Comparing NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 drives with RAM read/write speeds helps understand performance differences.
Comparing NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 drives with RAM read/write speeds helps understand performance differences.
Seeking details about how fast 2666mhz ECC memory performs compared to the quickest Gen4 NVMe drives for CAE/CAD applications. The goal is to run large simulations efficiently, ideally using in-core operations on RAM to avoid costly memory bottlenecks. At 128GB or more, this becomes challenging and may not be supported by all chipsets. Could adding a 500GB Gen4 NVMe SSD to a 64/128GB system maintain reasonable performance without major slowdowns?
This depends on how demanding the read/write tasks are. You can anticipate roughly a magnitude difference in performance, though it might still suffice for your requirements. DDR4 2666MHz offers a maximum transfer speed of around 21GB/s as shown here, doubling to over 80GB/s in quad channel setups. In real-world use it could be slightly slower based on your writing tasks, but it remains quite fast. Have you thought about using a cloud server? It could reduce costs.
Cloud solutions are definitely worth exploring, though I usually rely on an air gap due to some software problems. Perhaps the best way to confirm is by testing performance under various setups. With gen5 rolling out soon, I wonder if the gap will shrink significantly over time? Just keep in mind the challenge of maintaining an SSD under heavy read/write demands.
Yes, unfortunately. If you were to buy from a boutique system builder chances are they'd offer to run these tests for you so you can get the optimal configuration, though of course that comes with a considerable price premium compared to building it yourself. No, pcie4 or even 3 isn't a bottleneck in this case. The ssds themselves can only go so fast. There's a reason ram is more expensive The closest you can get would be an NVME RAID configuration with 4 or more drives but expansion cards that allow that are quite expensive and you'd probably end up in a similar price range as just getting 128GB of ram (though of course you'd end up with more storage). Here's an idea - you could order a couple of high end SSDs and put them in RAID through the motherboard (most high end motherboard allow this for at least 2 NVME drives as far as I know) and 128GB of RAM; run your tests and return the extra RAM or the SSDs depending on the results.