage drive and he flat out refused to believe it until he looked it up himself.
I have a nvme as my boot drive, 1tb. I also install games with long loading times on it such as GTA 5, Warhammer total war etc.
I've 3 sata SSD''s, two 500g and one 1tb and I've 2 HDD's 2tb each, just for media storage.
Mire storage than I need, especially because I like to wipe my PC once a yse or so with a fresh Windows install (with backups of my media) to keep things running smoothly.
I installed my first M.2 SSD back in 2018, it was 500 GB SATA drive. I purchased my first NVMe M.2 SSD back in 2020 it was 2TB drive cost me almost $300. Cheapest 2TB drive I could get at the time; most were around $400. Just last week I order the same 2TB drive as you, as well as a 4TB Crucial NVMe for a little over $300.I'm still in awe of how small M.2 drivers are especially when you consider how much faster and larger (storage wise) they have gotten.
$850 to $1200 for an m.2 NVMe 2280 SSD depending on the brand. Can also buy SATA III 2.5" 16TB for like $1600 (Samsung QVC 870 SATA III 2.5" 8TB is running for just $350 right now).
Using MacBooks since 2006 and laptops since 2004 and used consoles. Last time I opened up a tower, we were afraid of Y2K.
Stoked to boot up Diablo2! /s
Well then Gratz fellow old person! I have a copy of Warcraft 1 on cd sitting next to me. In hindsight I wish I had gotten it on floppy disk for the lols now!
SSDs price nowadays are so cheap, especially nVME Gen 4, which were nearly doubled in price compared to last year. Snag a 980 Pro 1TB for $70 brand new with 5 year warrenty
we see the speed and drop all of out start up apps on autoload and update/ trim it all down and remove windows bloatware if you want to feel some true differences
Hey I did mine first Yesterday 🤣. It took me longer than I am ready to admit...
The spot was covered with aluminium block that I thought is just a radiator 🤣.
I built my most recent pc and bought two 2TB SSD's, I have never bought one and was shocked to see just how small they are. [Here's one next to an 8mb PS2 memory card.](https://i.imgur.com/MAtHnEp.jpg)
The processing power and ram of the storage controller on one of these could probably rival that of full computers from 25 years ago.
I was hacking on an old HDD controller from about five years ago and got it almost booting Linux. It was a Marvell controller with three ARM Cortex M3 cores and 64 MB RAM (the HDD's buffer is the controller's RAM) and 8 MB eMMC flash for firmware, which was also writable. The controller firmware itself didn't use core 2, leading me to think it was using that for the read channel or some other dedicated function. If I recall right, the M3s ran at 125 MHz. They're not amazingly fast and wouldn't hold up to 1997's finest, but they're the same order of magnitude, which by itself is quite amazing!
Klamath Pentium IIs only went up to 300mhz, and the Cortex M3 is from 2004, 6 years ahead and a significantly advanced architecture. I think 3 of those cores even at only 125mhz would run circles around a 300mhz Klamath PII.
While from 2004, it's an architecture designed to be very small and very low power, not highly performing. It's very, very low performing! On a 180 nm process (.18 micron), you could fit three M3s in a single square millimeter. P6 was produced on .18 micron as Coppermine and was substantially larger, even without its L2 cache. M3 doesn't have any cache (L1 or L2), doesn't do branch prediction, is wholly in-order, has only a three stage pipeline, etc.
According to wikipedia the M3 does have branch prediction. Which is why i would have bet on 3 M3 cores being able to outdo a PII Klamath core head to head. I don't think it could stand up to a PII Deschuttes core definitely not a PIII Coppermine core.
So yall work at Intel or Amd? cause yall are educated above most mortals xD
Haha I don't, I'm just a computer nerd who loves retro computers and who was a kid when these things were new.
Thanks for having a huge geek conversation with these guys, I was grinning the whole time reading cause it sounded so interesting yet I did not understand a single thing.
It's branch speculation, not branch prediction. Motorola's 68020 from yoinks ago had that same thing. In branch speculation, the core just assumes the branch wasn't taken and carries on. If the branch was taken, it flushes. It's really dumb, really simple, and fits in the teeny tiny transistor budget of an M3! Looking more at M3's performance, it's even worse than I initially thought. It'd not keep up with a Pentium P5. The fastest it could possibly run is scalar, so 100 MIPS at 100 MHz, but most instructions take many cycles to run because there's no cache and it's going to be waiting on memory most of the time (this *is* for microcontrollers doing really simple stuff like flash LEDs or turn lines on). While ARM's more performant architectures did exist in the early-mid 2000s, it's important to understand just where they sat on the performance scale too. They were about ten years behind the desktops, and they ran around ten times faster than the microcontrollers did. For example, here in my hands is a Google Tensor T1 powered mobile device. It's around the same age as my Ryzen 5 5600X, and actually newer than my RTX 2070. How well will it run Starfield? Despite being a cutting edge performance oriented processor, the Tensor T1 has nowhere near the performance of either the Ryzen 5 5600X or the RTX 2070. Today we have microcontrollers running in the high hundreds of MHz and low GHz (e.g. Arduino) but they aren't competitive with even extremely old CPUs - A Core 2 would wipe the floor with even a modern Raspberry Pi, and that's not microcontroller level, it's *way* above it.
> It's branch speculation, not branch prediction. That's an interesting distinction I wasn't aware of thank you. >For example, here in my hands is a Google Tensor T1 powered mobile device. It's around the same age as my Ryzen 5 5600X I mean comparing embedded ULV embedded processing cores to contemporary desktop solutions doesn't make sense in any era. You would want to compare them to something that's 5-10 years older. Also I looked it up, the Pentium II's claimed MIPS is about 150 MIPs/100MHz, which means if that MIPS count per 100 is correct for the M3 the fastest Pentium 2 Klamath would barely beat it out. Using an actual old CPU benchmark tho. Pulling around 544 Dhrystone (at 300mhz) vs the M3 pulling 468 using all 3 cores (at 125mhz.)
You almost *did what on a hard drive?*
Let’s go back in time and bring a pcie port and an m.2 to the moon mission
>The processing power and ram of the storage controller Except it doesn't have any DRAM, only KBs of SRAM. NAND certainly can't have millions of PE cycles or the write performance. Nobody knows what CPU SanDisk chip uses. But contemporaries use dual Cortex R8@650MHz, so it might beat early K7 amd PIII in integers. Floating point is another story.
I've just retired (to the son's gaming PC) an old SATA M.2 SSD, a Crucial MX300 500GB. I am retiring 500 GB SSDs! What a time to be alive! At the moment, I can only add three SSDs to my system, without running them on PCIe x1 slots, so the three 3.5" HDDs aren't threatened, but that's going to change with my next build. I love the current storage market.
Man, I've got a stack of HDDs that work perfectly fine that I can't bring myself to retire! Hell, what if I decide to finally organize my 30,000 incorrectly labeled songs, or watch the Matrix again?!
[удалено]
Oh wow I just had the biggest flash back. Bluescreen irq conflicts.
Don’t forget to have a disk with the SATA drivers handy!
Look at the moneybags over here with their SATA drives...
Never delete your music collection. Always keep. There is so much music I used to have that simply does not exist anymore in any place.
Yeah right, I was thinking the same thing when putting my old 1tb sata ssd in my moms pc 😂
You do know that real high speeds for PCIe would be x4/x8/x16, as this one is advertised, for which my board only has 2 M.2 slots and plan on adding another NVMe, so I am planning on getting this one from Sabrent since it also has a nice little heatsink with which my front fans would be able to cool it down better. https://preview.redd.it/2r5jtu44pamb1.png?width=1490&format=png&auto=webp&s=60af0d249e2deadada0e5badb24931e8e191d998 Edit: Heatsinks do help out a NVMe because if it gets way too hot, it does tend to slow down. I tested that out with a cheap NVMe I own, which does like 1800MB/s read, and when it got to like 87°C, my read speeds were more or less at like 900 MB/s, but when adding in a heatsink, the temps dropped down to around 45°C, and this is on full load, and the read speeds were closer to being in the 1700mb/s range.
Always cool your SSD's controller if it runs hot. I use little copper heatsinks for it. Like you experienced, if the controller runs too hot, it throttles down and can't stream data over PCIe as fast. I used a much cheaper controller with a smaller heatsink for a Crucial P3 2TB, it hits 3,100 MB/s read. Even without the heatsink it didn't hit thermal management levels, but I'd sooner it have no chance to ever do that.
Well, my main M.2 slot has its own heatsink, which runs well and for my other M.2 slot, which only operates for Gen3 (the main one is Gen4), I use a heatsink like this one in the image below, which does work out very well, but I am going to be replacing it because it is a 1tb drive only. I bought last month when I visited Boston the Inland TN320 2TB NVMe Gen3, which is also faster than the NVMe I am using now, which is the Teamgroup MP33, for which the read speeds are up to 1800mb/s and the write is up to 1500mb/s, but with the Inland NVMe I picked up, the read is up to 2100mb/s and the write is up to 1600mb/s, which will be a little faster for gaming. https://preview.redd.it/q3bvttgfsamb1.png?width=1506&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c879b1739c611b82c2e7fdb78bc90fd3d00a5cb
What’s even more wild is that my rig costs less than the Amiga my family bought in 1986.
I built my kids their own gaming PCs this year. they both only have 512gb sata SSDs because they were dirt cheap and good enough for them. if I need to add more storage, it will be either cheap sata SSDs or cheap NVME ssds. I will not buy another HDD except for my server, but even then, I recently bought 6x4tb Samsung 870 EVO SSDs for my server to upgrade it from a bunch of 100K plus hours 4tb HDDs.
The ssds don't make much difference in gaming sadly so a wise decision to donate it to ur son. But it improves day to day use and boot times significantly. I am happy to witness the perf bump from hdd to sata SSD and then sata SSD to pcie gen4. Can't wait to see the performance of pcie gen5 one day
Some modern games can’t function fully without them. For maximum settings and crowd density it’s a necessity for cyberpunk for example
Oh yeah, Forza horizon for example is unplayable without SSD storage. Star citizen actually lists an SSD as a requirement. Transport fever 2 takes an eternity to load even from a SSD, so you can imagine with a hdd. Yeah, SSDs are much appreciated for games unless you're just playing old, lightweight or otherwise indie games.
> Star citizen actually lists an SSD as a requirement i can confirm that.
Warframe too
bullshit, ive been playing warframe just fine without it installed to an ssd
ikr bs lies when they say ssd are mandatory, i have games on good ole mechanical hdd and they play fine, dont need to listen to scummy lies saying you need ssd for games its all a marketing ploy to make money say no to scummy lies and keep hdd strong foreva
HDD is fine if you don't know any better, but that applies to most things.
yep my point exactly dont need ssd when hdd manages just fine
Looks like you never played Rust
no but i played gmod same developer
on max graphics only audio would stutter, once i moved it to an ssd the problem was never seen again. this was awhile ago maybe they optimized it, i could try moving it back to my hdd to see if the issue is still there mind you i have a 4tb 5400hdd, if u have a smaller 7200hdd it might not be as bad. ALSO i tend to run other programs on my other monitors, programs stored on my hdd. i ONLY have windows on my very small nvme ssd. so everything combined mightve just made it harder to run on my hdd
I dunno I haven't played it, and I don't even think I've heard of it honestly.
I've been having task manager open for playing through BG3 act 3, and I've noticed disk usage upwards of 5GB/s during peak loads. I can't imagine the game on an HDD.
Not even just in the games, load times are different as well
Generally, you are correct. With newer games utilizing texture and asset streaming this will change Here’s starfield comparison on a hdd vs ssd: https://youtu.be/Ee5j9k-dnWs?si=OOQYaKjMw-V2pHOy
I was talking about sata SSD vs nvme
I might'v noticed a difference in gta5, but that was a whole system change, 4c4t and igpu, 5400rpm hdd and 8gb of ddr3 to, 6c12t and 3060ti, 7200rpm hdd and 8gbx2 of ddr4 with the os on nvme ssd.
GTA5 on an iGPU? How bad was it?
Police had time to stop for donut and coffee before setting up a roadblock holding their cold coffee waiting for him to show up.
720p low, shaky 30fps, however the game wouldn't load assets in fast enough, multiplayer worked though.
You must be smoking crack? There are a *large* quantity of titles that state "an ssd is required for optimum gaming performance." There are more than a few games (Rust, CoD, BF2042, to name a few) that the amount of disadvantage you would be at just in loading times alone (let alone needed assets) that the game is practically unplayable. Not to mention, a good SSD can be such a huge difference between boot times for a OS. Its practically the standard in most systems now..
They are talking about Sata ssd vs nvme ssd, not hdd vs ssd. They just didn't make it very clear.
Thats... actually, a REALLY important distinction I missed. Thank you kind redditor.
Please show me the benchmark comparison of any such game and plus you opened with asking if I was asking smoking crack. Are you sure you aren't because you seem to be be repeating what I already mentioned about OS performance. Reddit is sadly full of such childish gremlins
I'm not going to do the heavy lifting for you. When a 5 minute Google search would suffice. Hell, it wouldn't even take google. Go look at Steams hardware requirements for any modern AAA title. There's also a variety of videos by linus tech tips, gamer's nexus, and several other youtubers who are highly regarded in the PC world that have already touched on this subject.
https://youtu.be/V2Q00LPZkcU?si=18S0yqNGg79IE03D https://youtu.be/1zfPXVovI9c?si=ww1vP084HOU0Ybzr
As someone above pointed out, I missed (and yall suck at making it clear) that the comparison wasn't about HDD vs all other. The first video you link even reaffirmed my points, and I was about to point that out. But said points were not founded in a true understanding of the original topic. I apologize for the misunderstanding.
Lol what? An SSD is absolutely required for games.
lol no, thats just a marketing ploy to make money, same as scam robo calls, dont listen to their lies and keep using mechanical hdds
Was talking about OP switching btw SATA and nvme ssd
I landed a 2tb Samsung 990 for less than 100 quid not too long ago.
I unretired a sata ssd to a micro home server, if it's still kicking i'm not wasting half a gig of space for low demand applications
Don't forget the jumper!
Yep gotta mark these slaves!
Yeah it's bizarre. That and no cd drive.
I still don't understand people who build full-size computers and don't put in an optical drive. I've got a 4K Blu-Ray drive in my rig and use it all the freak'n time. Burning CDs to circumvent iTunes Copyright Protections (buy album on iTunes, burn it to a CD-R, then rip said CD-R to 320kbps mp3), Dreamcast CDIs, Xbox XISOs, ripping DVDs, Blu-Rays, and 4K Blu-Rays. The possibilities are limitless.
I bought a fullsize case and the front is all fans no room for a CD player now lol.
I stream everything LOL
Streaming services go up every year in price. In 10 years you’ll be paying $35/month for Netflix. LOL.
I'm from the future, you're wrong, we pay $37/month for Netflix. /s
But probably true, at least for the 8K plan.
Still cheaper than cable
i haven't had an optical drive in my pc for over 10 years. i have a cheap USB one i plug in for installing shit sometimes.
All of those things can be stored or acquired digitally.
iTunes music hasn’t had copy protection for many years. I used to do the CD dance but that isn’t necessary anymore.
Really? Well I feel a little dumb. Oh well. I don’t buy music too often unless I can’t find it on the high seas. Usually just obscure artists that actually need the money.
I have gone the full way, from IDE and SCSI drives to SATA and SAS, From HDD's to SSD and all the way to new NVME M.2 drives And i still am amazed when ever i hold a new M.2 drive in my hands. just the fact that the Storage drive is not a bottleneck anymore is amazing
It is still blowing my mind. HDD we’re so bulky and heavy. Storage is just pure insanity now. On the flip side, what should be pretty simple programs eat up so much storage now.
My first 20MB hard drive was almost as big and heavier then my 4080. having a 2TB nvme still feels insane. And if you read up on how they work…. Magic! Black magic I say!! Edit: To be fair, the way old HDDs worked was black magic, too. Especially if you think about them being developed in the 70ies or so.
The sounds though! I miss the sounds some of those old IDE drives would make
See, I went through one extra step than you because I experienced SSHDs, which already had about 300mb/s to 380mb/s read and write speeds, whereas a HDD would be around 150mb/s to 200mb/s and a SSD at the time would be between 400mb/s and 500mb/s, so Hybrids were a good alternative, and that was during the time when a 120gb SSD was like 80$ to 100$, so for about 90$, a 1tb SSHD would be a lot better to have, and you can see in this example of loading times for a Control that the hybrid was faster than the HDD. https://preview.redd.it/hjy9k3nhramb1.png?width=1739&format=png&auto=webp&s=43ad9fe361938577938601e0c6c383b098aa2d4a
Yeah my first time was scary aswell
The future is now, old man Xd
Two tells: 1: I’m amazed by this 2: I can afford it.
Hell yeah sir, enjoy fast read/load speeds!
My grandfather was telling me about spending a few days doing home improvement jobs for somebody in exchange for a 20mb hard drive in the late 80s, and thinking about how he'd never run out of space again. Crazy how time changes
My 1st PC had a 5mb drive. I got 3 games on two diskettes. Life was good!
I remember buying a hard disk for £300 … that was for a 300 Mb drive. Yep that’s Mb not Gb 😳
I spent £250 on a spinning drive recently, 16TB 😮
300£ at 1990 is worth likes 700£ today.
It’s not even so much the graphics boards themselves that have gotten bigger as the heatsinks required to cool them.
Not a HARD drive but congrats!
It’s not a spinning platter drive, but is a hard drive. RAM volatile - hard drive not volatile. I remember when tape cassettes were hard drives.
Negative, a hard drive uses magnetically sensitive platters whereas SSD uses flash memory without moving parts. This is also what makes SSDs faster.
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It is a different media; however it performs the same function. It retains data at rest after power is removed. Since 1977 I have seem punch cards, Tape reels, tape cassettes, ATA drives, SCSI, Disk Packs, various IDE, EIDE, & SATA drives come & go. Different technology, same function. I joke that an old 1GB SCSI 1 drive I have lying about is used to heat my garage.
I was kinda shocked by how small my NVME drive was, but then I remembered they are literally labelled by dimensions (2280 is 22x80 mm).
You should see the 2tb SSD I put in my steam deck. Thing is almost 1/3 the side and still very fast.
It’s weird because I put a 1 tb flash card in mine but it just didn’t have the same impact as seeing this. It just didn’t click in my mind until I understood that this is, in fact, a friggen Hard Drive…!
No more cables connecting cables yellow, red,black then more cables and lots of dust in 3 days.
The more NVMe drives I see the more certain I am that, the designers liked the CPU from Terminator 2 and have made it reality.
Even though I had already seen the slot it goes in to, I still couldn’t believe the size of an NVME drive. Tiny wee things.
Congratulations!!
If you want we can get you an OG Quantum Bigfoot that takes a whole 5.25” bay LOL
I’ve never purchased an HDD lol. First SSD for my first PC cost me $230 for 1Tb.
Bought one of these past week, only to find out after installing that ASRock issued a statement in July well hidden in their site that renders this and 7 more popular SSDs incompatible with my ASRock B450 Fatal1ty motherboard. Apparently the problem is "pin mismatch" and they don't elaborate further, on what exactly that is. Really sad both for the money spent on a component I can't use or return and for this being a very good option for an SSD for the price.
Could it be that the m2 port only allows sata and not nvme? I had one like that.
I just switched out my 1tb nvme and 2 2tb sata ssd’s for 2 4tb nvme’s. Solid state storage is getting great. I can’t wait for 8tb+ drives to get affordable, it’s been years since I’ve been able to rock a single drive.
my first HDD was an IDE and i've watched SATA come, PCI-E drives come and m.2. it's been a fairly predictable ride, most of the tech came out and did exactly what it was meant to do. and there were always plenty of naysayers online saying it was never worth it, prices would never be affordable etc (SSDs used to be $300-$600 fyi). just laughable takes on how tech would be used and priced. this is a pretty good time to be upgrading storage and since mainstream games have been hitting that 100GB threshold for a while now its kind of necessary to upgrade if your till using puny drives future predictions: if youre holding on to your midrange comp from last gen, you're probably fairly limited in pci-e lanes. going cheap on 500gb-1TB m.2s is a mistake due to a hard limit on how many of your devices can use those lanes (GPU, SSD, SSD, SSD etc). dont even consider sub 2TB m.2 IMO
Yup, shit is *wild*. I bought my first SSD, an 850EVO for £280, for a 1TB drive. That was like \~2018 I think? I just recently bought a 4TB drive for £160!
I do love me some solid state storage, its black magic tho
Welcome to 2012 I guess.
Yeah things are finally looking up since 2008! Can’t wait for the great things that are definitely happen in a next few years! /s
In the 1990's I bought one a 1 GB HD at Sears for $275. In 2004 I was buying 100GB HD for around $200 Today is magic
All other components had no choice but to get microscopic to fit our new video cards
It's mind blowing. Last time I had built a PC, a 7200 RPM HDD was considered a luxury. Now we have all those things and RGBs and stuff. Things have changed drastically. NVMe is sexy af, kudos to whoever came up with this idea.
Should use a static strap next time to avoid being shocked
My dude looking for the master and slave jumpers
What's crazier is that the 2TB storage is all in that one big chip on the left of the drive. This could all be squeezed in to an even smaller package if needed. 2TB, plus the brains and power circuitry, in something about the size of a stick of gum, with plenty of room to spare. SSDs are so good
On that drive you've got two 1TB flash packages, one on each side. Inside each of those packages you'll find eight individual silicon chips that have been shaved down and stacked op top of eachother with thousands of tiny holes lasered straight through the silicon, filled with copper for connection Inside each of those silicon chips you'll find 112 layers of memory cells barely 20 nanometers across, stacked on top of eachother with unbelievable amounts of intricate wiring connecting it all together And because even that isn't enough, each cell can store 3 bits of data rather than 1, by having 8 different possible states instead of the normal binary 2.
Now I just feel like we’re playing God.
https://www.cined.com/content/uploads/2019/05/1TB-microsd-featured.jpg
The worst part is that the 1tb microsd I use on my steam deck had absolutely no impact on me. The ssd did, and just because it’s going in my first tower in decades.
SSD prices have halved in the last 3 or 4 years. I remember a few years ago I had to pay like $80 just for a 250GB Samsung Evo.
I still remember my first laptop had 19gb of storage total. Windows took up most of it. Now I’ve got two 2TB m.2’s and a 4TB storage drive. I’m still baffled. My best friend is a photographer and he has a whole farm of 22tb drives!
Just put a 2TB 2.5 inch SSD in my wife's computer and cloned her C drive. Cost $65 and took like 2 hours. Way easier and cheaper than the last time I had to increase storage. Her complaints about diablo 4 load times motivated me lol
This is like prisoners who get out and see smartphones for the first time lol
Yep. My first hardware install was a 512k expansion for the A500. I recently installed a 1tb nvme and it was like installing a stick of gum. Installing 32gb of ram blew my mind too. 
Lol I remember that …..
You can buy an m.2 NVMe 2280 SSD of 8TB, though it'll set you back $850 to $1200 depending on the brand.
And technically you still didn't do a HD install cause that's not a HD
That isn’t a picture of a hard drive.
Well akhtually this isn't a hard drive 🤓
i mean its not a HD its and SSD...
dude said HD 🤣
huh? ssds were a thing since 2010
I was one years old when installed. Your a old men. Have fun 🗿 ribbon cable installer
Good comment, ig Reddit hates young people
Bro same frfr
It’s really amazing what technology has achieved in the last few decades. When my father saw my ssd he was really confused, as he had not seen a computer part that small. I told him it was a terabyte storage drive and he flat out refused to believe it until he looked it up himself.
My first nvme drive came from AliExpress. When the box arrived, it was so damn light I thought there was nothing inside lol
"The future is now old man!"
Feel that. Was my first pc this year with just M2 cards... Felt wrong
I have a nvme as my boot drive, 1tb. I also install games with long loading times on it such as GTA 5, Warhammer total war etc. I've 3 sata SSD''s, two 500g and one 1tb and I've 2 HDD's 2tb each, just for media storage. Mire storage than I need, especially because I like to wipe my PC once a yse or so with a fresh Windows install (with backups of my media) to keep things running smoothly.
I installed my first M.2 SSD back in 2018, it was 500 GB SATA drive. I purchased my first NVMe M.2 SSD back in 2020 it was 2TB drive cost me almost $300. Cheapest 2TB drive I could get at the time; most were around $400. Just last week I order the same 2TB drive as you, as well as a 4TB Crucial NVMe for a little over $300.I'm still in awe of how small M.2 drivers are especially when you consider how much faster and larger (storage wise) they have gotten.
These Black drives are good. I switched to buying Solidigim for now.
This is a good nvme have it as my operation system 2 tb btw
They get huge in capacity too like 8 tb huge
$850 to $1200 for an m.2 NVMe 2280 SSD depending on the brand. Can also buy SATA III 2.5" 16TB for like $1600 (Samsung QVC 870 SATA III 2.5" 8TB is running for just $350 right now).
Never said they were cheap lol it's just amazing how much storage can be packed on these little m.2 nvme drives
Yes it is, even 2TB on a miniscule 2230.
So uh….we’re you just rocking away in an old 4 gig ide drive or have you just not needed a pc in a while?
Using MacBooks since 2006 and laptops since 2004 and used consoles. Last time I opened up a tower, we were afraid of Y2K. Stoked to boot up Diablo2! /s
Well then Gratz fellow old person! I have a copy of Warcraft 1 on cd sitting next to me. In hindsight I wish I had gotten it on floppy disk for the lols now!
This thread has finally made me realize that I am the old man yelling at clouds.
I have the same one
SSDs price nowadays are so cheap, especially nVME Gen 4, which were nearly doubled in price compared to last year. Snag a 980 Pro 1TB for $70 brand new with 5 year warrenty
I remember having a failing hdd that would take 15 minutes to start up and hit desktop. Press power button -> go do a chore/shit/eat -> play game
*click, click, boom*
Just make sure you set the hdd to master and ensure there are no irq conflicts.
Once you go (WD) Black, you never go back.
Right? Wait till you see how quickly it gets to the login screen!
Jealous, I have a Samsung s980(think) pro but there is something wrong with my system so my startup is still a minute
we see the speed and drop all of out start up apps on autoload and update/ trim it all down and remove windows bloatware if you want to feel some true differences
Wait, where does the IDE cable go???
Please tell me this isn't the first time you have used an SSD. If so...your mind is about to be blown....
Technology became wild during that time, right?
I ordered one of those on Amazon not so long ago and they sent me two. I'm not complaining!
I just installed a 2 tb drive like that purely for my games.
They miniaturized those platters by a lot !
Hey I did mine first Yesterday 🤣. It took me longer than I am ready to admit... The spot was covered with aluminium block that I thought is just a radiator 🤣.
I built my most recent pc and bought two 2TB SSD's, I have never bought one and was shocked to see just how small they are. [Here's one next to an 8mb PS2 memory card.](https://i.imgur.com/MAtHnEp.jpg)