I am building a new computer with the goal of downloading very large files and
transferring them to other attached storage drives as quick as possible.
The motherboard has four m.2 slots Pci 4.0 x4, 1st M.2 is from CPU the other three are from Z790 chipset.
To keep potential hardware resource contention at a minimum I was thinking of putting the dedicated downloads drive on the first M2 slot. The other M.2 slots will have OS drive(Win11) and 3rd NvME. This machine will also have some large spinning sata attached drives.
Is this logic concerning drive placements correct to accomplish the quickest possible file transfers?
thanks for both of the replies.
I use a downloads drive as part of my workflow process.
I review the file off the downloads drive and decide if it will be kept.
If kept it goes to the spinners and I rarely delete anything on them to keep
fragmentation of the large files to a minimum.
So the way file transfers (including downloads) work these days is, the file is read into a buffer in RAM. Once the content of the buffer reaches a certain threshold, for example 4k (NTFS) or 512k (ZFS default), it gets sent to the drive to be written down. The buffer then continues filling up until the next time enough data is available. If the buffer fills up faster than the drive can write out, it’ll just keep filling up until the drive is ready or the buffer limit is reached (meaning, you’re starting to run out of RAM).
Unless you constantly download huge files over a 40GbE connection, you could save directly to spinning rust and it wouldn’t make any difference.
I download a lot of large (20+GB) files to my NAS over my gigabit fibre internet, and that stores directly to a ZFS pool of Toshiba N300s (NAS HDDs). My maximum write speed to this pool is about 400MB/s, which is slower than a single SATA SSD (500MB/s). Even so, my downloads never come close to saturating the pool, because 400MB/s is 3.2Gbit/s, more than three times as fast as my internet connection. If I’m copying files over my home network, which is 10GbE, the pool is a bottleneck, but because my NAS has 32GB of RAM, I still rarely encounter slowdowns, because I’d have to be transferring files about 40GB big before I start to run out of RAM to buffer writes in. The NAS will accept data at the speed of the connection, and the drives will write it out as quickly as they can in the background.
Even low end M.2 drives will handle 2GB/s nowadays, which is 16Gbit/s. Unless you have a very serious indeed internet connection or transfer files on your home 20GbE network, you don’t need to worry. Each one of your drives can keep up. And if your use case is similar to mine, even a single HDD (about 300MB/s=2.4Gbit/s) can probably keep up with your network. If you really want to boost your storage speed, you’re usually best off investing in more RAM. More RAM means more space for your write buffer, and also that more data can be kept in your read buffer (aka cache, the thing that makes files you’ve recently used open much faster the next time).
Wow thank you everyone for all the helpful replies. The new computer M.2 slots are all pci4.0 x4 and I had already purchased 64gb mem for the build. Because of your explanations I feel more confident that I was overthinking and it won’t matter what slots I choose to use for any of the Nvme drives.