Be Jealous - a new toy for Dad - NVMe SSD M.2

[oshunluvr]

I bought a new motherboard a couple months ago that supports the new NVME M.2 standard -- two slots!

My current SSDs are OK but are now three years old and past their warranty - which generally means they are due to fail.

Samsung just released their newest M.2 SSD : The 970 Pro and it's priced at almost $100 less then last years model - so I bit. I haven't even tested it yet, but I partitioned it and ran a basic speed test:

stuart@office:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 432 MB in  3.00 seconds = 143.82 MB/sec

stuart@office:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1554 MB in  3.00 seconds = 517.83 MB/sec

stuart@office:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1550 MB in  3.00 seconds = 516.54 MB/sec

stuart@office:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nvme0n1

/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 9202 MB in  3.00 seconds = [B]3067.07 [/B]MB/sec

Six times faster than already fast SSDs. 20+ times faster than a 7200 RPM WD Black performance HD

sda is an HD, sdb and c are Samsung 850 840 Pro SSDs, and nvme0n1 is the Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD at 512GB.

Retail delivered from NewEgg for $249.99

[woodsmoke]

Oh you old hardware guy!
woodlikesitsmoke

[claydoh]

Even the cheapies are pretty fast, but not spectacular, vs the OEM spinning drive in my cheap-ish new laptop
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

claydoh@widget-lenovo:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nvme0n1
/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing cached reads:   21578 MB in  1.99 seconds = 10828.61 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1036 MB in  3.01 seconds = 344.54 MB/sec
claydoh@widget-lenovo:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 396 MB in  3.01 seconds = 131.48 MB/sec

I spied somewhere yesterday a 1TB ssd for 100 dollars. Probably not super fast, but roomy goodness for laptop users.

I can't find the link

Now I'd be happy with GPUs dropping back down to sane, pre-cryptocurrency mining days,or for DDR4 laptop ram dropping as well.

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, video cards are crazy expensive - more than CPUs these days. For me, the reason to spend $ on SSD tech is to gain speed so I usually wait the the price I feel comfortable spending for what I want. At $250 for 512GB and the fastest SSD in it's form factor, it seemed a reasonable price. Last year's 960 Pro M.2 is still selling at $320-340 but I can't imagine why anyone would buy it at that price. This new one is 1000 mbs faster than the 960 for less money, and the 1TB version is even faster. I do have cheaper SSDs where speed isn't a factor like my server.

[oshunluvr]

Oh you old hardware guy!
woodlikesitsmoke

You know it! I always have been a tinkerer. I once made a 40 pin rotating switch (the number of pins on an old HD cable) into a dual-boot device before we could actually do that in a simple fashion. I could power-down, turn the knob, power on and boot to my second drive. I basically swapped the drive position connections using the switch.

[woodsmoke]

LOL

OMG!!

WOAH!!

woodLIKESITsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Alms, alms for the poor!
(Poor in terms of SSD)

[kenj70]

Interesting topic. I have built my own PCs since about 1988. Started with HDOS (Heathkit H-89) and CP/M.

Here is for my current rig - SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 250GB NVMe PCI-Express 3.0 x4

[FONT=monospace]$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nvme0n1

/dev/nvme0n1:
Timing cached reads:   19888 MB in  2.00 seconds = 9958.07 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 5602 MB in  3.00 seconds = 1866.40 MB/sec

[/FONT]

I don't think I am getting the full performance from that drive. I am somewhat disappointed in the lackluster boot to login time on this desktop rig. I was hoping for 10 seconds from power on. Unrealistic?

-=Ken=-

[oshunluvr]

Interesting topic. I have built my own PCs since about 1988. Started with HDOS (Heathkit H-89) and CP/M.

Here is for my current rig - SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 250GB NVMe PCI-Express 3.0 x4

[FONT=monospace]$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nvme0n1

/dev/nvme0n1:
Timing cached reads:   19888 MB in  2.00 seconds = 9958.07 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 5602 MB in  3.00 seconds = 1866.40 MB/sec

[/FONT]

I don't think I am getting the full performance from that drive. I am somewhat disappointed in the lackluster boot to login time on this desktop rig. I was hoping for 10 seconds from power on. Unrealistic?

-=Ken=-

I'm not sure how good hdparm is at testing these new devices, but I would agree you should be getting better than that.

For comparison with my drive: http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare...00373vsm498971

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nvme0n1[/COLOR]

/dev/nvme0n1:
[/FONT][FONT=monospace]Timing cached reads:   36244 MB in  1.99 seconds = 18193.89 MB/sec[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]Timing buffered disk reads: 9422 MB in  3.00 seconds = 3140.26 MB/sec[/FONT]

So I'm nearly twice as fast but tests say I should be roughly ¼ faster.

EDIT: My write speed will be twice as fast, but not read.

Here's another quick test:

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]$ sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=10240; sync ; sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3 ; dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10240[/COLOR]
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB, 10 GiB) copied, 3.10854 s, 3.5 GB/s
vm.drop_caches = 3
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB, 10 GiB) copied, 2.54356 s, 4.2 GB/s[/FONT]

I can't say what your bottleneck is for sure, but I'd guess it's the mobo interface.

And no, 10 seconds from power-on is reachable if you don't have a lot of network overhead like network mounts.

[GreyGeek]

I couldn't stand it any more. I had to know what my HD were doing.

/dev/sda1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 358 MB in  3.01 seconds = 119.07 MB/sec
jerry@jerry-Aspire-V3-771:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1

/dev/sdb1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 268 MB in  3.02 seconds =  88.86 MB/sec
jerry@jerry-Aspire-V3-771:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 296 MB in  3.02 seconds =  98.12 MB/sec

It's better to not know some things.

[oshunluvr]

Sorry Jerry! Not trying to make you feel bad.

If it's any consolation, for most tasks you really don't notice the difference. Boot times are way better and obviously file transfers happen much faster, but not much else is noticeable.

[jlittle]

... the lackluster boot to login time on this desktop rig. I was hoping for 10 seconds from power on. Unrealistic?

I'd expect power on to log in time to be dominated by the POST of the firmware. My (2 year old) system with a Gigabyte motherboard takes at least 8 seconds. If you enable the grub menu, so that you can time the boot of the OS without the firmware, what time do you get? From grub to login my system takes 3 s. Systemd utilizes lots of threads starting everything, it's much faster than the old init. I don't mount any spinning drives at boot, they take seconds to spin up, though I suppose that would start at power on.

Annoyed by that 8 s delay, I suspend (to RAM) rather than shut down. It takes 1 s to wake up.

Regards, John Little

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, my boot is delayed by several network drives that I mount. It's gotten better as I've gotten smarter about how to mount things. It takes about 13 secs. from grub menu to login here. Actually I haven't timed it since I installed the new nvme drive.

[kenj70]

From what I recall the NVMe drives have ~4x the throughput of an SSD on a SATA 3 port. I got the NVMe to support HD video editing and, compared with what we had 10 or 15 years ago, it is plenty fast. I may be able to tweak the MB settings but I run pretty conservative settings these days; no overclocking; each build needs to last me 4 - 5 years to make the investment worthwhile. I thought of getting a second M.2 drive since my MB supports it but the I/O is fast enough now that I just keep an older 500 GB HDD as secondary for ready storage. Backups go on an external drive.

@oshunluvr - I looked over that long command line of yours. I don't begin to understand it. However, I was kind of concerned about that "BS" parameter.

-=Ken=-

[oshunluvr]

bs just means "byte size". The dd commands create a tempfile of 10GB and time the amount of time is takes to write and then read it.

Broken down, it's five commands

1. sync
2. dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=10240
3. sync
4. sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3
5. dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10240

1: flush any drive buffers
2: write 10GB of zeros to "tempfile"
3: see #1
4: clear any caches
5: read the tempfile

Obviously, run the test on a file system on the nvme drive and delete the tempfile when you're done. I did it twice, once with 1GB file and again with 10GB. I just thought it'd be useful as a comparison.

When I suggested the mobo might be at play, I was thinking BIOS and the interface throughput not CPU speed. You might look and see if there's a BIOS update for your mobo. NVME is rather new to the market thus might mean your BIOS is out of date.

If you're concerned about file access times, you might look into other things that can help your actual real-world access., like use of RAID or the file system you're using and fine tuning it.