M2 NVMe drives vs SSD for Media and Boot ??

[Neil Purcell]

Hello Folks,

I'm about to build a new pc which occasionally gets used for editing. I'm basing it around an i9-9900k and Gigabyte Designare and it will be mainly using Premiere Pro with AVC h264/h265 files for editing.

As there are 2 M2 slots on the board I was thinking of using 1x 500GB NVME for the boot drive and 1x 1TB NVME for Media storage (1TB should more than cover any current projects I'm working on). Probably 970 Evo Plus for both. I would have a traditional spinning disk or two for backups.

From what I can establish, NVME drives don't really deliver much real world performance over SSDs for OS/boot drive ???? But the price differential over similar SSD isn't massive and the mounting options are useful and potentially save bandwidth on this board(???).

Also there is also probably not much, if any, real world benefit for using as Media drives, but as above, it's not an insane idea.

Are there any negatives in using NVME drives for boot and Media drives with regard to wear and/or speed reducing over time?? Especially if I was to leave Premiere Pro at default settings and use the boot drive for Scratch. I could go traditional SSDs just as easily and add an extra for Scratch drive.

The difference in budget probably isn't much of an issue for me and I'm thinking along the lines of newer tech has a level of future proofing with the option to add other storage as necessary.

Any opinions greatly appreciated from these pages as you folks understand the tech and the workloads.


Thanks,

neil

[Alex.E]

I have my OS and software all on one M2. Feels fast but I've never benchmarked it. Regarding media, I don't see a noticeable difference going between my other M.2 and my SSD. I'm sure it's dependent on software too though. The only comparison I've done is with Premiere which wasn't very scientific to began with.

[L. Langer]

I would do a high-end 4TB SATA SSD for OS and programs and use the two M.2 slots with 2 x 2TB high-end SSDs for high-bandwidth I/O media stuff. You might even be able to RAID them together, depending on the features of the board chipset. Alternatively, you can also use a high-end PCIe slot SSD (for whatever) if you can swing it in your particular hardware setup and budget. The only real disadvantage of using the M.2 SSDs on the Designaire board (OR ANY BOARD) is that they are positioned on the board, under the add-in cards, which makes any sort of maintenance annoying.

[DC Chavez]

I have the same Mobo and 9960X processor. The guys from Puget systems recommend a NVME for your cache drive. Programs like Resolve hit it hard and can use the extra speed. Getting one for the OS is a boost in performance as well... I am using the Samsung 970 Pro 1TB drives, and have all my working footage on a 24TB TB3 GSpeed RAID. This thing screams. Keep in mind how many PCI-E lanes your processor provides, as they get eaten up real quick with GPU's and NVMEs. I use 16 x 2 for my dual GPUs and 4 x2 for the NVMEs.

Here is a link to my full build: https://www.reddit.com/r/watercoolin...d_in_20_years/

[Johnny Hurberg]

Im using one Nvme for system and programs, one for cache. 4 x ssd in striped raid for scratchdisk.