Hey everyone! I'm curious about whether using two NVMe SSDs instead of just one offers any real performance benefits, particularly in setups like a 9950X3D on an X870E motherboard. For instance, if I were to get two 2TB Gen4 M.2 SSDs, would that provide better data throughput compared to a single 4TB SSD? While I get that cost and redundancy come into play, my main question is about performance. I've heard that even with high throughput drives, a multithreaded processor or chipset might leverage parallelism. For example, when editing a video project where files are spread across drives, could that lead to faster speeds or lower latencies? Or is the idea of having two drives merely a myth, with a single SSD being just as good? Thanks!
5 Answers
Having separate drives is usually better if you're running heavy IO operations like video editing or you want to keep certain files distinct from your OS. But yeah, having two drives may take away a potential expansion slot later on. Sometimes, a single drive is just more efficient, and you might even face extra latency going through the chipset with two drives.
In my experience, two SSDs offer redundancy, which is their main plus. If one fails, you don't lose all your data. For things like video editing, having separate drives might prolong the lifespan of your SSDs, although filling both can leave you with less overall space.
It’s not that they're equivalent, but for gaming, you won’t see much difference since games usually don't take full advantage of SSD speeds. M.2 might better reduce load times versus SATA, but for most tasks, a single fast drive usually suffices unless, like you said, you’re doing simultaneous heavy operations across multiple drives which may yield slight benefits.
So, if I'm working on a big video project and compiling code at the same time on different drives, would you say there's a real benefit to that setup?
I think having two SSDs can be helpful for organizational purposes—you can separate your OS from apps and storage, which is pretty smart. It also protects you from losing everything if one SSD fails. But when it comes to actual performance, I don't think the difference is huge unless you're doing something very intensive like gaming or large file editing. Most games and applications won't fully utilize the extra speed unless you’re transferring large streams of data continuously.
Yeah, I get that! Just curious though, do you notice any lag or slowdown when reading and writing files from multiple drives at the same time?
What about your OS? Only 500MB for the OS? That seems so tight! How do you manage that?
You could use RAID 0 for improved speeds, but you risk losing everything if one drive fails. It's mostly beneficial for sequential data, like loading game levels. For multi-threaded tasks like video editing, having two separate drives might help, but more for organization than raw speed. If both drives are under heavy load, it might be smoother, but it really depends on how the tasks are managed.
Got it! So with NVMe not working like HDDs, I guess the single drive's performance is closer than I thought.
Thanks for the clarification! I wasn’t looking at RAID actually; I was just curious about general access speeds.
Exactly! You're looking at multi-threading benefits, but it can be tricky in practice.