Does the speed of ssd matter?

gooober

gooober

gooober

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Hey all so iam looking into a new ssd, been researching it but can't seem to find the awnser. If you buy a ssd with a write speed of around 2000mbs, would you notice any difference between that and a 3500mbs. Obviously it's faster but in reality is there much difference between them when it comes to gaming ? Or will you only notice it through editing etc? I primarily game so the cheapest is like £95ish but the cheapest 3500 is like 120+.. so for a gamer is it worth the extra money? Thanks
 
For gaming there is basically no difference.

There are practical advantages to m.2 based drives over SATA though and cost is almost on par per GB.
 
It's definitely a case of diminishing returns, but it's easy to get your fingers burnt.

If you go too cheap, risk is you end up with something with either no ddr cache or a small cache. That means it can only hit advertised speeds for a short time.

The sweet spot for value/performance tends to be the Sabrent Rocket (avoid the Q version), or something that uses the same design.

A fast pcie 3.0 is plenty for games - devs aren't taking advantage of pcie 4.0 yet.
 
Unless moving loads of data, you won't notice difference. At least not as much as you would changing the HDD for a SSD.
 
gooober said:
Hey all so iam looking into a new ssd, been researching it but can't seem to find the awnser. If you buy a ssd with a write speed of around 2000mbs, would you notice any difference between that and a 3500mbs. Obviously it's faster but in reality is there much difference between them when it comes to gaming ? Or will you only notice it through editing etc? I primarily game so the cheapest is like £95ish but the cheapest 3500 is like 120+.. so for a gamer is it worth the extra money? Thanks
Click to expand...


For gaming the faster the SSD the faster load times, while 2000mbps and 3500mbps might get a second or two faster load times so depends if that matters to you.
 
Off the back of that hardware unboxed review I bought a FireCuda 520, and it’s a *lot* faster than my old 660p was for loading cyberpunk, and the difference is noticeable in windows.

As to whether it was worth paying £300 vs £200 to get PCIe 4... probably not. Just depends on your priorities.
 
butter30 said:
For gaming the faster the SSD the faster load times, while 2000mbps and 3500mbps might get a second or two faster load times so depends if that matters to you.
Click to expand...
Average game doesn't even get more than couple second difference when changing from SATA to NVME SSD.
Because of their loading simply consisting of so many things besides actual read of data from drive.
Hence in average game that theoretical speed difference between 2000 MBps and 3500 MBps is lot less significant than how read pattern fits to controller's optimizing.
For example Kingston A2000 and WD Blue SN550 do very well despite of being basic/entry level NVMe drives.

Only games with really big whole file sequential reads benefit from that maximal sequential benchmark.
But even those games have also good amount of processing of that data in initializing game state etc and also random type reads of small files.
And in random 4K reads even the fastest NVMe isn't dramatically faster over good SATA SSD.
Though basic NVMe drives don't really cost more than SATA SSDs making them good starting level choise for all usual budgets.

And if game code and file structure would be changed for loading time to become affected only by sequential read speed, even PCIe v3 NVMe could still fill RAM and VRAM usage of most games in half dozen seconds.
I mean with NVidia skimping in new cards typical amount of VRAM is still 8GB.
And very few game uses even that much of RAM, but more like 5GB.


PS. Even prehistoric floppy drive would be faster than those millibit drives.
 
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