Should I buy SSD or m.2 NVMe with a £400 budget?

WhereHere1

WhereHere1

WhereHere1

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as the title states I have around £400-£500 budget for a new hard drive.

I want a minimum of 1TB storage.
Would preferably like 2TB.

So I know I can get 2TB with ssd.
But if I get NVMe 1TB would I notice much difference on startup? Is it loads better?
 
nvme is not totally worth the price premium unless you got extra money to burn or you are doing hdd heavy stuff like 4k video editing.
of course nvme will load games/windows faster, but the difference isn't as big as going from hdd to ssd :)
 
going to plagarise off a different thread -


windows loading:


gaming:


file copying:
File_Copying_8_GB.jpg



as you can see, not much difference unless its for file copying to same/another nvme drive.
for file transfer, you are again, limited to the speed of the slowest drive
 
There is a huge difference. The M.2 PCIe are amazingly fast. You will definitely notice a difference. However, the difference is most noticeable for your system disk. I would seriously consider getting a 250GB primary M.2 PCIe to run Windows and a standard SATA SSD for everything else. That way you can save a great deal of money. Also, Samsung are pretty expensive at the moment. Although they are probably worth it for M.2 PCIe, they can't really justify their price for SATA. A Crucial SATA SSD can be found for a lot less money than a Samsung. So for just over £500 you could get a 250GB Samsung M.2 PCIe and a Crucial 2TB SATA SSD. If you need the 2TB then that's the way to go. However, if you don't need 2TB then why not get a single 1TB M.2 PCIe ?? Bear in mind also that you may need to take cooling of an M.2 PCIe in to consideration. That may cost you extra.
 
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I've had an SSD as my boot drive since the days where 60GB was £80. I've had both Sata 2 and 3 drives and more recently have upgraded to a samsung 960 nvme drive and to be totally honest I've noticed 0 difference between all of them.

Get the 2TB Sata.
 
M.2 loses its speed advantage when you access lots of little files, like you do on boot, which is why its only marginally faster. As has already been said, doing things like copying a file from the m.2 to the m.2 will be faster than doing so with an SSD, as will video editing, as this reads/writes large files sequentially.
 
AiiR said:
I've had an SSD as my boot drive since the days where 60GB was £80. I've had both Sata 2 and 3 drives and more recently have upgraded to a samsung 960 nvme drive and to be totally honest I've noticed 0 difference between all of them.

Get the 2TB Sata.
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I am truly shocked and amazed. I have a total of nine SSD's, from the 830 to the Polaris M.2 PCIe. I instantly noticed the difference with the PCIe. It is just so much faster and the difference is especially noticeable during boot. But even just running browsers and so on they just instantly appear. I was so impressed when I ran up one on my gaming PC that I went out and upgraded a second PC to use them. I am now considering replacing the secondary drive on my PC with one, just for games. I wonder if you are not seeing the difference becuase you still have Superfetch and Prefetch enabled? Anyway, I guess we are all entitled to our own opinions, but I would definitely recommend getting PCIe if you can afford it. Only if you need to save money or need the additional space would I suggest getting Sata. BUT I would not recommend upgrading to PCIe unless your existing SSD is coming to end of life. Half of the reason I upgraded my second PC was that the 830 in there was approaching end of life. It was either a new Sata or new PCIe, and for a smallish drive the price difference is small. No contest!! It's a different matter though for a large secondary drive in a PC where the price difference is colossal.
 
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I too notice the difference between SATA3 and NVMe SSD as a boot drive, I wouldn't say its night and day but the difference is there. It's very subtle however, and I would not recommend shelling out bags of cash just to convert all the storage solution to NVMe SSD based.
 
Pocah said:
There is a huge difference. The M.2 PCIe are amazingly fast. You will definitely notice a difference.
Click to expand...

Couldn’t disagree more, if I wasn’t benching or transferring large files I couldn’t tell if my system was using an NVME drive or a SATA SSD. It was one of the most unnoticeable upgrades I’ve ever done.
 
For everyday use and gaming, SSD is the way to go. NVME is pretty damn expensive for very marginal increase in speed.

If you move large video files around or work with content creation between m.2 drives, then yeah sure.
 
The Force is so weak with this lot!
Superfetch attempts to predict what you are about to do and preloads files in to RAM. Prefetch loads critical information in about files to attempt to make them load faster. Between the two, they significantly improve loading speed including startup. The problem with them of course is that they consume CPU power, RAM and are loading things in to RAM all the time that you may not use. Another issue is that they may not be able to predict what you are about to do, if, for example, you are going to a new level in a game and loading in a map that the computer hasn't seen before.
Some users elect to disable the Superfetch and Prefetch once they have an SSD to stop wasting RAM and CPU power and cut down on unnecessary disk reads. Thing is that if you don't disable them then many loading times will be almost the same for SATA as they are for PCIe because you aren't directly comparing the speed of the two drives because Superfetch and Prefetch are undermining the results.
The only way I can understand that people can't notice a difference is because they haven't disabled Superfetch and Prefetch. To me there is a vast and very noticeable difference! Either that or I am the only Jedi in the universe, which seems pretty unlikely. Possible, though! *thinks* Nah, REALLY unlikely.
 
iamtheoneneo said:
In the real world where most of us live there is very little difference between the two medias
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No need to be rude! I'm not talking about measured difference. I am talking about real world perceived difference. I am honestly shocked that so many other people can't see the difference. But hey, ho, it must be true that I am a Jedi then. I will continue to buy M.2 PCIe's. I have already "updated" two PC's and I am buying my third this week.. Anway, this is my last comment on the subject. Be happy with your slow old SSD's!!! I am sure you will be
 
mrbazmondo said:
Out of interest - those reporting a difference and those reporting no difference. What models of M.2 and SSD do you have that you're comparing?
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850evo SATA, 960evo NVME. Massive and very noticeable differnce on CH6/Ryzen setup. AMD's SATA implementation doesn't seem as good as intels - much better benchmarks with all my SSDs on intel 4770k/Asrock z97 Extreme 6. Crystal disk mark

Seq Q32T1 scores were similar , 4k Q32T1 scores about were about halved and dropped by a third on the 4k test. (read and write)
 
On Intel controllers..

Fairly noticable difference between an old Crucial M4 SSD and an Evo 850. No noticable difference between the 850 and a 960 (besides benchmarks)
 
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