NVMe M.2 SSD Gen3 vs Gen4 - real world performance?

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Soldato
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I've read that real world performance between Gen3 and Gen4 NVMe drivers differs very little and most users can barely tell any difference.

Can anyone confirm this please? If possible I'd like to save a few £ on my new build by going with a Gen3 drive rather than Gen4.

Also, what would be a reasonable size for an M.2 boot drive? It will have Windows plus a few additional applications installed. I'm leaning towards 500GB.

Thanks for advice.
 
Yeah it's even hard to notice the difference
Between a sata SSD and a nvme m2
Access times are still so fast on a 500MBs sata SSD

Where m2 nvme shine is when you have more than 1
And are copying to/from them
So if you had multiple drives then you might see a difference
Between gen3 and gen4
But for 1 drive yeah gen3 is fine if it's cheaper
And 500gb or 1tb
1tb are usually faster if you ever intended adding a second drive
And copying stuff to/from them a lot
 
Roll said:
I've read that real world performance between Gen3 and Gen4 NVMe drivers differs very little and most users can barely tell any difference.
Click to expand...

Are you 'most users'? NVME drives shine when used hard - lots of reads and lots of writes. Do you work with large videos? Large databases? If not, you're not going to see much if any improvement over a SSD.

One of the major techtubers did a blind test with NVME vs SSD vs something else and most people guessed wrong when asked to say which was which.
 

Roll said:
Also, what would be a reasonable size for an M.2 boot drive? It will have Windows plus a few additional applications installed. I'm leaning towards 500GB.
Click to expand...
Don't waste very limited M.2 slots for small drives, unless that's all the (SSD) space you're going to need.

While in most games there's only little difference between SATA and NVMe SSDs, not all are coded for year stick and stone tech PCs and also future DirectStorage demands NVMe.
Also SATA SSDs aren't really cheaper per GB than NVMe SSDs.
 
@Quartz yeah doesn't surprise me lot of people couldn't
Tell the difference
If I boot off my old 850 Evo ssd
Doesn't feel any different from my mp510 nvme
Only once I start moving a load of files around does it become apparent

Obviously if price per GB is comparable
Then get the newer generation technology
As always though everything comes down to how much cash you have
And while it's nice to have
Not everyone can afford or even need the latest and greatest stuff
I bet most users don't really push what they have
Especially storage wise
As long as you have any type of solid state drive is the main thing
Drives me crazy fixing someone's pc with mechanical drives
 
Thanks all, much appreciated.

Will probably go for a 500GB Gen3 NVMe drive to keep the costs down and reuse a SATA SSD I already have for general storage.
 
Those wd blue drives are very good value.
I'd say also go for 500gb or 1tb.
I get by fine with a 240gb sys drive but do have to shuffle stuff around to my bigger 1 tb media drive sometimes. I think if I were starting from scratch I'd go for a 1tb sys drive.
 
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