Sata 3 SSD to NVMe SSD Worth It?

Dominic-Toretto

Dominic-Toretto

Dominic-Toretto

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I am currently running a samsung evo 512gb ssd, I am going to be upgrading my system shortly. Is NVMe worth it, are the performance benefits tangible in the real world or all theoretical? My main usage is gaming and browsing the web.
 
Your Samsung Evo 512 SSD is limited to 660M/B by the sata 3 interface speed. You probably have benched it yourself with CrystalDisk, or the like so you'll know better than me how well it goes (guessing 500 to 550M/B?)

If your upgrade system has PCIe 4.0 some of the latest gen 4 NVMe m.2 ssds should easily manage 5500M/B transfer rates ( x10 what you have now) and beyond ( Sure I saw some claiming 7000 M/B + somewhere last week)

Real world, windows bootup is going to be seconds. Game load up /level loading is going to be noticeably better.

Speculative future performance in a year or two when Microsoft Direct storage API is supported ... may be very worth it (or not)
 
Do you need more SSD storage? It might be helpful to post your system build and monitor, you need it to be balanced and if NVME is meaning your losing out on performance elsewhere then it isn’t worth it at all.

In my experience, the difference between going SATA to NVME are marginal when using current methods for loading windows/games. You’ll probally not notice a difference in blind AB testing. It’s nothing like going from spinning rust to SSD.

A NVME drive absolutely destroys a SATA drive in terms of raw throughput but in reality the CPU can’t do much with it because it can’t do any kind of meaningful processing of that data any faster. Game and windows load times are bottlenecked by other parts of the system in the way they are done now.

That said, that could change in the future with the new direct storage APIs. The issue is that developers need to adopt it and people need to put their games on NVME, it’s going to take time.

If I building up a new PC, needed more storage and it wasn’t taking money away from CPU/GPU/RAM then I would buy a PCIE gen 4 SSD for the reason mentioned above.

But I wouldn’t go out of my way to replace any existing drives for the sake of upgrading because you’ll struggle to notice the difference between the two.

If money isnt abundant and it was the difference between getting a 60 series GPU or a 70 series, I’d put the money into the GPU. You can always add pcie 4.0 NVME later when you can actually take advantage of it. They’ll get bigger and cheaper over time, especially the gen 4 versions.

At the end of the day, games aren’t getting any smaller and getting them all on an SSD is more important than them being on the fastest SSD possible.

Linus did a decent video on this last year:

 
Outside of benching the drives it is highly unlikely that you will notice much difference. Booting may be a little quicker, some games may play a little smoother as the game loads the next tile and large file moves will be quite a bit quicker. I went from a pair of sata drives to a pair of NVME drives with the hope of a little more performance but mainly to reduce clutter. Booting is only a second or two quicker, games don't seem to load any quicker but a couple of games are smoother (especially TS2021) as the game loads the next tile but aside from that real world differences are hard to spot. I am glad I did it as I have four less cables and two less drives visable but from a performance perspective I gained very little.
 
Recently installed an m2 nvme as a boot drive, replacing my samsung 830 sata and the boot times, game loading times etc feel no different. Obviously bench scores are way higher but very marginal gains in day to day running.
 
gab344 said:
Your Samsung Evo 512 SSD is limited to 660M/B by the sata 3 interface speed. You probably have benched it yourself with CrystalDisk, or the like so you'll know better than me how well it goes (guessing 500 to 550M/B?)

If your upgrade system has PCIe 4.0 some of the latest gen 4 NVMe m.2 ssds should easily manage 5500M/B transfer rates ( x10 what you have now) and beyond ( Sure I saw some claiming 7000 M/B + somewhere last week)

Real world, windows bootup is going to be seconds. Game load up /level loading is going to be noticeably better.

Speculative future performance in a year or two when Microsoft Direct storage API is supported ... may be very worth it (or not)
Click to expand...

The difference in game loads was a maximum of 1.5 seconds between AHCI SATA and NVMe the last I looked, YouTube has many, many examples. The idea games load perceivable quicker isn’t supported by real world data unfortunately, generally we live in a world where sequential read speeds are for marketing at this stage and have no significant impact on desktop/gaming use. As to buying now for features potentially useful in a year or two, buy in a year or two, you’ll be buying newer 2nd gen tech at a lower price/higher capacity with potentially even better performance.
 
Avalon said:
The difference in game loads was a maximum of 1.5 seconds between AHCI SATA and NVMe the last I looked, YouTube has many, many examples.
Click to expand...

I find it quite interesting that tech channel youtubers will encourage the market to spend hundreds on say an additional graphic card waterblock kit to get another 30mhz/5fps, or 100 quid on a set of rgb fans but having say Flight Sim 2020 loading a few seconds quicker, for want of a few buying decisions, is considered not worth it ? :confused:
 
Avalon said:
generally we live in a world where sequential read speeds are for marketing at this stage and have no significant impact on desktop/gaming use.
Click to expand...
IOPS Hype is even more BS.
Normal home use like gaming has mostly something like Q1T1 random reads.
(at which speeds are typically max 60MB/s)
 
Depends. If you have Prefetch and Superfetch disabled then yes you will notice a big difference. If you haven't got them disabled then it's barely noticeable.
 
Disco_P said:
Just avoid DRAM-less drives as they are hot garbage.
Click to expand...

Perhaps watch the video linked in post #13 before making a statement that doesn’t relate to general usage, or at least qualify your statement by citing whatever unusual/dubious/synthetic test circumstances you are basing it on.
 
Having bought a Samsung QVO 2TB SATA SSD without doing research, then finding out it's a bad all round drive, I was quite pleased at how it's still not that bad in that video for my usage as a dedicated games drive that I don't copy any data over to, anything more than that not great, but actually good for the exact purpose I use it for.

In the market for a fast PCIE 3 M2 drive but looking at £300-£400 for 2TB. Not even considering less than a 2TB drive which makes a PCI M2 expensive for me. I predict new consoles going to be running out of space very quickly, 2.5TB total SSD space on PC for gaming for me isn't enough, need at least 2 more TB.

With full drives I can't even replay CoD MW single player as it's 250GB or something crazy like that with all the updates.
 
Disco_P said:
Nope they're hot garbage for general usage.
Click to expand...

So they’re hot garbage for general use because you say so, and we should ignore real world benchmarks because they don’t tie in with your personal opinion? Best of luck with that... you’ll be telling us PCIe 4 NVMe is amazingly fast compared to everything else next :D
 
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