Hey y'all, I'm putting together a new build, and currently finalizing my design. I had settled on the Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 for my SSDs, but I'm seeing the SAMSUNG 970 EVO for like 70 bucks cheaper. Can anyone shed light on why two products that from what I've seen seem to have similar performance have such different price points? Cheers, -bbsmitz
The 970 Evo is Gen3, the Sabrent is Gen4. The difference should not be that visible in anything other than benchmarks and sequential reads/writes, like huge files copied etc., but I don't see many reasons other than price to use a gen 3 drive for a modern Ryzen build. You can buy the 980 Pro from Samsung if you want a Gen4 drive from them, but it's still TLC based and probably costs more. I'd personally get the Sabrent drive and some QLC cheaper large drive for storage/games. I see you also have HDDs, so you will have plenty of room.
One additional question if anyone knows. So my understanding is that the Ryzen 5000 has a total of 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes. Of those, 4 are used to connect to the motherboard, leaving 20 for peripherals. 16 of those 20 would go to the GPU, meaning there are 4 left for the NVME SSDs. However, each NVME SSD requires 4 lanes, so can I get 2 as I plan to?
Yes, the 2nd will go through the chipset and thus the x4 link, performance wont really be affect all that much, you may get some overhead if using multiple other devices connected to the chipset but it wont affect anything much.
Gen 4 is still pointless today. Very few softwares are able to take advantage of the extra speed, and it's usually professional stuff like Premiere (video editing). For everything else, there will be literally no difference whatsoever between Gen 3 and Gen 4 drives. Save your money and buy the cheaper stuff. Maybe in 2022+ the situation will be different, but by that time you'll want a bigger drive anyway.
The 4k low queue depth reads are about 20% slower on the 970 evo just FYI. so there will be some actual real world difference.
When it comes to real world usage, you probably will never notice a difference. Gen3 vs Gen4 does not really matter. When it comes to small read/writes which is what you do 99.9% of the time, unless you have special needs (transfering huge movies for example). Gen 4 only has better Seq. READ/WRITE which is pointless for most people. 980 Pro is out and 980 Evo should come next year
