For those asking why we didn't test drive X, Y or Z... we focused on testing different types of drive, rather than just every drive available. We don't have the time to test 100 different SSDs. I think from the conclusion and testing you'll see why it doesn't make a ton of sense to test even more SSDs in this way
Yep I agree bc no games yett has ssd in mind yett but maybe next year that my change since next gen games will be made with use of ssd in mind so next gen games will take advantage of ssd since console will use ssd in thejr games to so next gen we will see a bigger difference next gen when new games actually take advantage of a ssd
Current game engines don't utilize multi-core data streaming from storage much, if at all. It's CPU (mostly) & memory bandwidth bound, once you get to SSD speeds. Current API never needed it, and especially on PS4/Xbox 1, where the HDD is so slow that trying to do multi-stream fetching will stall it anyway, so it was never a focal point for devs. This is where Direct Storage IO and new consoles change the landscape, expect game engines to be revised for these new standards in the near future.
@@MichaelFitzpatrickk Yes, and Intel bringing gen 4 next year, to speed up PC ecosystem adoption. Even gen 3 NVMe will see significant gains once devs switch to multi-stream data fetch & decompression algos.
@@austin357 So happy amd, sony and ms help push fast io so dev can improve their game design. Following years gonna be amazing for everyone, we got intel who got kick in the butt and now they have awake, nvidia pushing the best they can to avoid big navi taking their crown, and amd keep growing their rnd division.
@@s.g.3042 Not for that game, no. But i'd expect most people to play more than that one game, plus an SSD will benefit boot times, and general OS responsiveness.
Would love to see a "Best SSD for Productivity". I guess differences would be larger zipping/unzipping large archives, exporting 4K videos, editing high res images in Photoshop.
Its the same, the crystaldiskmark tells the tale, straight line sequential for exactly that, unless you are dealing with huge raw 4k+ video its mostly just 4k random single threaded like with games, and there all the nvme fall down to almost sata, which is why they end up performing like that.
One of the big things for me was noticing the lack of stutter from asset streaming in games like Diablo 3 when run from an SSD. I always see load testing but never much on asset streaming, which should be a big deal (presumably) with devs working on games for the new consoles as a base line.
I'm a WoW player and loafing from HDD you get I game quick enough but there is no scenery, you are standing in mid-air till the ship and NPCs load, this can take several seconds ( feels like minutes)
I build gaming computers for customers from time to time, and have noticed that as well. An SSD seems to bring up the minimum frame rates a bit in certain games.
This! I've searched for detailed tests and information on this. Since I bought a used 256GB SSD for some of my games I noticed that those peaks in frames times in some games just vanished - and it's definitely noticeable. Namely those games are ghost recon wildlands and watchdogs 2. (Uuuubisoft, what are you saying to this?)
other youtubers have done that, but I find their results odd - switching my boot drive from MX500 to SN750 halved the time windows takes to load, it's lightning fast in comparison, however other youtubers have reported only a second or 2 difference....
@@martinarscott3524 Interesting. I was eyeing up a 500gb SN750 for purely boot + some programs. Talking about something as extreme as that much more speed upon boot raises eyebrows a lot.
For something that's done once a day, or once every few days or weeks (I let my system go to sleep/hibernate), what's the benefit between 10 second or less boot time and even less than that? I reinstalled windows by mistake on a sata ssd drive instead of the nvme sata 3, and I did not notice any difference. It took me a week to notice windows was installed on the wrong drive after running crystal disk to check the hdds.
I've never had a problem googling "does [model name] have dram" and multiple review sites immediately pop up staying whether it had a dram cache, which controller they used, everything you could want to know.
@@cm01 Here is great source docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcrfpJKHkOf-Oi1DbuuQva2gT4/edit#gid=0 Dram, Nand type, layers and everything you want to know
@@sir_whocampsalot2876 They should put the US government in charge. The government would make it illegal for any DRAM to be in a SSD so everyone is "equal" and tax you so you end up spending twice as much for half as much. High ranking government employees can still have DRAM on their SSDs because they are special people. And the government will make it so you have to have a special licences to buy anything other than a standard HDD. Sad thing is many people would love this.
@@rawdez_ you're just stupid and dont understand what he meant, even though it was obvious. What it means is, despite them claiming they arent experts, the info they're about to reveal will indeed make them look more expert than most. You're just dumb and failed reading comprehension, so it's ok, I love your irrelevant ass anyway.
I'm more interested in the effect of fast storage in frametimes, especially in open world games where assets need to be streamed in on the fly. Looking at those 1% and 0.1% lows comparing the different drives should give you a good idea of the actual experience while gaming.
I second this. Most open-world games (Horizon ZD right now) stutter a lot on my WD Green HDD (granted its a crappy HDD for gaming). It wasn't until I got the Adata SU800 SSD a couple of weeks back that I found out that it was actually the HDD that was the reason for the stutter. It never crossed my mind earlier since most of the people on community forums confidently say that SSDs only improve load times in gaming and not the games' performance, which made me think that one of the CPU/GPU/RAM components was the bottleneck.
@@Selfundum2424 I have seen on some windows 10 computers the hd gets spiked to full usage. HD or SSD didnt matter. There is something in windows that is causing it. The system has 8gigs of ram, and it was only using 2gig. For some reason the windows image viewer was pegging the SSD to 100% usage for minutes at a time. And it wasnt even opened. Really made me wonder wtf it was doing. I have noticed this on multiple systems with diff cpus/mobo's/etc etc
I'm old enough to remember a time when that HDD would have been regarded as the fastest thing in the universe. My first HDD, a 64MB monster, probably had a speed of about 1 or 2 MBs. You youngsters don't know how much you've got it made. My first mouse was made from sticks.
oh lah dee dah, here's a guy showing off with his fancy mouse made out of sticks! In my day we had to store our data using punch cards made out of papyrus, written by hand with a blunt rock. The data could only be read once a year at the summer solstice when the sun was in the right position in the sky :p
Thanks for this vid! I was just trying to decide between 4.0 and 3.0 for my new build. I think I'll go for 3.0. There's no point in paying $70+ more for 1.8 seconds. Even if Direct Storage makes a huge difference, like the vid said, that's a couple years out. I can make a new purchase then if I want.
What would be awesome is if you guys did a professional work load test for these like opening ue4 projects, large cad files, large 3d models etc. Would be cool to see how that scales
@Deez Nutz Agreed, it's possible that "gaming" is perhaps no longer a simple definition. I am not a "professional" or a "developer" however I will dabble in game capture, Unity level editing on Steam Workshop, VMs with a custom game server etc and this is where NVME SSDs are noticeably better. Particularly considering HWUB is referencing 12 and 16 core CPUs for gaming, it is fair to assume the purchasers of those products may dabble outside of "playing games" where an NVME SSD is going to be better in almost every way.
@@jonasbindslev9894 Skimmed the intro, checked a few graphs, then watched the conclusion. I already have an sn550 so was just really interested to hear their thoughts.
This was a great video, though it does make me feel bad for using my 6 year old sata SSD as a boot drive only and having all my games on a regular hard drive. I'd have been interested to see how fast a 7200rpm drive performed, since you wouldn't get a 5400 rpm if you planning to run things off it.
Nothing to be interested about. My Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM010 is shockingly slow for both handling Windows and playing games. Cannot wait until I get my hands on an SSD come next summer and forget I ever had this piece of hardware in my rig. I'll see if I can get a PCIe 3.0 or maybe even 4.0 drive for my operating system and at least a 1 TB SATA drive for everything else.
Agreed, using a slow HDD for something it wasn't designed for doesn't really give a fair comparison. They should have used a WD Black, a Toshiba X300, or a Seagate Gaming drive for a fair comparison. I use a Toshiba X300 as extended game storage, and while not ideal for some games (those that store their data disorganized, mostly), it's definitely not unbearably slow, nor does it result in streaming stutter. If I'm not mistaken a much more limited test was done by another channel (LTT?) pitting a cheap (and bad, no cache etc.) SSD against a WD black, and, if I'm not misremembering, the Black could keep up pretty darn well, and even beat the SSD in some tests. Right tool for the job, and all that. (of course, a *good* SSD should beat a *good* HDD every time when designed for the same purpose, except, for now, in price/GiB)
Considering this is a rare look into this topic by anyone these days, I thought the lack of 7200RPM stuck out like a sore thumb. Most people who do still have a HDD in a desktop will be using a 7200RPM one. It’s really for a better overall picture. Pitting a slow eco drive against SSDs just exaggerates the problem. The take away really doesn’t change however, you should be moving on from mechanical if you haven’t already.
@@sbjf Whether thats correct or not, the point of having more HDD with different RPM still stands. The tests on this are shrinking, so even just from a historical stand point, it would be nice to be able to point to a soruce which showed a good summary of all the above. Even if general consumers very rarely go for the higher RPM 10-15K, it would be interesting to see that represented, far more than just a bunch of different branded - but ultimately the same - SSDs.
They keep making SSDs faster when they're already faster than most real-world tasks can take advantage of. What I actually want is for them to have higher capacities and lower prices, not better speeds. I'd like to actually be able to replace all my noisy, huge, hot HDDs that have to be in a separate machine in another room so I don't hear them, but that day never seems to come.
This is exactly what QLC storage drive are for. Low cost, high capacity. And work is underway for PLC (5 bits per cell). Both Toshiba and Intel talked about it last year.
Something to keep in mind is that SSDs have a higher failure rate of lost data (when trying to recover data) than hard drives. SSDs are not really great for long term storage yet and their flash storage can also be a huge problem on the off chance that it goes bad quicker. Data centers and such are going to keep hard drives around because they’re longer lasting and easier to recover which will in turn not drop the prices of SSDs as quickly.
Thank you so much for this. I've been weighing an SSD game drive purchase (particularly among the ones tested), and this was a big help. I knew PCIe based drives weren't that much faster in years past (and still aren't to today) so it would make more sense to get a regular SSD for today and upgrade to a 4.0 drive when we see much more tangible loading improvements on PC.
Thanks a bunch. I am waiting to build a zen 3 system and have been going back and forth about upgrading my sata ssd to a pci4 harddrive. I think I will hang on to my current drive for a few more years.
finally, I have been waiting for a video just like this for quite a while, everyone just compares pcie 3.0 vs 4.0 or random ssd vs pcie nvme drives. but you took the time and effort to also mark the difference in TLC and QLC, cache vs non cache, m.2 Sata vs regular sata, and even the HDD, that was something I have not seen any youtuber do. thank you for this video I'll be referring to it and sharing next time I find people struggling with this question :)
No sane PC Gamer plays from a 5400 rpm HDD, I have 2x 2TB Barracuda HDD and they are way faster than a normal 5400 rpm HDD and if I have an annoying long loading game like total war Warhammer I'll move it to the SSD!
I'm rocking the WD SN550 1TB and after installing RD2 I was questioning my decision due to the load times but I feel better after seeing the benchmarks and considering the price to performance. Cheers! (that 40 secs feels like an eternity though :P )
It be really interesting to see PCI-E.3 vs .4 on content creation, like 4K video and audio work and large transfer files. Im sure many content creators are curious to see if the move to PCI-E.4 is currently worth the premium. thanks! sick 'stash!
Very helpful! I was tossing around the idea of "needing" a pcie 4.0 drive. Clearly I do not at this time. Thank you! a 2tb 3.x nvme will be ample power for my game expansion.
This video arrived the exact moment i opened youtube. And i am gathering data on SSD's and their usefulness over certain speeds. I did a little experiment myself: I created a 250gb zip archive full with random large game files from my drives and tried to copy it within a 970 evo. The initial copy speed was 1.8gbps. About 50gb down the line the speed dropped to 600MBps, then started wildly fluctuating between 600 and 800 mbps, occasionally rising back to 1.8gbps for 5 seconds and going back down. My conclusion is that the real MLC speed is around 600MBps Tlc speed is around 400MBps (crucial MX500) Qlc speed is around 80MBps (random review i read) Which makes HDD's write speed firmly above Qlc at 167MBps. Obviously that's not random reads and random writes. Those is where SSDs have ridiculous advantage. But during normal workloads on a defragmented hard drive random reads don't happen under normal workloads with large files.
@@gchatz6480 So, the problem with crystal disk mark and many other ssd benchmarks is that they never exceed the cache. I created a 250gb zip archive full with random large game files from my drives and tried to copy it within a 970 evo. The initial copy speed was 1.8gbps. About 50gb down the line the speed dropped to 600MBps, then started wildly fluctuating between 600 and 800 mbps, occasionally rising back to 1.8gbps for 5 seconds and going back down. My conclusion is that the real MLC speed is around 600MBps Tlc speed is around 400MBps (crucial MX500) Qlc speed is around 80MBps (random review i read) Which makes HDD's write speed firmly above Qlc at 167MBps.
Well the question is, how often do you copy 250gb files in a real world scenario? If you transfer such huge amounts of data on a daily or even weekly basis you might want to look into professional grade hardware, an average consumer does simply not move that much data that often.
@@ralfrudi3963 Gaming: When you download and install large games, move steam libraries and manipulate mod data and large procedural world saves (can span past 100gb for those). Productivity: 4k video files, scratch disks, large photo sessions. Others: Drive backups and cloning. Would i really want to pay twice the price over currently available SSDs to get around 200TBW extra endurance? Nope. Besides, MLC drives are only around 10% more expensive than QLC counterparts at 1TB mark, and often have more than double TBW rating.
For now while games still using linear data loading. Moving forward more and more games will load using parallel data loading if they want their games on the new consoles.
"welcome back to todd we're unboxed" Thanks for fixing that TH-cam. It was saying "Hardware Unboxed" for a little while there and I was getting concerned.
MS actually said in that article, that: "This process has already begun for DirectStorage and we’re working with our industry partners right now to finish designing/building the API and its supporting components. We’re targeting getting a development preview of DirectStorage into the hands of game developers next year." So, developers will get a preview-version. NEXT YEAR. They didn't even state is it February or November... Getting something out that might take a very long time... I wouldn't hold my breath ;)
@@aga87df You really should first even bother to read about the thing were discussing here, than come to post something you know nothing about... Here, read the article first: devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/
@Devenn Eng I know that was my point lmao, the dude above said direct storage was because the cpus were week. But the whole idea is because the cpus are so fast they can use direct storage.
Seems like the actual bottlenecks are the games themselves, something clearly going on during "loading" that doesn't have anything to do with searching for data.
@@andersjjensen dog slow in synthetic. This video shows the performance lose is much less than what most people think. So what would change if you didn't use the slowest hdd?
@@Zellonous It would close the gap a little in the few games that showed some sort of sensitivity to transfer speed, but not by a meaningful amount. The 15K RPM drives have a decent sustained read/write advantage over cheaper 7.2K desktop variants, but their seek times aren't other-worldly better, and it's the seek times that stacks up to the poor performance of HDDs not the actual throughput of linear data (as evident by the disparity between low end and high end SSDs in synthetic workloads that doesn't translate to any proper gains in games)
Those Red Dead Redemption 2 figures remind me of when I upgraded my Steam drive from 7200RPM HDD to SATA SSD in an attempt to improve GTA loading times. To this day GTA still loads slow as molasses.
Yeah. GTA Online loading is issues with the game itself (though story mode loads fast af). Console load times for GTA Online are also faster than GTA Online load times on PC. Rockstar is just doing something wrong.
SSDs on laptops makes a lot of sense because they are immune to shocks and vibrations, consumes relatively less power and are less temperature sensitive.
I would LOVE to see a frametime graph with each of these drives, just to showcase exactly how necessary it is to have a solid state drive for gaming over a traditional hard drive. I remember back some six years ago when I played World of Tanks, back when it ran on just a single core even, that I netted something like a 15-20% uplift switching from a HDD to a SSD alone. Sure, load times decrease, but when you can feed the CPU that data all the faster during games, wouldn't it make sense why the game runs smoother too? Thoughts?
Great video, thank you very much :). But one thing I believe would be worth to have another video about: gaming performance while on an SSD. I noticed my games run far smoother when playing on a SSD than on a HDD. Beyond loading times, on my SSD I actually get more fps and a more stable performance (probably due to assets being loaded while in game). It definitely pays to play on an SSD, even beyond the loading times.
Ryzen is usually better at decompression...I would love to see Ryzen VS Intel Core with those same drives and see how they scale across CPU architectures!
I bought the SN750 due to this video and man it really is a champ for loading times. It's really nice that even when I die in most games it only takes a few seconds till I can continue playing.
Good video with a a lot of usefull information, BUT it would have been nice to color code the drives in the benchmarks to clearly show which ones are Sata vs PCI-E 3/4.
Well, my wealth haven't reached that stage yet. I just reached stage 'Use SSD as boot drive'. For storage and game installation, I can only afford so much that I prefer having more space rather than speed. I can only benefit from the speed only when I write/read/loading games. With space, I can still benefit having large storage space even when I'm not using it. Next stage is, 'having a cheap secondary SSD for temporary game installation'.
That's what we need, a demonstration of in game comparisons between SSD and HDD. I'm not certain that the few seconds people save will be put to good use anyway...
@@Cheepchipsable I don't think there are that much difference in actual gameplay though, only in loading screen as the game engine loads the assets from the drive. Though I'm not really sure. In consoles, which solely focused on gaming, faster storage might make more sense, player can't do much while the game was loading. In pc, I'll just alt-tab and watch youtube/browse the web while the game is loading.
Hmm same here. I currently have a 250GB SSD as a boot drive and some apps and 2x 1TB HDDs. I'm going to get a cheap 512GB M.2 SATA SSD though, for storing some of my favorite games. SSDs are getting cheaper, it's only double the price of HDD per GB.
I use a 1TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 NVME PCIe 3.0 SSD, the Samsung 970 Pro uses MLC flash which means it gets its full speed all the time,- if you look @ online reviews you can see the Samsung 1TB 970 Pro in game loading beats most PCI express 4.0 M.2 SSDs since it has better [random 4k IOPS]. SSD manufactures are now cutting manufacturing corners using the cheaper TLC flash memory which means if you hammer the SSD too much it will throttle it's max speed. PCI Express 3.0 vs 4.0 does not really matter, what matters is the controller used on the SSD & what memory it is using, stay far away from QLC flash memory, the speed will throttle to almost harddrive levels.
I appreciate this video because I'm planning to finally snag myself an NVME drive during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales. It's the last piece I need for the 'ultimate' version of the system I first built back in February. I saved some money at the time by reusing the Samsung 850 EVO I'd previously installed in my old laptop as my primary boot drive, but with the prices on 1tb NVME drives these days, it's time I made the upgrade.
I feel like you could have covered tiered storage for pc.. software like primocache or fuzedrive do a great job at ssd caching / tiering to bring ssd level performance to large (much cheaper) spinning rust disks.
Lol,.. me too, still use them too...well I did until a fortnight ago when one of the drives failed. :( I've had them for years too, so I definitely got me moneys worth out of them.
Thanks, this is what I needed for my new build. Couldn’t have been more timely. I am getting a PCIe gen 4 as boot drive but was torn between what to pick as mass storage secondary for games.
I just upgraded from my 850 evo ssd’s to corsairs mp600 as a boot drive and storage drive and I don’t care what anyone’s says in reviews and comments about it not making a difference for games because that’s complete b.s. For the main games I play like bfv and cod m.w alone made a night a day difference. I’m first in every game on call of duty and wait around for 5 seconds or more for people to load in. It’s ridiculous. Bfv was probably the biggest improvement with loading into 64 players games and all games in seconds. I’m not even joking it’s stupid fast. Games like Rdr2 and gta is faster but not night and day faster. Maybe a few seconds. But where the new nvme drives really shine is that my os boots in seconds. My os is already open and loaded in before my monitor can turn on from a dead start. My monitor is the bottleneck lol Corsairs mp600 are 179 each right now on amazon being they are on sale and worth every penny. When I bought my 850 evo back in 2016 during the Black Friday sale they were 216 each after taxes for the 1tb which was cheep compared to the over $300 before the Black Friday sale. So in 2020 paying less for the same storage size and more than triple the speeds is a huge win in my books. A upgrade that should be good for many years to come.
JT_STUD Thanks for sharing your experience. I think your set up is different to the one discussed here and what I am considering which could explain some of the differences. No doubt, it makes a big difference to go with fast PCIe 4 M2 drive for Windows which they have done for the test and I plan to do the same. But instead of using the same drive like you do I plan on going with another 2TB drive for mass storage. I was contemplating between SSD and PCIe Gen 3 for secondary drive. I am not bothered with 2-3 sec extra load time which is usually the case as you mentioned and also demonstrated in the test. I think what they pointed out was that differences in raw speed don’t translate in to similar magnitude jump in game loading times which is true. Of course, you can shave off few seconds in loading but how important is that? In my case, I want Windows to load fast so I am going with Gen 4 but for a secondary drive for mass storage and game, I am open to save some money. It is not that RDR 2 is going to load in 10 seconds on a Gen 4. Point is this is still relatively new and will be few years down the line until codes will be written to take full advantage of the fast NVME drives until then difference will be relatively small. I might use that money towards a better GPU not Big Navi is round the corner or it could be 3080X.
Besides load times, Windows boot times would have been interesting. Or program load times. I had some test done a few years back. SolidWorks took 169s to load at work ....9s at home on my SSD. So SW load time and an assemble of ~100 parts will be blazing fast on an SSD as you read in all the files from the hard drive. Also similar to that could be compiling a project. I haven't done testing or a comparison but it seems the same 2 projects here at work will compile much fast on my PC with an SSD while my coworker is still running a HDD.
“I’m expecting this drive to be pretty slow” 😅 Meanwhile I’m using 4TB 5,400RPM drives for my games since they’re cheap $80 on Newegg (New). My main drive however is a $40 120GB Kingston SSD that I was about to replace with Crucial’s 1TB M.2 NVME SSD. But we’ll see if that changes after watching this.
Don't change your boot drive, the difference in speed between the kingston and the Crucial would barely be noticiable. Only change it if you need more storage room. I have a 9600k with a 120GB mushkin SSD and a 9700k with a Samsung 970 500GB M.2. I honestly don't notice a difference in boot times between the two drives, even though on paper the Samsung is much better obviously.
In a few years you'll be able to prep your refreshments before booting and not leave your mates waiting too long. Except some MBs still take 30 to 45s to boot before loading the OS; supposedly by design.
Since you talk about it by the end of the video, I would love to see a OS SSD + Game SSD vs OS+Game SSD comparison. Perhaps trying to test single and multiplayer games, with and without discord, and/or recording/streaming. Thank you soo much!
I would love to see some experiments. 1. Does having the OS on a seperate drive impact game perf, and does a faster OS drive impact game perf 2. Does moving the page files to a seperate fast ssd impact game perf Mainly i want to see if we can optimize windows by moving files and programs onto separate drives. I know any performance impact will be negligible but with rtx IO and the upcoming game consoles its possible this could help in the future. I havent seen anyone try this and anything i can find isnt done well.
Where I DO notice some nice big numbers is game installation and especially the preparation\disk allocation period. On SATA SSD it went as long as 15min with stupid EA Origin with speeds 200-300MB\s, on NVMe SSD I see in Task Manager 200\800MB\s for read\write or write ead. This is a good example of how important in the end the Mixed Workload tests are, bc u have OS doing operations on SSD and then game reading and allocating\writing. So for me it has been the most important metric while choosing my new SSD. Besides Mixed Workloads in benchmarks I concentrate on price also. I haven´t used same game applications(EA, Battlenet as my focus shifted from BFV to Warzone) to get real apples to apples comparison but I´d say you can shave off 1\3 of installation time. And have u noticed how often you come home from work\school, fire up the PC and then have to wait 30min for the 30GB game to install. With faster Mixed Workload it could be done in 10 min....
This was a great video! So often storage is either taken for granted or now assumed that the fastest, latest is best. So it is great to have a true analysis showing that benefits are marginal for PCIe 4.0 at this time. Again great work and it will be fascinating to see how this data changes Over the next two to three years
It's really disappointing just how primitive games are compared to the hardware. Especially when you notice that developers are in fact entirely capable of making games that utilize PC-exclusive features like raytracing, but neglect to optimize anything else.
Corsairs pcie4 mp600 is awesome. I have the 1tb version as my boot drive holding the games I play most and a cheap 2tb crucial sata ssd to hold all my other junk. It's great that ssd's are becoming affordable now. Running games on a hdd nowadays is unbearable lol.
I did something similar, a WD SN550 1TB PCIe drive for boot and a Crucial 2TB BX500 for my game drive with a 1TB Samsung HDD that's been carried forward from a build in 2014 and is still going strong now, but that will probably be replaced by another Crucial BX500 drive eventually. My SN550 boots to Windows in about 20-25 seconds from hitting the power button to landing on the login page, how long does your MP600 take?
@@TheKeyboardDemon I actually have a 2.5tb Seagate HDD but I took it out of my build for now because I'm nowhere near full capacity yet on my secondary sata ssd lol. And 20-25 seconds? That seems kind of long. I was curious when you asked me how long it takes from the second you press the power button so I shut down my PC and tested it just now. From pressing the button to the windows log in screen it only took 12 seconds. Idk if it's because I'm taking advantage of pcie4 but even pcie3 should be a lot faster then that. Or do you have a lot of applications enabled on start up? The average boot time even on cheap sata ssd's are under 15 seconds.
@@Dave-dh7rt Samsung 860 or 970 Pro series come in 1To too. they aren't cheap but that's the price to pay for reliability. I'm a bit sad that small capacity MLCs disappeared instead of getting cheaper.
You're never going to "wear out" an SSD if you're just gaming on it. Even the less durable drives would need to be written like 60-80GB per day, every. single. day. for 5+ years. You will want to upgrade long before it dies on you.
@@GeorgeD1 nobody here in the discussion talked about just gaming on it. Also you forgot that with smaller lithography, NAND is more prone to tension losses and bit changing when readings forcing silent rewrites on stored cells which shorten the calculated lifespan. Add to this that 3 or 4 bits per cells instead of one or two amplifies the phenomenon. Those gives us the fact that the gains actually provided by controllers improvements and dram addition are mainly nullified in realistic long term scenarios.
@@creytax9802 it suppose to be a software thing using the already existing stuff (rtx 3000 & big navi are the only supported gpus) my technical not so technical understanding of this lol
I wanted to ask you, would you be interested in benchmarking motherboards boot time to post? The biggest thing that I noticed when switching to Ryzen on a B450 Tomahawk from an old intel i5 3450 was the boot time. I went from less than 10 seconds to windows to 20+ seconds to windows. I'm using xmp, uefi only, every boot option disabled except for the boot drive on ssd, and used the fast boot option. I looked on the internet and saw other people mentioning this and that it just depends on the motherboard, but I didn't find anyone that would actually benchmark it. Boot time is a pretty big deal to me, and being able to have a boot time as fast as possible is one of the things I would be willing to spend more money on. Just an important consideration like having a quiet system. If I can get instantaneous boot by spending a bit more on the mobo and ssd then I would definitely consider it. Do you think this could be something you could consider adding in in your motherboard testing?
There might be options in the bios to increase the boot speed. That likely will help a lot with your problem. I use that MB but it's in my unraid server so I never notice it booting. My B550 aorus master is booting extremely fast. In my experience an nvme drive does improve boot speed of a system over sata ssd.
I too am running a 3600 on a b450 Tomahawk Max board but I use an nvme boot drive and its plenty fast to boot up. Its not a fancy nvme either just a kingston 120 gb cost me less than £50, a bargain, I went from an ssd to an nvme boot drive and the difference is noticable, once up and running not so easy to tell but bootup...hell yeah.
@@Superrayas I am not sure about this one currently but I have been building computers since 1993 and I have seen many with that option. It usually limits the splash screen and reduces wait time to boot. Most have the option. My current pc boots so fast I didn't think to look for it.
@@melvoid01 According to the internet you might be in UEFI/Legacy mode for booting and if you can switch to just uefi it will boot faster. Hope that helps.
Geoffrey Straw is correct in a way. There is an option in the Boot section that allows you set the seconds the BIOS will wait for a key input for boot options. You need to set that low even if you have disabled the boot option in most cases. 👍
Things I'd like to see done w/ those drives: 1) benchmarks including launch time of the game application itself (ie when you click play in steam) 2) benchmarks of direct storage titles, when available 3) performance of different cache systems (including using a cheap SSD and HDD with the SSD as a cache vs one larger SSD) when playing 1 game vs when you play say, 5 games regularly (see how stuff being able to be cached fully vs not will impact performance) 4) performance while antivirus is scanning your system cause that seems interesting 5) performance downloading games on very high speed internet (might have to run a local game cache server to simulate that cause Australia). I'm specifically looking for when the cpu becomes the bottleneck vs the drive
I will be interested in seeing how long it takes game developers to start taking advantage of the direct i/0 on the ssd's... and if it will be pcie 4.0 only or also work on pcie 3.0?
I have a WDBlack SN850 1TB for OS, Sk Hynix Gold P31 2TB for steam games, and an ext. Sabrent M.2 enclosure with WD Blue SN550 for files and system backup.
Just wondering as you chose to use a 5400rpm archive class (probably SMR) drive for loading games from, how it would stack up against a drive more likely to be in a desktop system. For example a 2-4TB WD Black or Seagate desktop class harddrive spinning at 7200rpm. The conclusion would probably be the same but I doubt it would be as bad as using an archive drive.
No, the WD120EMAZ is not SMR. All WD drives 8TB+ are CMR www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY, now I do agree using something that looks exactly like what I pulled from an external WD Elements 12TB (for use in an unRAID server) is a little questionable. I don't see your typical gamer shucking drives to use as a game/boot drive. They should at least have used a regular 7200RPM CMR drive. They go to all this trouble to get representative drives for the SSD's, should at least do the same for the HDD.
No one cares about hdds anymore so I don't know why they bothered testing hdd at all. This vid sorta views like an ad which is something I'm not used to with hammer on box
"As we are testing PCI 4.0 storage today we are performing our tests on an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT" Intel burn right there lol. Shame there's no Samsung 980 Pro 1TB drive tested, while the 7GB/se read speed is impressive i am sure it won't make much of a difference in games. Been waiting on a SSD that can get to the transfer speeds thats 4x PCI 4.0 can do. Should try the Battletech Game with Rouge tech mod, NVME 3.0, 1 and 1/2 mins, HDD 15+ i say 15+ mins cause i fell a sleep waiting then waking up to the main menu. My Main system was a 1TB NVME 3.0 Samsung Evo 970 as the boot drive 2x 2TB patriot SATA drives (cheapest ones i could get during last years amazon prime day deals) and 4x 1TB SATA SSD's drives which helps when using your system as a plex server. However i no longer have the Evo 970 in my main system i moved that over to my new legion 5P laptop as it only had a 256GB SSD in it which is pretty limited space for a Ryzen 7 4800H and RTX2060. So i am interested in a PCI 4.0 SSD that can reach the 7gb/sec transfer rates.
Thank you for this video. You have helped me with planning my new build. I’ll probably skip the PCIE 4.0 SSD now, and just buy a MB that can use one, in order to upgrade to one in the future, when they become relevant for gaming performance.
@@NeedlessEscape yes jager is definitly good He is good for every task thx to his gun, speed and gadget If you have not played jager yet, I would surely suggest picking him, He is usefull in literally every single match, and round on every map
![[#SHORTS CLIP] ใช้ของของตัวเองไปเลยสิคะ l ซานิเบาได้เบา l One Playground](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ea_mTywx2p4/mqdefault.jpg)
For those asking why we didn't test drive X, Y or Z... we focused on testing different types of drive, rather than just every drive available. We don't have the time to test 100 different SSDs. I think from the conclusion and testing you'll see why it doesn't make a ton of sense to test even more SSDs in this way
Thanks
Talking about different types, at least 1 Optane drive would've made sense.
SD cards can be reaaaalllllly slow, especially the cheap ones. So that doesn't surprise me
Yep I agree bc no games yett has ssd in mind yett but maybe next year that my change since next gen games will be made with use of ssd in mind so next gen games will take advantage of ssd since console will use ssd in thejr games to so next gen we will see a bigger difference next gen when new games actually take advantage of a ssd
SSD's even make yer mustache get longer. I need that upgrade now!!!
Current game engines don't utilize multi-core data streaming from storage much, if at all. It's CPU (mostly) & memory bandwidth bound, once you get to SSD speeds. Current API never needed it, and especially on PS4/Xbox 1, where the HDD is so slow that trying to do multi-stream fetching will stall it anyway, so it was never a focal point for devs. This is where Direct Storage IO and new consoles change the landscape, expect game engines to be revised for these new standards in the near future.
So pcie 4.0 might actually make a significant difference in next gen console port to pc titles? cool.
@@MichaelFitzpatrickk Yes, and Intel bringing gen 4 next year, to speed up PC ecosystem adoption. Even gen 3 NVMe will see significant gains once devs switch to multi-stream data fetch & decompression algos.
@@MichaelFitzpatrickk u might even see new line on minimun requirement like: at least 3500rw speed
This could make a big difference to the gaming experience! And then we might be happy we have NVMe drives.
@@austin357 So happy amd, sony and ms help push fast io so dev can improve their game design.
Following years gonna be amazing for everyone, we got intel who got kick in the butt and now they have awake, nvidia pushing the best they can to avoid big navi taking their crown, and amd keep growing their rnd division.
Moustache Setting: High
pretty sure it's on "psycho",
to much detail for high my G.
Nvidia MoustacheWorks: Ultra
16 times the detail!
Texture level Ultra
Overclocked mustache.
"Buy an SSD. ANY SSD to significantly speed up load times."
Planet Coaster: "Hold My Beer."
Not surprised in the least - Frontier have a habit of butchering anything they touch.
Thanks for the testing, but does the median 10 sec. access SSD advantage over a HDD justify the 5x higher prices?
@@s.g.3042 Not for that game, no.
But i'd expect most people to play more than that one game, plus an SSD will benefit boot times, and general OS responsiveness.
And we also have Cities: Skylines with thousand of assets (but actually, SSD improves loading speed drastically)
I wonder how would Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 handle that game's loading times.
Under the assumption that it's properly optimized for those.
Would love to see a "Best SSD for Productivity".
I guess differences would be larger zipping/unzipping large archives, exporting 4K videos, editing high res images in Photoshop.
this
Without seeing any tests and benchmarks, I already have the answer for you; the 980 PRO.
Fast nvme with high random read and write. Gen 4 cpu lanes look real good. I suspect we'll get bumps to dmi on intel next gen.
Its the same, the crystaldiskmark tells the tale, straight line sequential for exactly that, unless you are dealing with huge raw 4k+ video its mostly just 4k random single threaded like with games, and there all the nvme fall down to almost sata, which is why they end up performing like that.
One of the big things for me was noticing the lack of stutter from asset streaming in games like Diablo 3 when run from an SSD. I always see load testing but never much on asset streaming, which should be a big deal (presumably) with devs working on games for the new consoles as a base line.
So frametime consistency SSD vs High End SSD etc sounds good to me, let's go Tim, FREE THE MOUSTACHE
I'm a WoW player and loafing from HDD you get I game quick enough but there is no scenery, you are standing in mid-air till the ship and NPCs load, this can take several seconds ( feels like minutes)
I build gaming computers for customers from time to time, and have noticed that as well. An SSD seems to bring up the minimum frame rates a bit in certain games.
Makes sense, since random access is the biggest advantage of SSDs.
This! I've searched for detailed tests and information on this. Since I bought a used 256GB SSD for some of my games I noticed that those peaks in frames times in some games just vanished - and it's definitely noticeable. Namely those games are ghost recon wildlands and watchdogs 2. (Uuuubisoft, what are you saying to this?)
That moustache is loading faster than any SSD is loading a game, Tim!
Ha,Ha,Ha best comment so far
doesn't make sense.. bubbling whatever to get some likes?
@@tbp5815 perhaps
ugly-looking mustache
**cringe**
Windows boot time would be a good test to include in the bench
other youtubers have done that, but I find their results odd - switching my boot drive from MX500 to SN750 halved the time windows takes to load, it's lightning fast in comparison, however other youtubers have reported only a second or 2 difference....
@@martinarscott3524 Interesting. I was eyeing up a 500gb SN750 for purely boot + some programs. Talking about something as extreme as that much more speed upon boot raises eyebrows a lot.
@@eskimo4130 it's a great drive, I went for the included heatsink option as they do tend to get quite hot without, haven't had any problems so far
For something that's done once a day, or once every few days or weeks (I let my system go to sleep/hibernate), what's the benefit between 10 second or less boot time and even less than that? I reinstalled windows by mistake on a sata ssd drive instead of the nvme sata 3, and I did not notice any difference. It took me a week to notice windows was installed on the wrong drive after running crystal disk to check the hdds.
We live in an era where boots are extremely fast anyway
I hate how damn impossible it is to find out if a drive has a DRAM cache.
Oh i know its crazy
I've never had a problem googling "does [model name] have dram" and multiple review sites immediately pop up staying whether it had a dram cache, which controller they used, everything you could want to know.
@@cm01 Here is great source docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcrfpJKHkOf-Oi1DbuuQva2gT4/edit#gid=0
Dram, Nand type, layers and everything you want to know
Aren't you exaggerating? Combining an SSD model name with 'DRAM' renders immediate result most of the time.
@@sir_whocampsalot2876 They should put the US government in charge. The government would make it illegal for any DRAM to be in a SSD so everyone is "equal" and tax you so you end up spending twice as much for half as much. High ranking government employees can still have DRAM on their SSDs because they are special people. And the government will make it so you have to have a special licences to buy anything other than a standard HDD. Sad thing is many people would love this.
3 years later, and just a single mediocre game implemented DirectStorage
atlas fallen loads pretty damn quickly. but I think forspoken is the only one 😆
Tim: "We're not reviewers...but"
That means we're about to get one of more elaborate reviews on that those tech components on TH-cam :P
A common saying goes "every word before 'but' is irrelevant"
@@rawdez_ you're just stupid and dont understand what he meant, even though it was obvious. What it means is, despite them claiming they arent experts, the info they're about to reveal will indeed make them look more expert than most. You're just dumb and failed reading comprehension, so it's ok, I love your irrelevant ass anyway.
I've got the feeling that this video will have an update when developers get used to the new consoles SSDs.
You bet it will
Yea, in 2022
By then ssd’s will be much cheaper
@@allenqueen 2022 my ASS! Direct Storage API is coming with the next windows update...
@@allenqueen I've just realised that 2022 is only 1 year and 2 months. Oh god, I'm an elder.
I'm more interested in the effect of fast storage in frametimes, especially in open world games where assets need to be streamed in on the fly.
Looking at those 1% and 0.1% lows comparing the different drives should give you a good idea of the actual experience while gaming.
Exactly. Games like assassins creed origins/Odyssey run like garbage on HDDs
I second this. Most open-world games (Horizon ZD right now) stutter a lot on my WD Green HDD (granted its a crappy HDD for gaming). It wasn't until I got the Adata SU800 SSD a couple of weeks back that I found out that it was actually the HDD that was the reason for the stutter. It never crossed my mind earlier since most of the people on community forums confidently say that SSDs only improve load times in gaming and not the games' performance, which made me think that one of the CPU/GPU/RAM components was the bottleneck.
Red dead redemption 2 also stutters a lot on hdd.
Yeah, Sottr tanks between areas. Drops frame rate under 48fps and vsync does its janky stutter thing.
@@Selfundum2424 I have seen on some windows 10 computers the hd gets spiked to full usage. HD or SSD didnt matter. There is something in windows that is causing it. The system has 8gigs of ram, and it was only using 2gig. For some reason the windows image viewer was pegging the SSD to 100% usage for minutes at a time. And it wasnt even opened. Really made me wonder wtf it was doing. I have noticed this on multiple systems with diff cpus/mobo's/etc etc
I'm old enough to remember a time when that HDD would have been regarded as the fastest thing in the universe. My first HDD, a 64MB monster, probably had a speed of about 1 or 2 MBs. You youngsters don't know how much you've got it made. My first mouse was made from sticks.
you young will not know how nasa made to moon to moon with 1kb cpu
@@masternobody1896 with 4KB RAM
@@masternobody1896 the source code for the Apollo missions could be downloaded, a Commodore 64 was fast enough to run it.
oh lah dee dah, here's a guy showing off with his fancy mouse made out of sticks! In my day we had to store our data using punch cards made out of papyrus, written by hand with a blunt rock. The data could only be read once a year at the summer solstice when the sun was in the right position in the sky :p
My first hdd was a whopping 700MB
Thanks for this vid! I was just trying to decide between 4.0 and 3.0 for my new build. I think I'll go for 3.0. There's no point in paying $70+ more for 1.8 seconds.
Even if Direct Storage makes a huge difference, like the vid said, that's a couple years out. I can make a new purchase then if I want.
What would be awesome is if you guys did a professional work load test for these like opening ue4 projects, large cad files, large 3d models etc. Would be cool to see how that scales
Yep, that's the missing test. The message is clear for games - but what about other use cases?
@Deez Nutz Agreed, it's possible that "gaming" is perhaps no longer a simple definition. I am not a "professional" or a "developer" however I will dabble in game capture, Unity level editing on Steam Workshop, VMs with a custom game server etc and this is where NVME SSDs are noticeably better. Particularly considering HWUB is referencing 12 and 16 core CPUs for gaming, it is fair to assume the purchasers of those products may dabble outside of "playing games" where an NVME SSD is going to be better in almost every way.
Another great video, you guys don't miss. Thank you!
The video has been out for 8 minutes. But you're probably right 😋
@@jonasbindslev9894 Skimmed the intro, checked a few graphs, then watched the conclusion. I already have an sn550 so was just really interested to hear their thoughts.
This was a great video, though it does make me feel bad for using my 6 year old sata SSD as a boot drive only and having all my games on a regular hard drive. I'd have been interested to see how fast a 7200rpm drive performed, since you wouldn't get a 5400 rpm if you planning to run things off it.
Nothing to be interested about.
My Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM010 is shockingly slow for both handling Windows and playing games. Cannot wait until I get my hands on an SSD come next summer and forget I ever had this piece of hardware in my rig.
I'll see if I can get a PCIe 3.0 or maybe even 4.0 drive for my operating system and at least a 1 TB SATA drive for everything else.
Agreed, using a slow HDD for something it wasn't designed for doesn't really give a fair comparison. They should have used a WD Black, a Toshiba X300, or a Seagate Gaming drive for a fair comparison. I use a Toshiba X300 as extended game storage, and while not ideal for some games (those that store their data disorganized, mostly), it's definitely not unbearably slow, nor does it result in streaming stutter.
If I'm not mistaken a much more limited test was done by another channel (LTT?) pitting a cheap (and bad, no cache etc.) SSD against a WD black, and, if I'm not misremembering, the Black could keep up pretty darn well, and even beat the SSD in some tests.
Right tool for the job, and all that. (of course, a *good* SSD should beat a *good* HDD every time when designed for the same purpose, except, for now, in price/GiB)
Considering this is a rare look into this topic by anyone these days, I thought the lack of 7200RPM stuck out like a sore thumb. Most people who do still have a HDD in a desktop will be using a 7200RPM one.
It’s really for a better overall picture. Pitting a slow eco drive against SSDs just exaggerates the problem. The take away really doesn’t change however, you should be moving on from mechanical if you haven’t already.
It's a 7200RPM drive, not 5400rpm. HU just fell for WD's fake numbers.
@@sbjf Whether thats correct or not, the point of having more HDD with different RPM still stands. The tests on this are shrinking, so even just from a historical stand point, it would be nice to be able to point to a soruce which showed a good summary of all the above. Even if general consumers very rarely go for the higher RPM 10-15K, it would be interesting to see that represented, far more than just a bunch of different branded - but ultimately the same - SSDs.
Camera Quality Is So Sharp 👀
Just like your videos 😃
Would you recommend crucial p1
I'm here because of you - That TUF build ;-)
Dude I was watching this on 480p on my tablet and all this time I thought it was 720p!
You must be new
SSDs are so difficult to test, and they did a good job at it. Exceptionally well made video.
They keep making SSDs faster when they're already faster than most real-world tasks can take advantage of. What I actually want is for them to have higher capacities and lower prices, not better speeds. I'd like to actually be able to replace all my noisy, huge, hot HDDs that have to be in a separate machine in another room so I don't hear them, but that day never seems to come.
This is exactly what QLC storage drive are for. Low cost, high capacity. And work is underway for PLC (5 bits per cell). Both Toshiba and Intel talked about it last year.
Use sata ssds to replace your storage
Something to keep in mind is that SSDs have a higher failure rate of lost data (when trying to recover data) than hard drives. SSDs are not really great for long term storage yet and their flash storage can also be a huge problem on the off chance that it goes bad quicker.
Data centers and such are going to keep hard drives around because they’re longer lasting and easier to recover which will in turn not drop the prices of SSDs as quickly.
@@dscarmo I'd like to, when you can buy 16TB ones for less than a car.
@@the-lonemandalorian2674 Yeah I still have working hard drives from way back in 2006 LOL
Thank you so much for this. I've been weighing an SSD game drive purchase (particularly among the ones tested), and this was a big help. I knew PCIe based drives weren't that much faster in years past (and still aren't to today) so it would make more sense to get a regular SSD for today and upgrade to a 4.0 drive when we see much more tangible loading improvements on PC.
This is EXACTLY the video I needed for my new build. THANK YOU SO MUCH.
Thanks a bunch. I am waiting to build a zen 3 system and have been going back and forth about upgrading my sata ssd to a pci4 harddrive. I think I will hang on to my current drive for a few more years.
finally, I have been waiting for a video just like this for quite a while, everyone just compares pcie 3.0 vs 4.0 or random ssd vs pcie nvme drives.
but you took the time and effort to also mark the difference in TLC and QLC, cache vs non cache, m.2 Sata vs regular sata, and even the HDD, that was something I have not seen any youtuber do.
thank you for this video I'll be referring to it and sharing next time I find people struggling with this question :)
I would've liked to see a faster and slightly more mainstream HDD in there as well, something like the Barracude 2 or 3TB 7200RPM.
I feel like they just grabbed the first hdd they found
whats the point
No sane PC Gamer plays from a 5400 rpm HDD, I have 2x 2TB Barracuda HDD and they are way faster than a normal 5400 rpm HDD and if I have an annoying long loading game like total war Warhammer I'll move it to the SSD!
No
I used to have a 10,000 RPM Raptor. That was amazeballs back in the day.
I'm rocking the WD SN550 1TB and after installing RD2 I was questioning my decision due to the load times but I feel better after seeing the benchmarks and considering the price to performance. Cheers! (that 40 secs feels like an eternity though :P )
It be really interesting to see PCI-E.3 vs .4 on content creation, like 4K video and audio work and large transfer files. Im sure many content creators are curious to see if the move to PCI-E.4 is currently worth the premium.
thanks!
sick 'stash!
Very helpful! I was tossing around the idea of "needing" a pcie 4.0 drive. Clearly I do not at this time. Thank you! a 2tb 3.x nvme will be ample power for my game expansion.
I love Hardware Unboxed, for this reason, they give you the best benchmarks for real-world use. Thanks again guys, keep up the good work.
This video arrived the exact moment i opened youtube. And i am gathering data on SSD's and their usefulness over certain speeds.
I did a little experiment myself:
I created a 250gb zip archive full with random large game files from my drives and tried to copy it within a 970 evo.
The initial copy speed was 1.8gbps. About 50gb down the line the speed dropped to 600MBps, then started wildly fluctuating between 600 and 800 mbps, occasionally rising back to 1.8gbps for 5 seconds and going back down.
My conclusion is that the real MLC speed is around 600MBps
Tlc speed is around 400MBps (crucial MX500)
Qlc speed is around 80MBps (random review i read)
Which makes HDD's write speed firmly above Qlc at 167MBps.
Obviously that's not random reads and random writes. Those is where SSDs have ridiculous advantage. But during normal workloads on a defragmented hard drive random reads don't happen under normal workloads with large files.
Nice timing 😊
@@gchatz6480 So, the problem with crystal disk mark and many other ssd benchmarks is that they never exceed the cache.
I created a 250gb zip archive full with random large game files from my drives and tried to copy it within a 970 evo.
The initial copy speed was 1.8gbps. About 50gb down the line the speed dropped to 600MBps, then started wildly fluctuating between 600 and 800 mbps, occasionally rising back to 1.8gbps for 5 seconds and going back down.
My conclusion is that the real MLC speed is around 600MBps
Tlc speed is around 400MBps (crucial MX500)
Qlc speed is around 80MBps (random review i read)
Which makes HDD's write speed firmly above Qlc at 167MBps.
Well the question is, how often do you copy 250gb files in a real world scenario? If you transfer such huge amounts of data on a daily or even weekly basis you might want to look into professional grade hardware, an average consumer does simply not move that much data that often.
@@ralfrudi3963 Gaming: When you download and install large games, move steam libraries and manipulate mod data and large procedural world saves (can span past 100gb for those).
Productivity: 4k video files, scratch disks, large photo sessions.
Others: Drive backups and cloning.
Would i really want to pay twice the price over currently available SSDs to get around 200TBW extra endurance? Nope. Besides, MLC drives are only around 10% more expensive than QLC counterparts at 1TB mark, and often have more than double TBW rating.
Bro I want that sweet SLC drive when I have my first built.
So any SSD is better than HDD, and diminishing returns for high end SSD's with games.
At least right now. Devs will need to become better at getting data to load.
For now while games still using linear data loading. Moving forward more and more games will load using parallel data loading if they want their games on the new consoles.
Yes but if your building a system get a normal HDD instead of a SSD for 1/3 the price and put what you have saved towards the graphics card
Yeah but PCIe 3.0 NVMes are now as cheap as the good SATA drives.
@@ZXspectrum.. An ssd is mandatory for any system. Atleast a 120gb sata 3 ssd for windows.
"welcome back to todd we're unboxed"
Thanks for fixing that TH-cam. It was saying "Hardware Unboxed" for a little while there and I was getting concerned.
Your timing for these videos is on point. This was my next path of upgrading my system. Thankyou very much.
MS actually said in that article, that:
"This process has already begun for DirectStorage and we’re working with our industry partners right now to finish designing/building the API and its supporting components. We’re targeting getting a development preview of DirectStorage into the hands of game developers next year."
So, developers will get a preview-version. NEXT YEAR.
They didn't even state is it February or November...
Getting something out that might take a very long time...
I wouldn't hold my breath ;)
ThIs technology was made in order to unload the processor. It's not for fast loading
@@aga87df You really should first even bother to read about the thing were discussing here, than come to post something you know nothing about...
Here, read the article first: devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/
@@aga87df Direct storage puts way more load on the cpu due to decompression techniques.
@Devenn Eng I know that was my point lmao, the dude above said direct storage was because the cpus were week. But the whole idea is because the cpus are so fast they can use direct storage.
Seems like the actual bottlenecks are the games themselves, something clearly going on during "loading" that doesn't have anything to do with searching for data.
lack of multi-threading during loading most likely
Would be interesting to see how performance oriented HDDs compare in these tests (ie 7200rpm WD Black)
Still twice as slow.
Still horribly. The fastest 15K RPM HDDs are still dog slow compared the a cheap SATA SSD unless they are run at enterprise grade RAID levels.
@@andersjjensen dog slow in synthetic. This video shows the performance lose is much less than what most people think. So what would change if you didn't use the slowest hdd?
@@Zellonous It would close the gap a little in the few games that showed some sort of sensitivity to transfer speed, but not by a meaningful amount. The 15K RPM drives have a decent sustained read/write advantage over cheaper 7.2K desktop variants, but their seek times aren't other-worldly better, and it's the seek times that stacks up to the poor performance of HDDs not the actual throughput of linear data (as evident by the disparity between low end and high end SSDs in synthetic workloads that doesn't translate to any proper gains in games)
Omg, the mustache situation has escalated, a lot.
Many thanks for clarifying the SSD dram vs non dram debate re gaming. Another great video, Excellent work.
I was surprised not to see Samsung 980 Pro in this list, but great content as always! Thank you
Those Red Dead Redemption 2 figures remind me of when I upgraded my Steam drive from 7200RPM HDD to SATA SSD in an attempt to improve GTA loading times. To this day GTA still loads slow as molasses.
Yeah. GTA Online loading is issues with the game itself (though story mode loads fast af). Console load times for GTA Online are also faster than GTA Online load times on PC. Rockstar is just doing something wrong.
Glad I am now on SSDs.
I mean, my laptop not only kept having faulty HDDs, but it was also slow as hell if you wanted to load anything.
SSDs on laptops makes a lot of sense because they are immune to shocks and vibrations, consumes relatively less power and are less temperature sensitive.
I would LOVE to see a frametime graph with each of these drives, just to showcase exactly how necessary it is to have a solid state drive for gaming over a traditional hard drive. I remember back some six years ago when I played World of Tanks, back when it ran on just a single core even, that I netted something like a 15-20% uplift switching from a HDD to a SSD alone. Sure, load times decrease, but when you can feed the CPU that data all the faster during games, wouldn't it make sense why the game runs smoother too?
Thoughts?
Your tests are the best on the market. And thats a huge compliment looking at your competition.
Bruh, Gamers Nexus is way better
"Welcome back to todd we're unboxed"
Damn it TH-cam
For real, TH-cam's subtitles are painful most of the time.
he is todd howard.
Todd is probably grateful for being unboxed.
@@Joker-no1fz 14 times loading speedup
@@Raivo_K 16 times the snatch.
Great video, thank you very much :). But one thing I believe would be worth to have another video about: gaming performance while on an SSD. I noticed my games run far smoother when playing on a SSD than on a HDD. Beyond loading times, on my SSD I actually get more fps and a more stable performance (probably due to assets being loaded while in game). It definitely pays to play on an SSD, even beyond the loading times.
Ryzen is usually better at decompression...I would love to see Ryzen VS Intel Core with those same drives and see how they scale across CPU architectures!
I bought the SN750 due to this video and man it really is a champ for loading times. It's really nice that even when I die in most games it only takes a few seconds till I can continue playing.
SSD testing is much needed, there isn't really a big channel covering them I believe. Great work 👌🏽
Good video with a a lot of usefull information, BUT it would have been nice to color code the drives in the benchmarks to clearly show which ones are Sata vs PCI-E 3/4.
Well, my wealth haven't reached that stage yet. I just reached stage 'Use SSD as boot drive'. For storage and game installation, I can only afford so much that I prefer having more space rather than speed. I can only benefit from the speed only when I write/read/loading games. With space, I can still benefit having large storage space even when I'm not using it.
Next stage is, 'having a cheap secondary SSD for temporary game installation'.
Just make sure whatever ssd you get has DRAM cache since you are putting you OS on it which constantly reads and writes.
That's what we need, a demonstration of in game comparisons between SSD and HDD.
I'm not certain that the few seconds people save will be put to good use anyway...
@@surft haha, maybe that would be one my next stage, currently I'm using the cheapest m.2 nvme drive I could find as boot drive.
@@Cheepchipsable I don't think there are that much difference in actual gameplay though, only in loading screen as the game engine loads the assets from the drive. Though I'm not really sure.
In consoles, which solely focused on gaming, faster storage might make more sense, player can't do much while the game was loading. In pc, I'll just alt-tab and watch youtube/browse the web while the game is loading.
Hmm same here. I currently have a 250GB SSD as a boot drive and some apps and 2x 1TB HDDs. I'm going to get a cheap 512GB M.2 SATA SSD though, for storing some of my favorite games.
SSDs are getting cheaper, it's only double the price of HDD per GB.
I use a 1TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 NVME PCIe 3.0 SSD, the Samsung 970 Pro uses MLC flash which means it gets its full speed all the time,- if you look @ online reviews you can see the Samsung 1TB 970 Pro in game loading beats most PCI express 4.0 M.2 SSDs since it has better [random 4k IOPS]. SSD manufactures are now cutting manufacturing corners using the cheaper TLC flash memory which means if you hammer the SSD too much it will throttle it's max speed. PCI Express 3.0 vs 4.0 does not really matter, what matters is the controller used on the SSD & what memory it is using, stay far away from QLC flash memory, the speed will throttle to almost harddrive levels.
I appreciate this video because I'm planning to finally snag myself an NVME drive during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales. It's the last piece I need for the 'ultimate' version of the system I first built back in February. I saved some money at the time by reusing the Samsung 850 EVO I'd previously installed in my old laptop as my primary boot drive, but with the prices on 1tb NVME drives these days, it's time I made the upgrade.
Was actually looking at getting a larger SSD to replace my old chunky archival HDD. Cheers for the in- depth tests!
Rerun this when they release Direct Storage API. That will be the impressive difference if it turns out to be as good as it seems.
I feel like you could have covered tiered storage for pc.. software like primocache or fuzedrive do a great job at ssd caching / tiering to bring ssd level performance to large (much cheaper) spinning rust disks.
Why a 5400 HD and not 7200 one? Does not make sense...
Why would it matter, not like it would've been faster than the ssd's...
I remember having 2 10000rpm raptors in raid they were ballistic
Lol,.. me too, still use them too...well I did until a fortnight ago when one of the drives failed. :( I've had them for years too, so I definitely got me moneys worth out of them.
@@chrissavill8713 yeah real shame they stopped making them
And still slower than a cheap sata ssd. Drive technology has become great.
I was really unsure of the storage device of what I would have picked. Thank goodness this video was made just in time before I made a rash decision.
Where is 7200rpm HDD?
Where is the IDE (pata) harddrives.... too many elitist tech reviewers ;)
@@Lloyd-Franklin floppy disk?
@@thepezfeo 7200rpm is faster. Why use the slowest? Why bother testing hdd at all then?
Stoner Snek Lady
I bet you're fun at parties
@@CertifiedSlamboy like anyone thinking any HDD is worthy of todays games also right?
I would definitely expect HDD heavy games like ARk survival and crysis remastered if you may test on these?
Thanks, this is what I needed for my new build. Couldn’t have been more timely. I am getting a PCIe gen 4 as boot drive but was torn between what to pick as mass storage secondary for games.
@U are My submissive toy and a big HDD for back-up.
I just upgraded from my 850 evo ssd’s to corsairs mp600 as a boot drive and storage drive and I don’t care what anyone’s says in reviews and comments about it not making a difference for games because that’s complete b.s. For the main games I play like bfv and cod m.w alone made a night a day difference. I’m first in every game on call of duty and wait around for 5 seconds or more for people to load in. It’s ridiculous. Bfv was probably the biggest improvement with loading into 64 players games and all games in seconds. I’m not even joking it’s stupid fast. Games like Rdr2 and gta is faster but not night and day faster. Maybe a few seconds. But where the new nvme drives really shine is that my os boots in seconds. My os is already open and loaded in before my monitor can turn on from a dead start. My monitor is the bottleneck lol Corsairs mp600 are 179 each right now on amazon being they are on sale and worth every penny. When I bought my 850 evo back in 2016 during the Black Friday sale they were 216 each after taxes for the 1tb which was cheep compared to the over $300 before the Black Friday sale. So in 2020 paying less for the same storage size and more than triple the speeds is a huge win in my books. A upgrade that should be good for many years to come.
JT_STUD Thanks for sharing your experience. I think your set up is different to the one discussed here and what I am considering which could explain some of the differences. No doubt, it makes a big difference to go with fast PCIe 4 M2 drive for Windows which they have done for the test and I plan to do the same. But instead of using the same drive like you do I plan on going with another 2TB drive for mass storage. I was contemplating between SSD and PCIe Gen 3 for secondary drive. I am not bothered with 2-3 sec extra load time which is usually the case as you mentioned and also demonstrated in the test. I think what they pointed out was that differences in raw speed don’t translate in to similar magnitude jump in game loading times which is true. Of course, you can shave off few seconds in loading but how important is that? In my case, I want Windows to load fast so I am going with Gen 4 but for a secondary drive for mass storage and game, I am open to save some money. It is not that RDR 2 is going to load in 10 seconds on a Gen 4. Point is this is still relatively new and will be few years down the line until codes will be written to take full advantage of the fast NVME drives until then difference will be relatively small. I might use that money towards a better GPU not Big Navi is round the corner or it could be 3080X.
@@jamesthomson8659 multiple drives in a separate unRaid or FreeNAS server for backup.
So many good Aussie based tech channels on TH-cam...
Besides load times, Windows boot times would have been interesting. Or program load times. I had some test done a few years back. SolidWorks took 169s to load at work ....9s at home on my SSD.
So SW load time and an assemble of ~100 parts will be blazing fast on an SSD as you read in all the files from the hard drive. Also similar to that could be compiling a project. I haven't done testing or a comparison but it seems the same 2 projects here at work will compile much fast on my PC with an SSD while my coworker is still running a HDD.
“I’m expecting this drive to be pretty slow”
😅 Meanwhile I’m using 4TB 5,400RPM drives for my games since they’re cheap $80 on Newegg (New). My main drive however is a $40 120GB Kingston SSD that I was about to replace with Crucial’s 1TB M.2 NVME SSD. But we’ll see if that changes after watching this.
You should notice a real difference. Tim was testing several modern SSDs and not much older SSD models versus modern ones.
I like Kingston's 1TB A2000 NVMe drive. Super low price, has DRAM and TLC flash. Cheap enough that I can fill up every M.2 slot with it.
Those 5400 rpm and 5900 rpm drives still have decent read speeds if they are newer
Don't change your boot drive, the difference in speed between the kingston and the Crucial would barely be noticiable. Only change it if you need more storage room. I have a 9600k with a 120GB mushkin SSD and a 9700k with a Samsung 970 500GB M.2. I honestly don't notice a difference in boot times between the two drives, even though on paper the Samsung is much better obviously.
@@VolcanicProtectorMan yeah, at least they aren't like dreadful 4200 rpm ide laptop drives holy crap those are slower than usb 2.0 flash drives
Another great show guys... keep up the good work..
Most are too fast. One must be able to make a cup of tea before the computer and a game loads up.
In a few years you'll be able to prep your refreshments before booting and not leave your mates waiting too long. Except some MBs still take 30 to 45s to boot before loading the OS; supposedly by design.
Your new AI robotic helper will serve you right away. That time will come soon...
Get a wife...
A NVME M.2 for Boot drive and a QVO based ssd for Bulk storage in place of an HDD would be a very nice configuration.
Since you talk about it by the end of the video, I would love to see a OS SSD + Game SSD vs OS+Game SSD comparison. Perhaps trying to test single and multiplayer games, with and without discord, and/or recording/streaming. Thank you soo much!
"Todd we're unboxed" is now my favorite tech channel.
I would love to see some experiments.
1. Does having the OS on a seperate drive impact game perf, and does a faster OS drive impact game perf
2. Does moving the page files to a seperate fast ssd impact game perf
Mainly i want to see if we can optimize windows by moving files and programs onto separate drives. I know any performance impact will be negligible but with rtx IO and the upcoming game consoles its possible this could help in the future. I havent seen anyone try this and anything i can find isnt done well.
This test will take a while but i would really like to know.
I can tell you the answer to #1 is no. It doesn't get any boost for being on the system drive.
well im using 860 evo 250gb for windows 7 or 10 from 2018 and 850 evo 250gb for games since 2015
Where I DO notice some nice big numbers is game installation and especially the preparation\disk allocation period. On SATA SSD it went as long as 15min with stupid EA Origin with speeds 200-300MB\s, on NVMe SSD I see in Task Manager 200\800MB\s for read\write or write
ead. This is a good example of how important in the end the Mixed Workload tests are, bc u have OS doing operations on SSD and then game reading and allocating\writing. So for me it has been the most important metric while choosing my new SSD. Besides Mixed Workloads in benchmarks I concentrate on price also.
I haven´t used same game applications(EA, Battlenet as my focus shifted from BFV to Warzone) to get real apples to apples comparison but I´d say you can shave off 1\3 of installation time.
And have u noticed how often you come home from work\school, fire up the PC and then have to wait 30min for the 30GB game to install. With faster Mixed Workload it could be done in 10 min....
Don't bother, there would be minimal improvement, if any at all.
This was a great video! So often storage is either taken for granted or now assumed that the fastest, latest is best. So it is great to have a true analysis showing that benefits are marginal for PCIe 4.0 at this time. Again great work and it will be fascinating to see how this data changes Over the next two to three years
4.0 has advantage for workload or file copy, but it's lifespan makes it useless for this kind of usage :p
I'd love to see raid vs larger size drives. So two RAID0 1TB vs a single 2TB. I'd also like to see FPS and if drive type matters there either.
Really useful analysis, and wise advices. You won my subscription. Great job guys.
Would love a dollar per load-seconds graph! :)
Can you please remake this video for 2023?
Would have been interesting to see a Raid 0 or 10 array of WD Black's or Golds to see if they can hold up vs SSDs
No amount of raid will bring the 4K r&w up with nand flash
I think it would have been nice to have included a Raid 0 pair of HDD's which would cost the same as the lowest end SSD for comparison.
Haha, going back in time watching this I forgot about the Ron Jeremy cookie duster!
It's really disappointing just how primitive games are compared to the hardware. Especially when you notice that developers are in fact entirely capable of making games that utilize PC-exclusive features like raytracing, but neglect to optimize anything else.
Corsairs pcie4 mp600 is awesome. I have the 1tb version as my boot drive holding the games I play most and a cheap 2tb crucial sata ssd to hold all my other junk. It's great that ssd's are becoming affordable now. Running games on a hdd nowadays is unbearable lol.
I did something similar, a WD SN550 1TB PCIe drive for boot and a Crucial 2TB BX500 for my game drive with a 1TB Samsung HDD that's been carried forward from a build in 2014 and is still going strong now, but that will probably be replaced by another Crucial BX500 drive eventually.
My SN550 boots to Windows in about 20-25 seconds from hitting the power button to landing on the login page, how long does your MP600 take?
@@TheKeyboardDemon I actually have a 2.5tb Seagate HDD but I took it out of my build for now because I'm nowhere near full capacity yet on my secondary sata ssd lol. And 20-25 seconds? That seems kind of long. I was curious when you asked me how long it takes from the second you press the power button so I shut down my PC and tested it just now. From pressing the button to the windows log in screen it only took 12 seconds. Idk if it's because I'm taking advantage of pcie4 but even pcie3 should be a lot faster then that. Or do you have a lot of applications enabled on start up? The average boot time even on cheap sata ssd's are under 15 seconds.
I know people booting from HDD nowadays, lol.
0:06 todd we're unboxed.
When they can alr nail the auto caption to "hardware unboxed" and start putting easter eggs XD
Excellent analysis... you saved me a upgrade so I can get a few Hardware Unboxed T-shirts!
Loading time is only one aspect, would really like to see 1% and 0.1% low framerate in games to gauge asset streaming and on the fly loading
You forgot to mention "endurance" of the drives!
That's why I'm not considering any QLC or even a TLC drive.
Vierax good luck finding a MLC drive with over 128 or 256gb..
@@Dave-dh7rt Samsung 860 or 970 Pro series come in 1To too. they aren't cheap but that's the price to pay for reliability.
I'm a bit sad that small capacity MLCs disappeared instead of getting cheaper.
You're never going to "wear out" an SSD if you're just gaming on it. Even the less durable drives would need to be written like 60-80GB per day, every. single. day. for 5+ years. You will want to upgrade long before it dies on you.
@@GeorgeD1 nobody here in the discussion talked about just gaming on it.
Also you forgot that with smaller lithography, NAND is more prone to tension losses and bit changing when readings forcing silent rewrites on stored cells which shorten the calculated lifespan. Add to this that 3 or 4 bits per cells instead of one or two amplifies the phenomenon. Those gives us the fact that the gains actually provided by controllers improvements and dram addition are mainly nullified in realistic long term scenarios.
I guess this will just be revisited next year when DirectStorage from Microsoft comes to PC. Great Vid Overall!
Do you thing there will be needed new motherboard for this technic? Or just a normal M.2 Motherboard with M.2 SSD. TY
@@creytax9802 it suppose to be a software thing using the already existing stuff (rtx 3000 & big navi are the only supported gpus)
my technical not so technical understanding of this lol
I wanted to ask you, would you be interested in benchmarking motherboards boot time to post?
The biggest thing that I noticed when switching to Ryzen on a B450 Tomahawk from an old intel i5 3450 was the boot time. I went from less than 10 seconds to windows to 20+ seconds to windows.
I'm using xmp, uefi only, every boot option disabled except for the boot drive on ssd, and used the fast boot option.
I looked on the internet and saw other people mentioning this and that it just depends on the motherboard, but I didn't find anyone that would actually benchmark it. Boot time is a pretty big deal to me, and being able to have a boot time as fast as possible is one of the things I would be willing to spend more money on. Just an important consideration like having a quiet system. If I can get instantaneous boot by spending a bit more on the mobo and ssd then I would definitely consider it.
Do you think this could be something you could consider adding in in your motherboard testing?
There might be options in the bios to increase the boot speed. That likely will help a lot with your problem. I use that MB but it's in my unraid server so I never notice it booting. My B550 aorus master is booting extremely fast. In my experience an nvme drive does improve boot speed of a system over sata ssd.
I too am running a 3600 on a b450 Tomahawk Max board but I use an nvme boot drive and its plenty fast to boot up. Its not a fancy nvme either just a kingston 120 gb cost me less than £50, a bargain, I went from an ssd to an nvme boot drive and the difference is noticable, once up and running not so easy to tell but bootup...hell yeah.
@@Superrayas I am not sure about this one currently but I have been building computers since 1993 and I have seen many with that option. It usually limits the splash screen and reduces wait time to boot. Most have the option. My current pc boots so fast I didn't think to look for it.
@@melvoid01 According to the internet you might be in UEFI/Legacy mode for booting and if you can switch to just uefi it will boot faster. Hope that helps.
Geoffrey Straw is correct in a way. There is an option in the Boot section that allows you set the seconds the BIOS will wait for a key input for boot options. You need to set that low even if you have disabled the boot option in most cases. 👍
Love this comparison video using actual games that people play instead of just looking at synthetic benchmarks.
Tim is my eternal champ for his Rdr2 guide
Things I'd like to see done w/ those drives:
1) benchmarks including launch time of the game application itself (ie when you click play in steam)
2) benchmarks of direct storage titles, when available
3) performance of different cache systems (including using a cheap SSD and HDD with the SSD as a cache vs one larger SSD) when playing 1 game vs when you play say, 5 games regularly (see how stuff being able to be cached fully vs not will impact performance)
4) performance while antivirus is scanning your system cause that seems interesting
5) performance downloading games on very high speed internet (might have to run a local game cache server to simulate that cause Australia). I'm specifically looking for when the cpu becomes the bottleneck vs the drive
So, Red dead redemption 2, I'd love to see a processor usage graph whilst loading. Rockstar got some explaining to do, what is taking 40 seconds?
Probably rendering all the moustaches
I will be interested in seeing how long it takes game developers to start taking advantage of the direct i/0 on the ssd's... and if it will be pcie 4.0 only or also work on pcie 3.0?
Will probably work on any with caching
I have a WDBlack SN850 1TB for OS, Sk Hynix Gold P31 2TB for steam games, and an ext. Sabrent M.2 enclosure with WD Blue SN550 for files and system backup.
We need a newer version of this video thanks
Just wondering as you chose to use a 5400rpm archive class (probably SMR) drive for loading games from, how it would stack up against a drive more likely to be in a desktop system. For example a 2-4TB WD Black or Seagate desktop class harddrive spinning at 7200rpm. The conclusion would probably be the same but I doubt it would be as bad as using an archive drive.
TBH a WD black is unlikely to be in a home system, their constant head parking noise is very hard to tolerate.
No, the WD120EMAZ is not SMR. All WD drives 8TB+ are CMR www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY, now I do agree using something that looks exactly like what I pulled from an external WD Elements 12TB (for use in an unRAID server) is a little questionable. I don't see your typical gamer shucking drives to use as a game/boot drive. They should at least have used a regular 7200RPM CMR drive. They go to all this trouble to get representative drives for the SSD's, should at least do the same for the HDD.
why 5400 speed for the HDD ? get the 7200 or what ever was the speed...kinda dump tbh.
No one cares about hdds anymore so I don't know why they bothered testing hdd at all. This vid sorta views like an ad which is something I'm not used to with hammer on box
"As we are testing PCI 4.0 storage today we are performing our tests on an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT"
Intel burn right there lol.
Shame there's no Samsung 980 Pro 1TB drive tested, while the 7GB/se read speed is impressive i am sure it won't make much of a difference in games. Been waiting on a SSD that can get to the transfer speeds thats 4x PCI 4.0 can do.
Should try the Battletech Game with Rouge tech mod, NVME 3.0, 1 and 1/2 mins, HDD 15+ i say 15+ mins cause i fell a sleep waiting then waking up to the main menu.
My Main system was a 1TB NVME 3.0 Samsung Evo 970 as the boot drive 2x 2TB patriot SATA drives (cheapest ones i could get during last years amazon prime day deals) and 4x 1TB SATA SSD's drives which helps when using your system as a plex server. However i no longer have the Evo 970 in my main system i moved that over to my new legion 5P laptop as it only had a 256GB SSD in it which is pretty limited space for a Ryzen 7 4800H and RTX2060. So i am interested in a PCI 4.0 SSD that can reach the 7gb/sec transfer rates.
THANK YOU for using TH-cams 'Index' feature. LEGEND!!
Thank you for this video. You have helped me with planning my new build. I’ll probably skip the PCIE 4.0 SSD now, and just buy a MB that can use one, in order to upgrade to one in the future, when they become relevant for gaming performance.
Subtitles: Todd we're unboxed
Poga
@@OmPrakash-pc1ec I swear ive seen you before
@@NeedlessEscape good
@@OmPrakash-pc1ec The one op I dont have is jager. Is that good?
@@NeedlessEscape yes jager is definitly good He is good for every task thx to his gun, speed and gadget If you have not played jager yet, I would surely suggest picking him, He is usefull in literally every single match, and round on every map