NVMe M.2 - what and how to put software on it

[Uriah]

I have my WINDOWS OS on an SSD seta drive now.  My games like IL-2 BOS and DCS are all on a spinning platter.  I just bought an NVMe M.2 drive and have it installed.  It is 500GB.

I don't think it will make much of a difference to clone the SSD over to the M.2, particularly the Windows OS.  But other than load time would having the games on the M.2 make a real difference in performance.   I do use Oculus Rift s.  I am hoping having it and the games on the M.2. would be a far better than leaving them installed on the platter.

 

That said I suspect I can just copy the folders to the new M2 drive.  But in general, do I need to reinstall software to the new drive or can I just copy folders.

[Uriah]

I think I found the answer. 

Looks like you can put a link in the old folder and direct it to a different drive and folder.

Copy programs to a new drive

Without having to re-install programs.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO4qMi_SyJI

 

Edited December 16, 2019 by Uriah
clarity

[dburne]

M.2 Nvme will be much better load times over the platter drives.

[Uriah]

But after load does a game play any better?  I am thinking maybe it would help in performance and help reduce stutters.

 

[dburne]

11 minutes ago, Uriah said:

But after load does a game play any better?  I am thinking maybe it would help in performance and help reduce stutters.

 

 

If you are running the game from a platter drive, any SSD type drive is going to be better in performance if the game has to read/write from the drive during play.

For instance running out of memory.

Other than that, probably would not notice much of a difference except in load times which would be substantial.

 

But really platter drivers are so well - yesterday, I only have SSD/ m.2 Nvme in my rig.

They have come down so much in price now also.

[Jaws2002]

I recently switched everything from a pair of smallish SSDs (128GB+256GB) to a pair of M.2 Nmve SSDs. A one TB 970Evo Plus and  two Terabytes Aorus PCIe Gen 4. 

Everything is faster with the new drive, but i noticed the biggest  difference in DCS load times. That one was pretty slow  to load for me, even with the SATA SSD. Now it loads extremely fast. Around twelve to fourteen seconds, from clicking on the icon. Before it took around a minute. 

 

 

3 hours ago, Uriah said:

But after load does a game play any better?  I am thinking maybe it would help in performance and help reduce stutters.

 

 

   I think it would reduce stutters if the game can't load everything in the memory and has to go to page file. How much memory do you have?

 

Edited December 16, 2019 by Jaws2002

[Uriah]

16 GB.

[Jaws2002]

You have enough so the game can run from the memory and doesn't have to run to SSD to grab files during game play.  But compared to a spinning drive it may make a difference even during gameplay.

Edited December 16, 2019 by Jaws2002

[Uriah]

Good to know.  Thanks Jaws and eveyrone else

[Alonzo]

Windows starts to degrade over time, so if you have some time this holiday period, you would get a better result by reinstalling Windows and using the NVMe drive as your primary drive. This is a lot more effort but you will get a better result. The Windows page file will benefit from the NVMe as well.

 

There isn't a whole lot of difference between SATA3 and NVMe for games, because NVMe primarily helps with high speed contiguous file transfers, which games only do a little. If you're working with 4K video files then NVMe will help. There are YouTube videos comparing SATA3 SSD vs NVMe and it's barely any faster on the NVMe drive. One of the posters above is comparing a couple of older SSDs against a brand-new NVMe drive and they are getting better performance -- I don't dispute the result but it's likely 90% due to the newer drive, not the SATA3 vs NVMe difference.

[Jaws2002]

1 hour ago, Alonzo said:

Windows starts to degrade over time, so if you have some time this holiday period, you would get a better result by reinstalling Windows and using the NVMe drive as your primary drive. This is a lot more effort but you will get a better result. The Windows page file will benefit from the NVMe as well.

 

There isn't a whole lot of difference between SATA3 and NVMe for games, because NVMe primarily helps with high speed contiguous file transfers, which games only do a little. If you're working with 4K video files then NVMe will help. There are YouTube videos comparing SATA3 SSD vs NVMe and it's barely any faster on the NVMe drive. One of the posters above is comparing a couple of older SSDs against a brand-new NVMe drive and they are getting better performance -- I don't dispute the result but it's likely 90% due to the newer drive, not the SATA3 vs NVMe difference.

 

 

That and the game now being on an almost empty 2TB NMVe drive, vs a 80% full, ten years old SATA ssd.

Edited December 18, 2019 by Jaws2002