That would give me more total space and more performance. If I was willing to spend more money, I could have larger capacity, PCIe 4.0 drives in all three M.2 slots. I’ll also play around with running SQL Server backups to the C: drive, since it can do about 4,900MB/sec of sequential write performance.
C: Samsung 980 PRO – OS, SQL Server binaries, system databases (except tempdb).
I’ll be running at least two named instances of SQL Server, with my various database files deliberately spread out across these drives.
The moral of the story is that you should consult your motherboard manual to avoid making mistakes like this! What Are You Doing With All Those Drives? If you try to put something in every PCIe slot, every M.2 slot, and every SATA port, you will have probably have some issues. Many motherboards and chipsets have conflicts like this as you add more devices to your system. That is what I did, which was quick and easy. The other solution would be to connect my two SATA drives to different SATA ports that did not share bandwidth with the 3rd PCIe slot. The problem with that is that it puts the Intel 900P too close to the Radeon 5700XT video card, which would reduce the effectiveness of the cooling fans on the video card. One would be to move the Intel 900P from the third PCIe slot to the second PCIe slot. Once I realized this, I had two ways to fix the issue. This smaller capacity SKU has lower write performance than the 1TB or upcoming 2TB models. Keep in mind that this is only the 500GB size of the Samsung 980 PRO. The Samsung 980 PRO is my boot drive, and it is in the M.2 slot closest to the CPU. That high queue depth makes NAND storage look better. Here they are from the fastest to the slowest. I did some quick and dirty I/O testing of these six drives with CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0.
Finally, the Intel Optane SSD is using the Intel NVMe driver version 5.1 Some Quick Comparative CrystalDiskMark Results in 2020 Samsung has not released an NVMe driver for the Samsung 980 PRO, and I don’t think they are planning on it. The Samsung 980 PRO is using the Microsoft NVMe driver, while the Samsung 970 EVO Plus drives are using the Samsung NVMe driver version 3.3.