Windows 10: My personal real world testing of NVMe PCI Express Gen 4

We all love having fast PC's and anybody that has paid attention to hard drives over the years knows that the new shiny PCI Express Gen 4 drives come with mindboggling high data transfer rates.

I mean, let's face it, do we want a PCI Express Gen 3 drive that ONLY gets 3,500MB/sec when instead we can "upgrade" to a Samsung 980 or WD Black SN 850 and get 2x the performance (yes, 7,000MB/sec)? On paper, it's mesmerizing, but is the real seat of your pants experience the same?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying these drives are bad. Hell, I have a new PC that is running a new 2TB WD Black SN850 that cost a whopping $450 and it benchmarks super fast. I love it. So, I decided to do some functional testing for something that I do on the regular to see what my net gains are.

For my test. I used HyperV and I installed Windows Server 2019 to 3 different drives as shown below

1. PCIe Gen 4 NVMe drive, WD SN850, benchmarking at over 7,000MB/sec
2. Sandisk Ultra 3D 500GB SATA III drive that comes in around 550MB/sec
3. External USB 3 Western Digital Elements 8TB Hard Drive, that benches around 160MB/sec

I timed how long it took to start the VM, install Server 2019, create the admin account, log in the first time, and shut down the box.

The results are as follows

1. WD SN850 at 2:45
2. Sandisk SATA SSD at 2:52
3. External 8TB WD drive at 8:30

Therefore, as we can see, the PCIe Gen 4 drive was the fastest, but in THIS real world usage case it only beat out the much slower SSD by 7 seconds. That's less than a 5% improvement.

The advantage of SSD has always been it's ultra low random access time. With a conventional drive, it takes 12-15ms to get from file to file. With an SSD, that time frame shrinks to 0.1ms. But that hasn't vastly improved over the years. SSD's have been in this same area since their inception, with the read/write drives improving dramatically.

If your usage entails copying massive files from driveA to driveB and you do this all day long, by all means, buy nothing else than the fastest PCIe Gen 4 drive you can find and revel in your time savings. if you are doing a bit more normal daily things like running applications or playing games......don't feel bad if you don't have the extra cash to upgrade to one of these crazy fast new drives, as the juice is likely not worth the squeeze.

:)

 

PCI Express Status Test Failed

I ran a test using SupportAssist and it turned out that the PCI Express test showed "No Device". What does this mean? I have a Radeon R7 M445 4Gb and currently using windows 10 on Dell Inspiron 15 5567. Please Help!

 

PCI Express Status Test Failed

See the link below from Dell's forum.

https://www.dell.com/community/Desktops-General...

 

NVM Express, Inc. Debuts NVMe Over Fabrics Compliance Testing

NVM Express, Inc., the organization that developed the NVM Express (NVMe) and NVMe Management Interface (NVMe-MI) specifications for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus as well as over Fabrics, hosted its eighth NVMe Plugfest at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) in Durham, N.H. during the week of October 30-November 2. The event offered the first official NVMe Over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) compliance and interoperability transport layer testing for RoCE, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet, and the Fibre Channel.

The testing performed by the UNH-IOL, an independent testing provider of standards conformance solutions and multi-vendor interoperability, generated 14 new certified products for the base NVMe Integrators List and one for the NVMe-MI Integrators List. Eight inaugural products were also approved for the newly launched NVMe-oF Integrators List, which accepts RoCE initiators and targets, Ethernet switches, as well as Fibre Channel initiator, targets and switches, and software.

"Since 2013, the UNH-IOL has certified over 112 NVMe-based products at the NVM Express Plugfests," David Woolf, senior engineer, Datacenter Technologies at the UNH-IOL, said. "By continuing to prioritize specification compliance and interoperability testing, companies can ensure faster time to market and seamless interactions with other devices NVMe-based solutions."

Attendance at the NVMe Plugfest included 63 engineers from 19 different companies focused in enterprise, client, cloud storage and test equipment manufacturing. Participating NVM Express member companies included Broadcom, Brocade, Cavium, Cisco, Intel, Lite-On, Mellanox, Microsemi, Oakgate, SANBlaze, Seagate, SerialTek, SK Hynix, Starblaze, Teledyne-LeCroy, Via Technologies, Viavi, Toshiba and Western Digital.

"The growth and success of NVMe Plugfests demonstrate maturing NVM Express technology and a readiness for Fabrics," Ryan Holmquist, Chair of the NVMe Interoperability and Compliance Committee (ICC), said. "Our testing events have expanded as existing standards evolve, offering a diverse and multiplying set of transports to test NVMe technologies-from PCIe architecture to over SAN, from ROCE or Fibre Channel. Beyond technology growth, the Plugfests foster a collaborative environment for device analyzer, test equipment manufacturers and industry experts to discuss issues and exchange ideas."

The next NVMe Plugfest will be held in spring 2018 at the UNH-IOL in Durham, N.H.