SSD - Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB vs Intel Optane 900P 280GB

vahadar

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I recently bought an Optane (erm, not only for the Raven 😇) and i was wondering, since this the card is older than my current SSD (970 EVO plus) but faster for some characteristic, should i move Star Citizen to this drive or not?

I dont know if it is just the basic write/read speed that matters, in that case the 970 seems better?

 

Lorddarthvik

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I doubt there is any real world difference in perceived loading times or performance in the case of SC. Especially that the loading times both when getting into the game and inside the game are affected greatly by server performance.
Case in point, moving my SC from an old 850 EVO 250GB SATA SSD to an m.2 970 EVO Plus 1TB SSD made no difference in real world loading times or in game performance. Loading times are random at best, and I still get the occasional hitching if I get on a bad server, and other times I don't, even though the 970 is much faster (550MB/s vs 3500MB/s) when tested in Samsung Magician.

Edit: as both are so fast drives, you can just copy it over in a minute, change the location in the launcher and test it out if you get any diff
 
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Lorddarthvik

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Thank you @Lorddarthvik i will test that .
Looking forward to the results!

Btw, I feel like my M.2 is underperforming by a lot, or my oldest SSD C: drive is overperforming?
I might have turned on some sort of acceleration for it though, still it's weird to gain 10x the speed of the other one which is technically the same type of disk on the same connection.
It doesn't make any difference in daily use, but still... see pic

Both 850s are SATA3, 970 is m.2 NVME (PCIE) connected right on the mobo. Ignore the HDD-s, those are old as hell and working in spec.
Drive Comparision_20210304.png
 
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Lorddarthvik

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Ah yes, I have Samsung Rapid enabled on my system SSD, that's why it's 10 times faster.
It does the same thing basically as far as I know, but can only do it with a single drive.
My M.2 is doing fine as it is, there is no reason for me to ram cache it. If I'm working on 8K footage or something similar that would warrant such high speeds, it's done in Resolve and that has wonderful caching to RAM as it is.
I don't really see how games could gain much from this, but it does depend on the game in question. I've seen some gains in MSFS loading times when I moved it to my m.2 vs the slower sata ssd. Not in anything else though that I currently play, and that's like 8 games... so YMMV.
 
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vahadar

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keep in mind:
- the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB runs on a system with an i9-9900KF with 64 GB @ 3200
- the Intel Optane 900p 280GB runs on a system with an i7-6700k with 32 GB @ 2133
My system is an AMD 5600X with 32 GB @ 3600 C18 (but runs at 2666 it seems), do you think RAMCache will change something, or i should consider upgrading RAM with 2 more 16GB sticks?
From my monitoring, i am generally at 70% max RAM usage when running the game (on very high settings), that does not leave much free RAM left.
 
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marcsand2

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My system is an AMD 5600X with 32 GB @ 3600 C18 (but runs at 2666 it seems), do you think RAMCache will change something, or i should consider upgrading RAM with 2 more 16GB sticks?
From my monitoring, i am generally at 70% max RAM usage when running the game (on very high settings), that does not leave much free RAM left.
I must check my RAM usage during play. I never have seen the game use over 20GB, 15GB would be a lot. That off course doesn't take into account the rest of the system usage.
 
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Grimbli

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I must check my RAM usage during play. I never have seen the game use over 20GB, 15GB would be a lot. That off course doesn't take into account the rest of the system usage.
Mine used 18+, so I would totally recommend more if you don't close down everything before playing.

But I also have two monitors and watching videos or browsing while playing.
 

marcsand2

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Mine used 18+, so I would totally recommend more if you don't close down everything before playing.
64GB is more then enough, nothing to worry about

But I also have two monitors and watching videos or browsing while playing.
1 monitor with Guilded
1 monitor with Discord
1 monitor with a browser
 

Grimbli

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64GB is more then enough, nothing to worry about
I thought I was responding to someone who only had 32. I have 64 and I feel I'm fine for years to come as well.
 
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vahadar

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Something to keep in mind is that SSDs gets slower, the less free space there is on it.
Good point. My 970 with 2TB is 80% full, I will use the Octane as dedicated SSD for Star Citizen then, and test the speed for each SSD.

And for RAM I play with just one monitor, Firefox opened with about 40 tabs (eating like 3gb of RAM). Nothing else too RAM hungry beside drivers and apps.
 

vahadar

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Yeah, it is a RAM drive from ASUS. It speeds up things a lot. With 64GB of RAM, there is some room left
I have tried installing RAMcache but it seems it works only with asus product. I have a MSI B550 motherboard, apparently MSI had a similar tool called RAMdisk a few years ago but does not provide it anymore, the last driver i found was only compatible with amd ryzen 1st and 2nd gen only, when i have an amd ryzen series 5000 (5600X).

I now have 64 GB of RAM, managed to set it at 3200 (i dont know why in bios when set to auto it stayed at 2666).

Do you guys happend to know of any tool that can do a similar job for Ram caching for MSI board and Ryzen 5000 serie?
 
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Richard Bong

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I recently bought an Optane (erm, not only for the Raven 😇) and i was wondering, since this the card is older than my current SSD (970 EVO plus) but faster for some characteristic, should i move Star Citizen to this drive or not?

I dont know if it is just the basic write/read speed that matters, in that case the 970 seems better?

The Optane drive is not designed to be used as an SSD. It is designed to be a smart cache to speed up drive access for your other drives. Note, it only works that way if your Motherboard supports it.

It should, as designed, make a spinning disk about as fast as an SSD. Yes, it does also speed up SSD drive access, but not as dramatically.
 
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