Anyone upgraded from SSD to Nvme?

Associate
Joined
28 May 2010
Posts
2,053
Location
Leeds
Did you notice any real difference in games and apps?

Thinking of upgrading my old 120gb Sata 3 ssd (450 read /450 write) to 2TB pcie3 NVME (3500 read /3000 write).

Currently I use the SSD just as my windows boot drive but I was thinking of getting the NVME to put windows and multiplayer games (FPS & MMO's) on
 
At this point I've upgraded all my drives from SATA to NVME. It almost never makes any noticable difference in games/apps. It makes a noticable difference when copying large files around, where it's fun to see Windows displaying the transfer rate chart in GB/s instead of MB/s.

So, unless you have a specific use-case where you need to transfer multiple GBs of sequential data, I wouldn't upgrade just for the performance. They are nice for reducing cable clutter though.
 
Hard drive to sata ssd - huge difference best upgrade anyone can do.
sata ssd to nvme - honestly wouldn't even be able to tell difference outside of file transfer speeds.

I've got 2 identical nvme drives, 1 in gen4 (os and games) and 1 in gen3 (scratch disk in my case) and in benchmarks the only difference is max transfer speed is halved on the gen3, outside of benchmarks no obvious difference though. The rest of my pc storage is sata ssd's and while file transfers are slower than nvme (still far better than hard drives), the general usability of the drives are pretty similar

Nvme might make more difference once games take notice of directstorage etc but at this moment in time no real difference in load times or anything in the games I play.
 
Did you notice any real difference in games and apps?

Thinking of upgrading my old 120gb Sata 3 ssd (450 read /450 write) to 2TB pcie3 NVME (3500 read /3000 write).

Currently I use the SSD just as my windows boot drive but I was thinking of getting the NVME to put windows and multiplayer games (FPS & MMO's) on
Games and apps: not really
Benchmarks: yes
 
SSD are lots cheaper, great temperature than NVMe. But, backup on NVMe are lots quicker to do system full backup and restored. Backing up my Linux Mint take only 2 minutes and restored it back it under 2 minutes! I don't use Windows.
 
Only downside I'm finding now is the limited number of NVMe drives you can have in a system - need to make sure my next motherboard has at least 4 slots on it...
 
Only downside I'm finding now is the limited number of NVMe drives you can have in a system - need to make sure my next motherboard has at least 4 slots on it...
Easy 'fix' for the time being is pcie to nvme adapters... some even support more than one nvme drive although you might lose a bit of speed in some cases.
 
Easy 'fix' for the time being is pcie to nvme adapters... some even support more than one nvme drive although you might lose a bit of speed in some cases.

It took me a lot of research when I first started looking into them to get my head around it, but yes - I'll probably end up with an Asus Hyper card if I need one but you're limited to two extra drives on that. I had to relearn everything I thought I knew about storage as each one requires dedicated PCI lanes, of which only 8 are available if you have a GPU. So many threads online about people filling it with 4 drives and the computer only seeing one of them, and then two if they birfurcated the lanes, but never more than that.

Mind you, I could just get a Threadripper...
 
It took me a lot of research when I first started looking into them to get my head around it, but yes - I'll probably end up with an Asus Hyper card if I need one but you're limited to two extra drives on that. I had to relearn everything I thought I knew about storage as each one requires dedicated PCI lanes, of which only 8 are available if you have a GPU. So many threads online about people filling it with 4 drives and the computer only seeing one of them, and then two if they birfurcated the lanes, but never more than that.

Mind you, I could just get a Threadripper...
Silverstone has some 'interesting' options if you're interested in playing around, you still have the pcie lane limitations of course.

Or if you're ok with losing a bit of speed and/or using sata m2 drives they have things like the below. I kind of wish I'd known about these when I did my build, might have made cable management a bit easier lol (6x2.5inch sata ssd's into the back of an o11 evo...)
 
Last edited:
It took me a lot of research when I first started looking into them to get my head around it, but yes - I'll probably end up with an Asus Hyper card if I need one but you're limited to two extra drives on that. I had to relearn everything I thought I knew about storage as each one requires dedicated PCI lanes, of which only 8 are available if you have a GPU. So many threads online about people filling it with 4 drives and the computer only seeing one of them, and then two if they birfurcated the lanes, but never more than that.

Mind you, I could just get a Threadripper...
It's definitely possible to see more than 2
I have 3 and can use all of them
And can actually add 2 more because the motherboard has a dimm.2 module
So a total of 5 of them
Though yes bifurcation would put my gpu at x8 not x16
But there's no real life issues with it at x8 anyway
Only 8 lanes available may be a limitation of your particular set up
There's cpu lanes and also chipset lanes
It does make reading your motherboard manual a lot more necessary
If you want to start using more than 1 nvme drive though
 
Silverstone has some 'interesting' options if you're interested in playing around, you still have the pcie lane limitations of course.

Or if you're ok with losing a bit of speed and/or using sata m2 drives they have things like the below. I kind of wish I'd known about these when I did my build, might have made cable management a bit easier lol (6x2.5inch sata ssd's into the back of an o11 evo...)

I've already got a single card for that actually - a silverstone one which takes on drive on a 4x slot.

I looked around a lot at the sata ssd's but they were pretty much the same price, if not more expensive, than the NVMe ones and you still had to find cables and power connections etc for them, so in the end I jsut skipped that generation and went with a WD 2TB for £129. I had a £20 voucher for paypal which knocked it down a bit too. It's the slowest drive you'll find but I'm only using it for storage and not my OS so it doesn't really matter.
 
Back
Top Bottom