**The Impact of Sequential Read and Write Performance**

In recent years, sequential read and write performance has become an increasingly important consideration when it comes to choosing storage solutions for workstations. However, this is not necessarily relevant for every workflow, as many applications now focus on working with smaller files and random read and write operations.

For those workflows that do rely heavily on sequential read and write performance, such as copying or working with large files, a drive with excellent sequential performance can make all the difference. This is where drives like the ones I've been testing come in - they offer speeds of up to 26,000 megabytes per second using Crystal Disc Mark.

However, it's essential to note that these speeds are not always consistent and can vary depending on various factors, such as the type of workload being performed. In my recent tests, I've seen a wide range of results, from as low as 16,000 megabytes per second to over 26,000 megabytes per second.

**The Importance of Drive Variability**

When working with drives at these speeds, it's crucial to consider the variability in performance that you can expect. This means understanding that the speed of your drive may vary depending on a range of factors, including the type of workload being performed and the other drives in the system.

For example, if you're using a drive for video files, but another drive is much slower, the overall system speed will be limited by the slower drive. In contrast, if all the drives are identical and perform at the same level, the overall system speed can benefit from their combined performance.

**Raid Stripes: A Mythic Performance Benefit**

One common myth that I've encountered is that combining multiple drives in a raid stripe provides a significant performance benefit. However, this is not always the case, especially when working with large files and random read and write operations.

In fact, setting up a raid stripe can often actually reduce your random read and write performance, as the system has to manage the data across multiple drives more efficiently. This means that if you're looking for speed benefits, you may be better off sticking with individual drives rather than trying to combine them in a raid stripe.

**PCIe Cards: The Key to Unlocking High-Speed Performance**

To take full advantage of high-speed storage solutions like these, you need a specific piece of hardware - a 16-lane PCIe slot on your motherboard. This allows the four drives to be split into separate four-lane slots, providing the necessary bandwidth for each drive to operate at its best.

Without this level of support, it's impossible to unlock the full potential of high-speed storage solutions like these. I've seen this firsthand in my own system, where a 4-in-1 PCIe card allows me to install four drives and achieve speeds of over 26,000 megabytes per second using Crystal Disc Mark.

**Real-World Applications**

So what kind of applications can benefit from high-speed storage solutions like these? In my case, I've found that it's particularly useful for working with large files, such as video footage. By having a drive that can read and write at speeds of over 26,000 megabytes per second, I have the headroom to handle even the most demanding workloads.

Of course, this level of performance is not necessary for every application or workflow. However, for those who need it, high-speed storage solutions like these offer a significant advantage. And with prices starting at around $60-70 for a 4-in-1 PCIe card and individual drives often selling for under $100, they're an affordable way to unlock the potential of your system.

**The Future of Storage**

As we move forward, it's likely that storage solutions will continue to evolve and improve. Already, we've seen significant advancements in the speed and capacity of SSDs, and it's not hard to imagine that we'll see even more exciting developments in the years to come.

For now, though, I'm just happy to be playing with these cutting-edge storage solutions and pushing them to their limits. Whether you're a professional artist or a serious gamer, there's no denying the potential of high-speed storage to transform your workflow and unlock new levels of performance.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlast year I did a video where I created a super fast SSD using this 4 nvme Drive carrier card in my uh think station here and I loaded it up with four 2 tbte Samsung ssds uh which are PCI Express Generation 4 uh which my computer does support however if you did watch that video you might remember that I had a slight issue with it because although this card was detecting the drives in the Bios as being pcie 4speed when I booted into Windows everything ran at PCI Express 3 and I still got some pretty incredible speeds as you can see here from my initial disc test with sequential performance nearing 15,000 megabytes per second on read and just over 13,000 megabytes per second on right and In fairness I was pretty happy with that but recently I was doing some maintenance on my think station here and I realized that I hadn't done a bios firmware update since the day I bought it and there's been like 10 generations of BIOS since then or something crazy I was just going through the release notes and I happen to notice a comment about PCI Express 4 devices only running at PCI Express 3 speeds so I thought actually yeah I need to do the BIOS update and then retest this drive which I've just done and the results are um pretty amazing actually let me show you so we're hitting almost 22,000 megabytes per second on read and almost 25,000 megabytes per second on right I mean that is just unbelievable SSD performance suffice it to say I'm pretty happy with those results even though they probably won't materially make any difference to me in real world usage and before you get too excited and you rush off to do this for yourself there are some caveats that we do need to just um cover off before I get assassinated in the comments section first of all I've set this up as a raid stripe so I'm going for allout performance I'm not interested in data redundancy I have separate backup systems I've got a NAS drive and very thorough backup processes so I don't need that what I want is a really fast working area for working with video files and video files tend to be large so sequential read and WR performance actually does make a big difference to this now not every workflow revolves around sequential read and write performance really this is all down to when you are copying or working with large files and quite often you find that actually what you're doing is working with lots of smaller files and then random read and write becomes more relevant to you and combining these Drives together in a raid stripe is not going to give you any performance benefit for that side of things so don't rush out there to do this and assume that you're going to get uh speed benefits across the board because you won't and in actual fact setting up a raid strike probably actually slightly reduces your random read and write performance so for me this drive is all about working with large files so that sequential performance is excellent here's another caveat though when you're working with drives at these kind of speeds what you'll find is the variability in the speeds that you get and the performance you get is actually quite large you can actually see this if we compare the results that we got with this recent test and the results I did last year and you'll see on some of the tests it's actually slower it's not if I run the test multiple times uh you get a great Variety in result results when it comes to sequential performance I've seen tests run as low as 16,000 megabytes per second and as high as 26,000 megabytes per second using Crystal disc Mark and this particular sequential test is very much presenting an ideal case scenario so just bear that in mind the performance that you actually get will be variable consider also that uh reading and writing to the dis is great if uh you're just working with video files on that drive uh but if you're doing a copy to another Drive drive and the other Drive is much slower and you're copying from or copying to then obviously your speed will be limited by the other Drive here's another caveat for you and that is that in order to use a card like this where you're putting four nvme drives onto one PCI Express card you need to have a 16 Lane slot available on your motherboard not only do you need that 16 Lane slot you need to be able to bate it in other words you need to be able to split that slot into four separate four lane slots otherwise what will happen is you'll plug the card in and you'll only see one of the drives not all four so it very much depends on your workflow and the type of machine you've got as to whether or not this information is of much use to you I just think it's fascinating to see how fast you can go you know the Peak Performance of these drives is just mindblowing compared to just a few years ago really uh pretty amazing and not massively expensive to achieve either uh these four-in-one carrier cards so I'm using an Asus model here um we also have identical p620 Lenovo think stations in our web studio and for those we bought a 4-in-1 carrier card from sabron I'll put links to both of those in the description um both of them were relatively cheap I think around 60 70 or dollars and you can often get good deals on the ssds as well so with the four two terb drives that I've installed on this card I end up with an 8 tbte super fast SS D now it's also fair to say that I don't need a drive that runs this fast I've done it simply because I'm a bit of a geek and I like playing with these things and I just wanted to see what was possible and at the end of the day I was going to buy those drives anyway because I wanted 8 tabt of storage so to have it running as fast as it does is great it means I got Headroom I've got future proofing and anything I throw at this system it can handle it but let's be realistic here doubling the speed of your SSD at this level is not going to give you double the performance you may not even notice any difference at all because we've got the laws of diminishing returns here uh once an SSD gets Beyond a certain speed you can't work any faster and you maybe won't notice much difference but hey it's fun to do these things it's fun to have the bragging rights and and do the tests I was going to buy the drives anyway so why not and I thought it would be interesting to share it um and it's what should have happened last year when I did the video this is the kind of performance I was expecting I've done my calculations in advance and I was kind of expecting it to be this speed so it was a little bit of a let down when I I didn't get up to these numbers as always I look forward to reading your comments and uh I'll see you again soon for some more geeklast year I did a video where I created a super fast SSD using this 4 nvme Drive carrier card in my uh think station here and I loaded it up with four 2 tbte Samsung ssds uh which are PCI Express Generation 4 uh which my computer does support however if you did watch that video you might remember that I had a slight issue with it because although this card was detecting the drives in the Bios as being pcie 4speed when I booted into Windows everything ran at PCI Express 3 and I still got some pretty incredible speeds as you can see here from my initial disc test with sequential performance nearing 15,000 megabytes per second on read and just over 13,000 megabytes per second on right and In fairness I was pretty happy with that but recently I was doing some maintenance on my think station here and I realized that I hadn't done a bios firmware update since the day I bought it and there's been like 10 generations of BIOS since then or something crazy I was just going through the release notes and I happen to notice a comment about PCI Express 4 devices only running at PCI Express 3 speeds so I thought actually yeah I need to do the BIOS update and then retest this drive which I've just done and the results are um pretty amazing actually let me show you so we're hitting almost 22,000 megabytes per second on read and almost 25,000 megabytes per second on right I mean that is just unbelievable SSD performance suffice it to say I'm pretty happy with those results even though they probably won't materially make any difference to me in real world usage and before you get too excited and you rush off to do this for yourself there are some caveats that we do need to just um cover off before I get assassinated in the comments section first of all I've set this up as a raid stripe so I'm going for allout performance I'm not interested in data redundancy I have separate backup systems I've got a NAS drive and very thorough backup processes so I don't need that what I want is a really fast working area for working with video files and video files tend to be large so sequential read and WR performance actually does make a big difference to this now not every workflow revolves around sequential read and write performance really this is all down to when you are copying or working with large files and quite often you find that actually what you're doing is working with lots of smaller files and then random read and write becomes more relevant to you and combining these Drives together in a raid stripe is not going to give you any performance benefit for that side of things so don't rush out there to do this and assume that you're going to get uh speed benefits across the board because you won't and in actual fact setting up a raid strike probably actually slightly reduces your random read and write performance so for me this drive is all about working with large files so that sequential performance is excellent here's another caveat though when you're working with drives at these kind of speeds what you'll find is the variability in the speeds that you get and the performance you get is actually quite large you can actually see this if we compare the results that we got with this recent test and the results I did last year and you'll see on some of the tests it's actually slower it's not if I run the test multiple times uh you get a great Variety in result results when it comes to sequential performance I've seen tests run as low as 16,000 megabytes per second and as high as 26,000 megabytes per second using Crystal disc Mark and this particular sequential test is very much presenting an ideal case scenario so just bear that in mind the performance that you actually get will be variable consider also that uh reading and writing to the dis is great if uh you're just working with video files on that drive uh but if you're doing a copy to another Drive drive and the other Drive is much slower and you're copying from or copying to then obviously your speed will be limited by the other Drive here's another caveat for you and that is that in order to use a card like this where you're putting four nvme drives onto one PCI Express card you need to have a 16 Lane slot available on your motherboard not only do you need that 16 Lane slot you need to be able to bate it in other words you need to be able to split that slot into four separate four lane slots otherwise what will happen is you'll plug the card in and you'll only see one of the drives not all four so it very much depends on your workflow and the type of machine you've got as to whether or not this information is of much use to you I just think it's fascinating to see how fast you can go you know the Peak Performance of these drives is just mindblowing compared to just a few years ago really uh pretty amazing and not massively expensive to achieve either uh these four-in-one carrier cards so I'm using an Asus model here um we also have identical p620 Lenovo think stations in our web studio and for those we bought a 4-in-1 carrier card from sabron I'll put links to both of those in the description um both of them were relatively cheap I think around 60 70 or dollars and you can often get good deals on the ssds as well so with the four two terb drives that I've installed on this card I end up with an 8 tbte super fast SS D now it's also fair to say that I don't need a drive that runs this fast I've done it simply because I'm a bit of a geek and I like playing with these things and I just wanted to see what was possible and at the end of the day I was going to buy those drives anyway because I wanted 8 tabt of storage so to have it running as fast as it does is great it means I got Headroom I've got future proofing and anything I throw at this system it can handle it but let's be realistic here doubling the speed of your SSD at this level is not going to give you double the performance you may not even notice any difference at all because we've got the laws of diminishing returns here uh once an SSD gets Beyond a certain speed you can't work any faster and you maybe won't notice much difference but hey it's fun to do these things it's fun to have the bragging rights and and do the tests I was going to buy the drives anyway so why not and I thought it would be interesting to share it um and it's what should have happened last year when I did the video this is the kind of performance I was expecting I've done my calculations in advance and I was kind of expecting it to be this speed so it was a little bit of a let down when I I didn't get up to these numbers as always I look forward to reading your comments and uh I'll see you again soon for some more geek\n"