Old Gamer Memory Upgrade Worth It?

[silentbogo]

Rocking 2 Fanxiang NVME drives for a couple of years now

It's always a lottery with those, and you simply got lucky. For example, I am not so lucky: few years ago few of our big local retailers started selling Dato-branded RAM and SSDs. All chips are re-lasered (probably because they are refurbished). My buddy bought 10 sticks of DDR3 and 6+ sticks of DDR4, and all of them are still alive. I bought 10 sticks of DDR3, 10 sticks of DDR4 (assortment of DIMMs and SO-DIMMs), 3 or 4 SSDs, and every single one of these got RMAd within a couple of months.
Fanxiang might be one of the better ones, but with these low-end brands it's really easy to get confused or duped. Like we had some passable [Taiwaneese/Czech] Mibrand SSDs, but now the market is also filled with all kinds of copycats (Wibrand, Mebrand etc.). Or all kinds of King[insert your random word/letter combination here] always make me frown...

 

[Harlow]

Oh hell yes! That's a very good drive. Good price too! Grab it enjoy! You should expect about 2100MBps(ish) out of it on your board.


The OP is putting that drive into an older system PCIe 3 system, so that doesn't matter.

I've just run CrystalDiskMark on my 1TB Crucial P3 CT1000P3SSD8 in my Gigabyte GA-Z97-D3H and as mentioned earlier, I get 792.49MB/s read and 812.02MB/s write speeds (SEQ1M 8QT1), not 2100MBps(ish).

The M.2 socket on my Gigabyte mobo is connected to just 2 PCIe lanes, not 4 lanes. Fitting a 4-lane drive is wasting performance, but better than SATA.

The OP's MSI Z97 Gaming 5 manual shows the M.2 port is limited to 10Gb/s for PCIe SSDs, which presumably means 1250MB/s max?

Storage Intel® Z97 Express Chipset
6x SATA 6Gb/s ports (SATA1~6)
1x M.2 port*
M.2 port supports M.2 SATA 6Gb/s module
M.2 port supports M.2 PCIe module up to 10Gb/s speed**
M.2 port supports 4.2cm/ 6cm/ 8cm length module
Supports RAID 0, RAID1, RAID 5 and RAID 10***
Supports Intel® Smart Response Technology, Intel® Rapid Start
Technology and Intel® Smart Connect Technology****
* The SATA5 and SATA6 ports will be unavailable when installing a module in the M.2 port.
** Intel RST only supports PCIe M.2 SSD with UEFI ROM, does not support Legacy ROM.
*** M.2 PCIe interface does not support RAID 0, RAID1, RAID 5 and RAID 10.
**** Supports Intel Core processors on Windows 7 and Windows 8/ 8.1

As a comparison, Crystal shows 502.17MB/s read and 472.90MB/s write on my 240GB Intenso 2.5" laptop SSD, connected to a standard SATA port on the Gigabyte Z97.

My 1TB P3 NVMe provides "snappier" performance on the Z97 than the cheap 240GB (DRAM-less?) Intenso, but there's not a vast difference between the two.

For something much faster, I could buy a 2TB Crucial T705 Gen.5 for my main system, with sequential read and write speeds of 14,500MB/s and 12,700MB/s.

 

[Veseleil]

Fanxiang is not a low-end brand, just saying. When I bought mine (amazon), there were a decent lineup of models ranging from slow and cheap gen 3, to the fast and more expensive gen 4 drives. There's a good reason why they have excellent reviews. Example, S880:

https://www.amazon.com/fanxiang-S880-Internal-Solid-State/dp/B0C36XZJBF

 

[AusWolf]

Fanxiang is not a low-end brand, just saying. When I bought mine (amazon), there were a decent lineup of models ranging from slow and cheap gen 3, to the fast and more expensive gen 4 drives. There's a good reason why they have excellent reviews. Example, S880:

https://www.amazon.com/fanxiang-S880-Internal-Solid-State/dp/B0C36XZJBF

I don't know about Fanxiang, but I'm a bit tempted to get a Fikwot drive just for its name.

 

[68Olds]

I don't know about Fanxiang, but I'm a bit tempted to get a Fikwot drive just for its name.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Fanxiang is not a low-end brand, just saying.

Hell yes they are. That's a brand I actively avoid. Are you kidding with that?

There's a good reason why they have excellent reviews.

Have you READ some of those reviews? You do know about the problem with fake reviews, right?

I've just run CrystalDiskMark on my 1TB Crucial P3 CT1000P3SSD8 in my Gigabyte GA-Z97-D3H and as mentioned earlier, I get 792.49MB/s read and 812.02MB/s write speeds (SEQ1M 8QT1), not 2100MBps(ish).

I just looked that up. You seem to be correct and for an odd reason.

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/z97-gaming-5/Specification

Seems MSI hooked up the M.2 NVMe though the southbridge at PCIe2 x 2(WTF?!?).
@rockit00
Seems like your board will give you only about 900MBps-ish due to this. I'm sorry about that, was thinking it was PCIe3 x 2.
Still, like Harlow said that's an improvement over SATA, just not as much of one.

 

[nomdeplume]

Seems MSI hooked up the M.2 NVMe though the southbridge at PCIe2 x 2(WTF?!?).

Optane, that's what.

 

[rockit00]

Storage 101 gets better by the minute! I wonder about Fanxiang and their offerings. The Crucial P3 1TB PCIe Gen3 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD that I priced on Amazon yesterday is for sale by Fanxiang for $10. less on ebay! I also see their other SSD drives are getting user praise on TPU and other forums and places too. I'm clueless about the SSD business at the moment but I'm listening. Is Fanxiang a manufacturer or a distributor? They seem to offer great prices and do a lot of business! Low end or high end matters but does it work or does it fail? Opinions matter too, what works for me, may not work for you. I have the funny feeling that by the Fourth of July I may be rocking SSD for everything but storage! "Caveat Emptor" May the buyer beware, lots of fake stuff out there. Go big or go home. Thanks to all for your input.

​

 

[lexluthermiester]

The Crucial P3 1TB PCIe Gen3 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD that I priced on Amazon yesterday is for sale by Fanxiang for $10. less on ebay! I also see their other SSD drives are getting user praise on TPU and other forums and places too.

Stick with the Crucial, it's worth the extra $10. If you trust nothing else I've said, trust this.

 

[nomdeplume]

I have the funny feeling that by the Fourth of July I may be rocking SSD for everything but storage! "Caveat Emptor" May the buyer beware, lots of fake stuff out there. Go big or go home. Thanks to all for your input.

Glad your headache mostly went away.

Wherever you arrive on the split between fast OS drive and storage across your systems. Less flashy [pun] [but also stress on less] spinning rust is making a comeback. SSHD → ____ vs lasers/foam/synthetic DNA/I AM ROBOCOP has been a fun tech divergent for decades where it dribbled down to consumer products. Don't go too head over heels catching up on flash based drives at cost of the larger spectrum.

 

[rockit00]

There is an old saying from 1970's " Free your mind, and your ass will follow". HDD SSHD SSD @nomdeplume, I don't even have a headache yet because of people like you and those on this forum. I see experience, I see disagreements, misunderstanding , I haven't needed an aspirin yet. Are we having fun yet? Evolve or perish or crawl under a rock.

 

[Harlow]

Less flashy [pun] [but also stress on less] spinning rust is making a comeback.

Good to hear. Mind you, I never stopped using hard disks. My first was a 30MB (Megabyte) ST506/412 5.25" drive, followed by some 20MB 3.5" Lapine Titans. Nowadays you can get 20TB and 30TB drives, with a million times greater capacity. Petabytes and Exabytes soon? Maybe not for a few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST-506/ST-412

Don't go too head over heels catching up on flash based drives at cost of the larger spectrum.

Agreed. I use three 1TB M.2 NVMe drives in my main system. 1). Windows + apps, 2). Adobe/Topaz scratch disk, 3). Video rendering (work in progress). It's overkill, but it fills the mobo's M.2 slots. I also have five hard disks in the same system for general storage.

Older PCs boot from 2.5" SATA SSDs. Backups are saved on four TrueNAS Core RAID-Z2 ZFS servers (8 hard disks per server) and 800GB LTO4 tape cartridges. I use SSDs for speed and hard disks for on-line bulk storage.

Stick with the Crucial, it's worth the extra $10. If you trust nothing else I've said, trust this.

I agree wholeheartedly. Stay with "big name" manufacturers from a well known (perhaps local?) stockist. You need good quality/reliable drives for Windows and data.

I've just started buying cheap stuff on AliExpress, but I avoid their "too good to be true" bargain drives. Less reputable manufacturers take reject memory that still "sort of" works and build super cheap SSDs/memory cards/flash drives, with "funny" strange sounding names. When it comes to Sandisk, Samsung, Crucial, Kingston, you can't be sure if you're buying a genuine drive from abroad or a "knock off" with bad memory.

Other manufacturers build 100% fake storage.
https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...nal-portable-ssd-usb-drives-are-fake.3773032/.

I use h2testw to check claimed capacity on SD cards and USB sticks. It writes 1GB files until the card/drive is full, then reads them back and reports any errors.
https://h2testw.org/

I haven't needed an aspirin yet.

I remember Aspirin and Disprin. We used to buy them in bottles of 50 or 100. Where I live, it's all Paracetamol and Ibuprofen in foil wrapped strips at supermarket checkouts (with a limit of 2 packs per transaction). No sign of Aspirin unless you go looking for them at the pharmacist.