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jaylach
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Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 6:58 pm |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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I have two 500GB M.2 PCIe interface SS drives. A few days ago I goofed and needed to restore a system image. LOL! Yes, I goof sometimes too... So I start the image restore and then had another thought and canceled the restore. It was actually too late to cancel and still have the OS on the drive. I tried the restore again and it failed due to the state of the drive. So I swap the PCIe M.2 drives and start the restore again which finished fine. I'm back up and running fine except that my system drive is now on a slower drive as it is not NVMe driven. I went to Disk Management and had zero issue re-establishing the original NVMe PCIe SSD. But I want the NVMe drive as my system drive so I need to use Acronis True Image to clone the now system non-NVMe drive back to the NVMe drive. It all worked fine and I'm back to booting from the NVMe drive. I still need to swap the drives back to their original ports as, while I have two such ports, only one is an "Ultra" port which is faster than the other but all is fine. All the above is just the history of what happened. Here is the "WOW factor". My system drive size is 263GB as to used space. These drives are so fast that the clone took only ~7 minutes. This totally amazed me. I mean, I started the clone and went outside to have a smoke. When I came back it was totally done.
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sboots
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Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 8:17 pm |
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Site Admin |
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Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2012 9:48 pm Posts: 2944 Location: New Jersey
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That is most certainly a "wow" for speed!
_________________ stephen boots Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020 "Life's always an adventure with computers!"
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jaylach
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Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 8:28 pm |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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Ya, even though the faster drive is in the wrong port it still has a potential write speed of ~1.5 GB/sec. The current burst read rate is ~1.6 GB/sec. The difference between the two drive type ports is that, when I put the NVMe drive back to the proper port, it will have a benchmark on a burst read of over 3 GB/sec. At least that is according to my last benchmark before I had to switch the drives as to ports.
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bbarry
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Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 8:42 pm |
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welcoming committee |
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Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2012 12:47 am Posts: 2399 Location: North Central Arkansas
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So both you and your drive were smoking!
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jaylach
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Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 9:08 pm |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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bbarry wrote: So both you and your drive were smoking! Sigh, before too long, I expect that my "fast" drives will be considered slow. Ya know, it seems to me, we think about CPU and video card speeds as to system performance but, if you have a slow drive, the other factors are not as important as they seem. For ages the hard drive speed has been the limiting factor as to system performance. This is changing and it will be a drastic system speed change when finished. The NVMe PCIe SSD drives are just the beginning in my humble opinion. I expect that, within the next two years, we will see solid state drives that offer speeds equal to and surpassing the speed of our current RAM (memory). Once the mechanical aspect is removed as to the drive being mechanical or on chips, it is just a matter of making the chips faster.
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dvair
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Posted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 12:51 am |
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welcoming committee |
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Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2012 2:39 am Posts: 679 Location: Johnstown, NY
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I use the free version of Acronis that comes with my Intel drives. I have 2 M.2 PCIe drives in my system. Takes about 3 minutes to clone my C drive and 5 for my D. This is imaging to a SSD that is in a USB 3 enclosure. Cloned and restore without any issues a couple of times.
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jaylach
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Posted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 2:30 am |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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dvair wrote: I use the free version of Acronis that comes with my Intel drives. I have 2 M.2 PCIe drives in my system. Takes about 3 minutes to clone my C drive and 5 for my D. This is imaging to a SSD that is in a USB 3 enclosure. Cloned and restore without any issues a couple of times. David, if I remember right both your M.2 ports are Ultra while only one of mine is Ultra with the other being standard. My port configuration is one of the reasons that I got my second M.2 drive quite cheap as it is not NVMe driven. It is still much faster that a SATA SSD but not close to a NVMe driven drive plugged into an Ultra port. Once I have everything properly set up again I think that I could easily see a 5 minute clone of my 263GB system drive. Actually I got the second M.2 drive to speed up video encoding but there was never really a time issue concerned with that. Bottom line was that I had an open port for the thing and it was on sale cheap. I MAY go back to my original setup using a 240GB SATA SSD for my video encoding and use the slower M.2 Drive to make clones of my system drive now and then. It would almost be like setting up a R.A.I.D. 1 array that I mirror manually instead of the system doing automatically. It would actually be sort of cool. Take a few minutes to mirror my system drive to the other before doing a feature update of Windows 10. If there is an issue just go to my UEFI BIOS and switch boot drives and then clone back in the other direction. This could actually be better than doing system images as it would be MUCH faster. Don't worry, I'll still do images but I think that the days of system images are drawing to an end. There are just faster methods available today.
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jaylach
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Posted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 8:40 pm |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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The more I think about it the more I like the thought of using the second M.2 drive to clone my system drive as they are the same size and I can easily switch between the two in my BIOS boot settings. I don't actually need the second M.2 drive for my video conversions as my SATA 240GB SSD does well enough as to that aspect. It is also a fact that I don't need the second M.2 SSD for storage space as I have a total of ~13.25TB of drive space. I really only got the second M.2 drive because I could not pass up the sale price.
The system is on pretty much 24/7 but I do do periodic reboots. My thought is to start a clone, which requires a reboot with True image anyway, when now and then when I do a reboot. I would not bother unless system changes were made such as a major software install. If something breaks I just go to my UEFI BIOS and switch boot drives and I'm back up and running in just slightly over the time of a normal reboot. Of course I'd still keep doing my daily image backups but, the more I think on it, the more I sort of like the idea. Like I previously said it would be sort of like having a manual Mirrored R.A.I.D. array.
Any thoughts?
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dvair
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 12:42 am |
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welcoming committee |
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Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2012 2:39 am Posts: 679 Location: Johnstown, NY
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Just set up the mirror, should be able to do that right in your BIOS then its a nice hardware RAID.
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jaylach
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 12:57 am |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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Would setting up an actual R.A.I.D. array work with the drives being of different types; one NVMe and the other not? Ya, I know, I can look that up myself... On the other hand they are both of the same size. If this would work would I see any performance hit? While I understand what R.A.I.D. is about I have never set up an array. I finally got tired of the slow garbage involved with Acronis True Image and removed replacing with Disk Wizard. Disk Wizard is actually quicker. Sure, I need to now do images manually instead of on a schedule but that is not a big deal. Actually this will save wear and tear on my backup drive as I will only do images when the system changes. It isn't like my system drive often changes as all my data is on a different drive including my email store. As to my data I sync that to my second system using GoodSync.
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dvair
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 8:35 am |
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welcoming committee |
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Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2012 2:39 am Posts: 679 Location: Johnstown, NY
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I believe that technically that they are both NVMe one just runs at a slower speed, give a shot and see. If not you can always keep it as is.
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jaylach
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 12:54 pm |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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We'll see but I have doubts as the two drives use different driver sets. Actually the faster one is seen as a SCSI drive while the slower is not. Still worth a try.
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dvair
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 1:32 pm |
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welcoming committee |
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Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2012 2:39 am Posts: 679 Location: Johnstown, NY
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OK, if they are seen as different maybe not. I believe the actual controller is on the card itself, so that may have something to do with it too.
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dvair
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 1:39 pm |
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welcoming committee |
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Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2012 2:39 am Posts: 679 Location: Johnstown, NY
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jaylach
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 1:53 pm |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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I had to chuckle a bit as the Samsung M.2 SSDs shown in the article are what I have as my faster drive. Mine is a 960 EVO.
The 960 EVO is a strange critter using the same controller as the 960 Pro and bench-marking the same or better than the Pro in many cases.
<edit> The testing of if these two drives would work together in a R.A.I.D. array isn't going to happen. I would have to reinstall Windows to finish. Mayhaps if I ever decide to do a complete reinstall of everything but not now as there is nothing wrong with the system and it would be too much effort just to see if something works that I really don't need.
LOL! Mayhaps on my next build I'll see if I can get a mobo with four ultra M.2 slots. Consider the performance of a system with 32 core, 64 threads, with the system drive both R.A.I.D. mirror and striped arrays. Mirror for system drive redundancy and then stripe those for double the drive speed performance. In theory you should be able to approach 6-7 GB burst reads per second. Of course theory is just that, theory. For instance my Samsung NVMe drive has a potential of 3200-3500 MB/sec burst read speeds but the reality is that I get a bit over 3000 MB/sec reads.
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jaylach
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Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2019 12:04 pm |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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David, do you use Over Provisioning on your NVMe drives? From a lot of what I've read it is supposed to improve performance but I get higher read rates with it disabled.
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dvair
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Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2019 1:35 pm |
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welcoming committee |
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Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2012 2:39 am Posts: 679 Location: Johnstown, NY
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No I haven't done any of that, just left them as is. They only thing I do is run the Intel Optimizer once a week as part of my weekly maintenance stuff.
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jaylach
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Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2019 1:53 pm |
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Resident Geekazoid Administrator |
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Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:09 am Posts: 9435 Location: The state of confusion; I just use Wyoming for mail.
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OK, thanks.
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