Hi @Ranty79,
I did some research and found a german article where a guy build up his desktop system with up to 3 NVME Kingston KC3000 and tested it. Luckily he did some screenshots from Crystal Diskmark so we can see the difference in here 😉
Here we can see the standard configuration for 1 single drive. The performance seems to be o.k. to me.
This is the configuration build of a RAID0 with 2 drives. As we can see the sequential read and write performance will raise up, but in the same way the random read and write performance will drop.
At least he build up a RAID0 configuration with 3 drives of the same NVME type to see how they will perform together. We see an another performance increase in sequential read and write performance and nearly a little increase in random read and write performance compared to the 2 drive build, but never reaches the performance of a single drive. So what does this mean to us in practical use ? Let's keep it as simple as my little brain can handle it. From my knowledge the data on drives are written one by one to the drive and the space ( cell / sektor ) which is used for the datapackage is coordinated by the controler of the NVME. So large files will be written in one flow to their neighbour cells / sektors ( like cars where driven onto a car ferry ). Smaller files will be written into the next, fresh cell which has not been used often ( chaotic system like a chess board in half of the game where some fields are occupied with figures and some are empty ). When we keep this in mind ( from my understanding ) the sequential read is the performance of big, large files read from the drive ( like you empty the car ferry ) and the the random read is for our smaller files ( in my example the chess board where the figures must be picked one by one from the board and have to jump over the empty spaces ). Hopefully you can follow my stupid comparsions 😂
So what does this mean to practical use to me ? As long as I'm handling large files like ISO images, single backup files, movies, very large pictures or large compressed containers like *.ZIP or *.RAR archieves etc. they where stored ( let's say ) sequential. When it comes to smaller files like programms often uses multiple small information data like *.INI, *.DLL, *.INF and stuff like that, they where stored ( let's call it ) randomly on the drive.
If I'm right in my thoughts I personally would prefer a NVME drive with good IOPS performance in 4K random read and write instead of the ( good marketing strategic ) sequential max read and write speeds. I my theory that must bring up a better boost and performance to the system when you handle most time small files ( like Windows itself or games mostly do ). And then there's an other big point in newer technologies which uses part of the system RAM to coordinate the data to the NVME instead of a separate DRAM on the drive itself. There are some interesting articles about that. That's the reason why I'm not pretty sure if I will upgrade my system with a WD black SN850X ( with DRAM ) or try to test out a Lexar NM790 ( without DRAM ) meanwhile the latest news are praising YMTC for their new memory chips and technology.
But I think this story goes to deep now and if anyone is interested in this, he can find some interesting articles about that stuff ( or can write me a PM to discuss a bit of that ) 😉
Link to the article of the RAID0 test ( sadly in german, but hopefully it can be translated ) where the screenshots are from.
At least, this is only my understanding how this all works and like I said before - if I'm wrong in my thoughts or have a point missing - please feel free to correct me. Thank you
