BUILT FOR STORAGE
THERE WEREN’T ANY nasty surprises for us here, and the build process went without a hitch. We were momentarily confused by the lack of a securing post on the main M.2 slot, but realizing we could borrow the one from the unused bottom slot, it didn’t hold us back for long. You could argue that you don’t need it at all, as the heatspreader holds it securely, but as our machines get couriered from the photo studio back to the office for testing, we prefer to overprovision, as opposed to finding our components rattling around later on.
Getting up and running with StoreMI wasn’t as straightforward. After installing Win 10 on the Samsung 970 Evo, and downloading the drivers, we proceeded to completely mess up the install of StoreMI. We clicked the wrong checkbox, and instead of producing a superfast hard drive, we ended up with a machine that wouldn’t boot. Frustration set in as we couldn’t then get Windows to see any drives, but after checking out the FAQ at www. enmotus.com/amd, we managed to grab the drivers, and wipe the drives with DiskPart.
On the second attempt, we installed Win 10 to the hard drive, then installed StoreMI so the SSD was used to speed up that installation. This time it worked without a problem, so we could get on with testing the performance of the drive tech and the rest of the machine. The performance garnered from this build was exactly what we expected in terms of the games suite and Cinebench score—this is a decent mainstream machine and no mistake. The fact that the zero-point we use for Build It is a previous-generation Ryzen 5 1600 means that the figures really speak for themselves.
How about StoreMI? It’s worth noting that a tiered drive system like this takes a while to kick in, and our performance metrics initially showed read performance more akin to what we’d expect from a spinning hard drive (around 180MB/s for sequential reads), albeit with PCIe NVMe write speeds. A few tests down the line, though, and the same benchmark produced the Samsung 970 Evo’s normal read performance—the incredible read figures that you can see in the benchmarks below.
While it would be easy to see this as a problem for StoreMI as a technology, it’s not as simple as that, especially when it comes to applications you use a lot. It performs exactly as you need it to where it counts. Essentially, if you use a lot of different apps, but rarely, a dedicated, large NVMe is definitely a better deal, but for a more focused selection of apps and games, StoreMI works well.