980 Pro vs 860 EVO - Who wins plotting?

[Fuzeguy]

Just moved all ext. HD USB plots from a TR plotter to a Ryzen 3600 w/32GB memory for farming. Had a few TBs of space to fill. As an experiement, took a NEW Samsung 860 Pro 1tb, updated the firmware, and replaced the primary B550 MB OS nvme (PCI-E 4.0) with it, and put an old, old 860 EVO 500GB on a spare SATA MB connection. Started a plot on each. Each 9000 memory, 8 threads and started same time (just 2 min apart). Surely the 980 Pro will win against an old SATA ssd, right?

WRONG! EVO 5 hrs 25 min; 980 5 hrs 46 min. How could this be? Nvme against SATA and SATA wins!?!?

What I did notice, and to the 980s favor, was that it was barely doing anything, active time was a few % normally, where the EVO was a 30-40–50-70-80% pretty much always. So the 980 can do much more simultaneously. But it still astounds me that the SATA did BETTER time than the 980 single plot?

Any ideas? Am I CPU bound or ???

[jazsimps]

I recently purchased one… 980pro 1TB and already had two… 970evo plus 2TB onsite. My experience using both M1 air and mini is that phase 1 finishes noticeably faster with 980pro. The 980pro is noticeably faster but may not be worth the recent price increase due to increase demand IMO.

Unfortunately, my two M1s are limited by 16RAM causing a bottle neck till next upgrade in the Fall/Spring hopefully.

I’m utilizing the following two enclosures below:

• Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 to m.2 NVMe SSD tool-free
• OWC Envoy Express Thunderbolt™ 3 NVMe M.2 SSD

I read w/n the ChiaForum somewhere a strategy of position/setting as follows:

• Temp Directory #1 (for the semi-fast SSD)
• Temp Directory #2 (for fastest SSD)
• Final Directory

I haven’t tested out this strategy but planning to later this week. I’m interested too to hear others feedback on it.