Need advice on CPU and SSD

Posted by Burnedice25@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 6 comments

Hey all,

Been building PCs for as long as I can remember and I'm finally treating myself so a really good new PC after years of scraping by with whatever cheap hardware I could find on discount (Nothing wrong with that BTW, it's half the fun.)

Anyway, I got most of the parts figured out just hoping someone can answer a few questions:

1) I know Gen V M.2s are considered a waste for most use cases, however my job as a photographer requires me to go through and edit 1000s of photos a week, and saving fractions of a second between clicking "next" to see the next image would save like an hour or 2 every week. Since all these photos are stored next to each other on the disk, and I am reading them in order, is that a "sequential read" and would I see the benefit of a Gen V drive?

2) 9700x vs 9800x3D vs 9900x.... The way I see it, all of these would be absolutely fine for gaming (Pairing with a 5070Ti), which would I see the best Lightroom Performance / Single Thread performance? I know the 9900X is a dual die chip and that could hurt it in single core tasks, but I've also heard X3D chips sacrifice single thread performance.

Thanks for reading!

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BaronB@reddit

"Sequential" reads for an SSD don't really mean the thing you might think it means.

On an old HDD, if you write a single file it's going to be written down continuously in a long line onto the platter assuming there's space for it. And if you write a lot of files down one after another, each one is going to end up one after the other in a long line. Additionally, if you write a single file over and over, assuming the file doesn't need more space than is available in the slot it's already in, it'll very likely be written over on the same spot on the disc each time.

This is not how SSDs work. For a single file on an SSD is intestinally written randomly across the physical storage. This is intentional and part of how SSDs can read and write as fast as they can, and also done for wear reasons. If you write multiple files in a row, more than likely they're actually going to be writing to the SSD in parallel, and every file is randomly splattered across the drive. If you rewrite an existing file, it's not going to write over the existing data, it's going to randomly splatter it elsewhere and simply forget what the data that is still being stored was supposed to be. It'll only start overwriting parts of the drive that were previously written to but not longer "part of a file" if it's randomly chosen when writing a new file.

The reason they work this way is because each cell used to store data on an SSD has a limited lifespan. It can only be written to a certain number of times before it'll no longer be able to hold data. So SSDs intentionally spread out where it writes data to so that it's roughly an even amount of wear. Obviously some files will be written and those parts of the drive will never be written to again... except that's not entirely true either as SSDs will occasionally re-write data to refresh it since SSDs do actually slowly loose data. If you leave an SSD in a drawer unpowered for a few months or more likely years for modern SSDs, the data will start to disappear. This is called "bit rot".

The other reason for this is you can think of SSDs as a massive number of separate tiny storage devices that individually have not gotten any faster or slower at reading or writing data than they were a decade or two again. What we've gotten better at is reading or writing to a lot of them all at once. As a very basic analogy, imagine you have a giant warehouse of file boxes. But for bureaucratic reasons, each box can only hold a single page of paper, the people working in the warehouse can only move a single box at a time, and each isle of shelves can only have a single person working them at a time.

SSDs are kind of like that. So if you want to store or read a page of data, you're limited to how fast a single working can run down a isle and get or store a single box. So to store an entire book, it's actually faster to have as many workers as you have pages and for each one of them run that one box to their own isle.

And that's basically what each generation of SSD does. They add more and more "isles" to the "warehouse" with more and more "workers". But the rules have not changed and each isle can only ever have one worker in it, so that's the only way to make it faster.

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BaronB@reddit

So, that's a long winded way to say, "sequential" reads for SSDs are more about having a lot of data lined up for an SSD to write or read at once. You really only ever see the max speeds from SSDs when they're writing a single file large enough to allow for it to be able to fully utilize it's parallel write or read speeds.

Lots of small files in a row is better than single small files one after the other. But that still won't be as fast as a single large file.

So the reason why Gen 5 SSDs are considered a waste, even for most content creators, is unless you're writing files that are many tens or hundreds of GB in size, it won't be measurably faster than a Gen 4 SSD. Most of the time when saving files to disk for things like photography you're going to be limited by how fast the CPU is able to apply whatever modifications you're making, and then compressing those files. The actual writes may be nearly instantaneous.

Cer_Visia@reddit

In practice, most of the time when loading an image is not taken by the transfer from the drive, but by looking up the file, decoding the data, and lots of user interface stuff.

Look at the typical size of one of your photos, how many MB? Then consider that the theoretical transfer speed of a Gen4 SSD is 7000 MB/s, and that Gen5 increases this to 14000 MB/s.
Assuming a file size of 150 MB, it would be transferred in one fiftieth of a second on Gen4, and in the best case, going to Gen5 would reduce the time by one one hundreth of a second. Anything less than one tenth of a second is not really be noticeable.

Codys_friend@reddit

This guy focuses on reviewing parts for creator builds.

These are his recent recommendations for cpu's: https://youtu.be/JN_oOBewKCQ?si=oCXRX9nav6uABS2g https://youtu.be/N7n80fYAA_A?si=F1YUNXlUfSfePLc9

Here he discusses various parts in a pc, including cpu's, gpu's, and ssd's: https://youtu.be/6X9DpE4PjME?si=Mc7-TRlmwFvkaqao

These are a few of his ssd review videos: https://youtu.be/3f9hEn5_QZw?si=sSLSUriIahmKsAqj https://youtu.be/vkJdO2mxQIU?si=KdbnA_qNILROTbfj

I hope these help.

I find it fascinating that he talks about how the max write speed of SSDs don't really matter since that's not a real use case.

But he then talks up the PCMark consistency test as being a true show for how good a drive is... but that's also an entirely unrealistic use case. That test is really about finding out how long a drive can maintain it's max write speed when filled up multiple times over with a continuous stream of file writes.

The PCMark test has benchmarks that test use cases with a handful of actual applications. But no one shows that data... because it stopped actually showing any differences between drives years ago. And it stopped showing any differences because there stopped being any.

pigletmonster@reddit

A gen 4 or a gen 5 drive will definitely improve your performance. Although the difference will be small or unnoticable between 4 and 5. X3d cpus rarely provide any benefit outside of gaming, so you will see better work related performance with a ryzen 9 non-x3d over a ryzen 7 x3d.