Question Gamer SSD in real world

[Arkaign]

This strongly reflects what I've personally observed for ages now : SSDs haven't really moved that much in real world experience in most cases. I still have an OCX Vertex 4 256GB from eons ago I recently tested head to head against a Gen4 nVME drive with my 3700X, and beyond simple file copies, most operations and loads felt basically identical.

So, unless you're spending heaps of time waiting on file copies, don't worry about going 10/10th on your SSD, or dumping a SATA/Gen3 nVME thinking you'll see some major benefits with a fancy new one. It's probably the least noticable difference for most users and basically any gamer. As long as you aren't running off HDD or a controllerless model, you're good to go.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

The biggest diff was from a 7200rpm HDD to any SSD, but i'd have to say though, old (2009-2014) SSDs are significantly slower than the SATA SSDs and NVME drives of today. I just upgraded from a 2013 Samsung 840 Sata SSD to a "pretty redacted" Toshiba XG4 NVME(free, take off from a dell laptop) and I can feel an overall snappiness in my system from bootup and opening up software.

Now, will going from my "shitty" Toshiba XG4 to a "best prosumer" WD Sn750 Black NVME have as big of a performance increase?


Profanity is not allowed in
the tech areas.

AT Mod Usandthem

 

[NewMaxx]

I don't think it ever was in doubt that SSDs are all the same in terms of performance with games. HardOCP even did a review a few years back showing a HDD was getting the same FPS. Although obviously load times are much better with a SSD, and some games can load a bit faster with NVMe. Although I have to sigh over seeing this video because it means I'm going to get a lot of people linking it in every SSD thread when it is actually a narrow interpretation of the hardware...

 

[Charlie98]

Meh, I just like the form factor... no power or data cables. W10 boots in about 7 seconds... but it very likely would have done that as a clean install on a 2.5" SSD as well, give or take a second, assuming it was an apples to apples SSD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, TBH, except for new PS5 console ports to PC (since PS5 will have SSD, probably some flavor of NVMe), most PC games are more-or-less "optimized" for loading / storage on a (7200RPM, mostly?) HDD.

So this result may change in a year or two from now, when we start to get PS5 console ports, with games with "streaming worlds", design to stream in off of an SSD. (Like that prototype Spider-Man game that they showed off, when previewing the SSD feature of the PS5.)

I will add that for boot-up and shut-down of Windows 10 (and Windows Updates), an NVMe drive for the OS drive CAN make a perceptible difference. As for games loading, except for open-world games, probably less so.

 

[killster1]

This strongly reflects what I've personally observed for ages now : SSDs haven't really moved that much in real world experience in most cases. I still have an OCX Vertex 4 256GB from eons ago I recently tested head to head against a Gen4 nVME drive with my 3700X, and beyond simple file copies, most operations and loads felt basically identical.

So, unless you're spending heaps of time waiting on file copies, don't worry about going 10/10th on your SSD, or dumping a SATA/Gen3 nVME thinking you'll see some major benefits with a fancy new one. It's probably the least noticable difference for most users and basically any gamer. As long as you aren't running off HDD or a controllerless model, you're good to go.

it doesn't even say what the 3 drives are. personally i do a lot of file copying quick par unrar etc maybe with 32gb of ram you are able to use speed of your drives better? id have to research that i guess, but if you cant tell the load times of windows / updates you must have a bad brain, they asked 3 random guys and made jokes the whole time after a few tests. doesn't seem like a definitive test just 4 guys goofing around.

 

[Arkaign]

it doesn't even say what the 3 drives are. personally i do a lot of file copying quick par unrar etc maybe with 32gb of ram you are able to use speed of your drives better? id have to research that i guess, but if you cant tell the load times of windows / updates you must have a bad brain, they asked 3 random guys and made jokes the whole time after a few tests. doesn't seem like a definitive test just 4 guys goofing around.

Lol of course it's not a benchmark speed test. More of "what does it feel like to actually use, back to back?", under the context of just using stuff that's already installed.

Booting Windows, a clean run on anything from a decent SATA 500-600MB/sec drive to a 4500+MB/sec drive is pretty minimal, I saw like 4-5 seconds vs 5-6 seconds. Games basically identical in performance due to all the other stuff going on with decompression etc.

It depends a lot on what your use case is. Hence the focus here being on gamers. If you're doing a ton of file copies then upgrading a SSD may make sense. On the other hand someone that already has a big SSD that is working decently and isn't doing extremely intensive file copying may see basically no benefit to buying a new model drive as an upgrade. Even windows updates or installing Windows fresh is something that sees extremely marginal improvement.

It's just one of those counterintuitive things that people don't realize until they've gone back and forth with it. I've probably worked with somewhere between 8,000-10,000 SSDs by now, and many dozens personally since the old 32GB and 60GB days. Going from HDD to SSD was an enormous difference, so I always looked forward to breaking the SATA 6bps limit, only to find it kind of meh.

 

[killster1]

Lol of course it's not a benchmark speed test. More of "what does it feel like to actually use, back to back?", under the context of just using stuff that's already installed.

Booting Windows, a clean run on anything from a decent SATA 500-600MB/sec drive to a 4500+MB/sec drive is pretty minimal, I saw like 4-5 seconds vs 5-6 seconds. Games basically identical in performance due to all the other stuff going on with decompression etc.

It depends a lot on what your use case is. Hence the focus here being on gamers. If you're doing a ton of file copies then upgrading a SSD may make sense. On the other hand someone that already has a big SSD that is working decently and isn't doing extremely intensive file copying may see basically no benefit to buying a new model drive as an upgrade. Even windows updates or installing Windows fresh is something that sees extremely marginal improvement.

It's just one of those counterintuitive things that people don't realize until they've gone back and forth with it. I've probably worked with somewhere between 8,000-10,000 SSDs by now, and many dozens personally since the old 32GB and 60GB days. Going from HDD to SSD was an enormous difference, so I always looked forward to breaking the SATA 6bps limit, only to find it kind of meh.

so you worked with 10,000 ssd's then decided to buy a nvme and cant see the diff!? wowowowow.. i have several pc's with different speed drives and notice it all ;( i dont play alot of games but the few times i do play it seems like forever with the 512gb m.2 ssd 350mb/s my dell came with was very excited to upgrade to a 2tb 950ex. playing games and blind tests between random guys that are limited to preinstalled machines while joking around most likely wont notice. Use the computer everyday im 1000% sure you will notice performing the tasks i do with even simple tasks. which ssd is 600MB/s a 860 pro? (512gb pro sounds like a drive more expensive then a pcie4 1tb)
you said a file copy test between a 256gb ocz drive and apcie 4 nvme was almost identical!? maybe you need more ram? maybe your source drive sucks that it was coping from can think of lots of scenario where a test between the two wont help but loads where it will. More ram system drive multitasking should easily show the diff

 

[Arkaign]

No, not a file copy, just stuff like opening AC Odyssey, Metro Exodus, RDR2, etc. It's extremely marginal with games. File copies and data transfer benchmarks are situations where you can actually see the difference.

I work all day every day with PCs in corporate and consumer environments, and upgrade my home units constantly. I very rarely these days find users that see benefits from moving from one SSD to another SSD. Pulling the old Vertex 4 out to compare with my latest nVME was kind of a fun experiment before donating it on down the line.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've probably worked with somewhere between 8,000-10,000 SSDs by now

That's impressive.
More SSDs than my browser tabs, even.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I very rarely these days find users that see benefits from moving from one SSD to another SSD. Pulling the old Vertex 4 out to compare with my latest nVME was kind of a fun experiment before donating it on down the line.

I agree.

This current box, with R5 3600, 32GB DDR4-3600 and RAID-0 Intel 660p 1TB NVMe SSDs (and Win10), isn't all that much more impressive than my prior-gen box, with R5 1600, 32GB DDR4-3000, and a "lowly" 240GB Adata TLC SATA SSD and a 4TB spinner. I mean, in everyday usage, there's like no real noticeable difference. (Sure, the R5 3600 has twice the mining output of the R5 1600, due to the improved cache and AVX2 support. But everyday application usage, isn't a lot different, least of all the SSD difference.)

That said, there is ONE reason, that I can see, to replace an "Older Gen" SSD: dealing with power-loss, without bricking.

I have a friend, in which I gave him a Vertex2-family SSD, a 240GB I think, large for that era, but for free, it was a used refurb, kind of beat-up drive. But it worked... for a while. What finally killed it, was a power outage. Took out the drive. Friend had a UPS that I had sold him, never bothered to hook it up. (Or maybe I sold him the UPS, after that happened, and hooked him up with another SSD.)

Anyways, that's an important point, if you have critical data on an older SSD, 1) Back it up, possibly daily, and 2) consider replacing it with a newer device, with better power-loss prevention.

Supposedly, the Samsung EVO SATA drives, use a log-structured filesystem internally, to handle the block-mapping, such that they are able to roll back when power-loss occurs.

Crucial has taken another tact, and I've heard rumors that this is no longer true, but they at least used to have "power back-up capacitors", extra ones, on the MX500 (and previous M550 and M500 SSDs as well), such that they could "survive" a power-loss event, without corrupting their mapping tables.

Either way, modern SSDs are MUCH more resilient to "pulling the plug" on the PC.

Edit: Though, I get why you might want to run an older SSD, the older MLC-variety SSDs, had a certain amount of "snappiness", and most importantly, performance-consistency, especially with write speeds, that modern TLC (and QLC, UGH!) drives lack, even with DRAM and SLC cache (and those modern budget drives that lack those features, are even far worse!).

So, for example, 1st-gen Adata SU800 drives, early TLC drives, they have an SLC cache. But writing 50GB or so of ISOs continuously to one of those drives, and seq. write-speeds (according to Win10 file-copy dialog box graph), starts to bounce between 30-40MB/sec. That's like, USB2.0 external HDD speeds. (UGH!)

A decent HDD has better, more consistent seq. write speeds than that.

Thankfully, modern NVMe drives, some of them with very impressive specifications for read and write, still perform better than a HDD, when SLC cache is exhausted. (Heard that the 660p or 665p would hit 800MB/sec write speeds, down from 1800-2000MB/sec, when SLC cache is exhausted. Still bearable, I guess. Way better than the SU800 SATA.)

 

[Paperlantern]

Definitely a benefit from moving from mechanical drives, to SATA SSD to NVMe. A buddy of mine and myself have virtually the same machine. Same graphics card, i5 cpu, same amount of RAM, etc. He has an NVMe drive though, and I have a few year old SATA SSD. We both play Forza Horizon 4 currently. When a race starts, theres a "loading" screen that you see where it starts at the front of your car, and rotates, goes past the door, etc as the camera rotates slowly around the car. The sequence stops once the race instance has loaded into memory and it drops you into the map to play. My sequence stops roughly 12 seconds in, maybe 15. His stops 3 seconds in. He almost barely gets to even SEE the sequence at all.

The difference between running the game off of a Mechanical drive to an SSD was astounding. Literally sitting there with my chin in my hands on the mechanical (relatively new, 4TB WD Blue), wondering if the game had frozen up, we are talking MINUTES to boot and even get to the first screen. With the SATA SSD, it's less than 20 seconds. I'm sure on my buddy's rig, he's on the first screen in a matter of 5 to 7 seconds.

For a gamer, and the big games that are out there now, the storage matters for load times. You will wait a LOT less with an NVMe. Less frustration, less waiting, more playing.

 

[Arkaign]

How full is the SSD? All of them lose a bit of performance the closer the get to full capacity. The older and smaller, the worse this degrading factor is. I think it was Gamers Nexus a little ways back that showed games not showing very much additional benefits at all from nVME. And indeed, clean installs of windows and current, large games (Gears 5, Metro Exodus, RDR2, etc) I see extremely narrow margins. The iOPS number and decompression time seem to be somewhat limiting vs the enormous gap. And this is from a 'fast' SATA SSD vs elite tier nVME drives. Windows itself, and any large file to file copies are outrageously quick, but the more ram you have seems to negate this to a large degree.

It's possible that FH4 is some kind of exception where they didn't use much compression. This would allow the nVME to stretch its legs a bit more than the standard way they're heavily compacted into cabinet files and DRM routines.

Hardware where I've experienced this :

Z370/390 platforms
B450/570X platforms
Ryzen 3700X, 3900X
8086k @ 5+GHz, 9900KS @ 5+GHz
DDR4 3600, 3733, 4000
1080ti, 2080ti
OCZ Vertex 4, Samsung 850 Pro
Sabrent PCIe 4.0 x4 nVME, Samsung 970 Evo nVME, SU8200 nVME, Intel 600 nVME
Windows 10, no background activities beyond bone stock windows

 

[Soulkeeper]

I'd say there were a few defineable transitions in the SSD revolution.

Thinking of the very first SSDs like the 4GB slow ones in the Eeepc (30MB/s or something).
The only reason these early SSDs were better than spinners was due to latency being lower imo.

Very first -> fast sata -> nvme/pcie

Each step has seen limited latency improvements, The sequential improvements and controller refinements.
Thinking of memory vs. ssd: If we consider latency compared to sequential/peak throughput over the years.
We've seen far less movement on the latency front, although nvme has helped. This is why optane tops many of the charts, even though it has lower bandwidth than most the competitors.

So throughput is like 1/10th of mem bandwidth these days for top of the line SSDs, but latency is still 1/300th+

 

[killster1]

I'm still waiting to hear which ssds do 600MB/s.. of course ssds that cost more than nvme should perform good enough for loading games, most people that buy high end stuff dont do it for games.

 

[Arkaign]

I'm still waiting to hear which ssds do 600MB/s.. of course ssds that cost more than nvme should perform good enough for loading games, most people that buy high end stuff dont do it for games tho just bragging rights

It's just the theoretical peak limit due to SATA 3 transfer rates, when the larger SSDs started getting into the 250+GB sizes and models like the Samsung 830 etc, they all started to bounce off the practical limits, which in practice is mostly in the mid-550ish range.

It was interesting to see how the things obviously added speed by parallelized structures. A single model line like the Vertex 4 I had, the smaller ones would have dramatically slower performance, even with the same controller and cache setup. The gains from ~60Gb to ~128Gb were clear, then huge gains from ~128Gb to ~250/256, solid gains to the 500/512, and real but not nearly as significant going to the 1TB range.

One of the things I am curious about with nVME vs good SATA models like my Samsung Pros and even the old Vertex is the CPU/system utilization. With a good SATA SSD you can look at the specs and examine the PCB itself, and you see a pretty robust little processor, cache, etc to run the thing, which I have to imagine takes a lot of effort off of the platform. It was such a big deal BITD that things like the Sandforce, or Samsung's tri-core on-PCB controllers were legit selling points over the less robust models. You could have two SSDs that both claim 550ish reads/500ish writes, but one with 40,000iops and the better one with 90,000-100,000iops, and dramatically better small file performance and capacity scaling.

One thing that REALLY needs to be more widely known is just how badly many SSD models perform when they get too full. A 500GB HDD at 465GB partitioned, will still perform at a close level to how it did empty even when it gets above 80/90% full. But many SSDs in the 120-500GB range especially will fall right on their face sometimes with only 70% used, and when they get closer to full can just be agonizing. A drive that does 550/540 on normal testing to start with can drop steadily, until you begin to see sub-HDD speeds usually at around 85%+ full.

 

[VirtualLarry]

One thing that REALLY needs to be more widely known is just how badly many SSD models perform when they get too full. A 500GB HDD at 465GB partitioned, will still perform at a close level to how it did empty even when it gets above 80/90% full. But many SSDs in the 120-500GB range especially will fall right on their face sometimes with only 70% used, and when they get closer to full can just be agonizing. A drive that does 550/540 on normal testing to start with can drop steadily, until you begin to see sub-HDD speeds usually at around 85%+ full.

This is VERY true.

 

[CtrlAltDeluxe]

One thing that REALLY needs to be more widely known is just how badly many SSD models perform when they get too full. A 500GB HDD at 465GB partitioned, will still perform at a close level to how it did empty even when it gets above 80/90% full. But many SSDs in the 120-500GB range especially will fall right on their face sometimes with only 70% used, and when they get closer to full can just be agonizing. A drive that does 550/540 on normal testing to start with can drop steadily, until you begin to see sub-HDD speeds usually at around 85%+ full.

This is why from just googling SSDs and NVMEs for 5 minutes you can easily come to the conclusion that you shouldn't buy anything below 1tb. You're gimping yourself severely otherwise.

 

[Soulkeeper]

Also, due to the nand chip density increases, We never scaled the channels above 8. Infact 4 or fewer channels became the normal.
This was offset partially by nand speed increases and more advanced caching algorithms, but just like muscle cars ... no replacement for displacement.

 

[mv2devnull]

cant see the diff!? wowowowow.. i have several pc's with different speed drives and notice it all ;(

Personal differences. Biology. Music, colours, refresh rates, cheap wine vs "brand" champagne. Some see/hear/taste them. Some think they do (when not blind testing). Some can't tell the difference even when the numbers should be "obvious".

 

[Arkaign]

0-2 seconds in most games, with a couple of edge cases where the gap is more like 25%, despite the difference normally being 0-12%ish.

If I had to guess, these were games where compression was not as much of a factor, so it could simply stream in the data and go about its business.

It is indeed odd, but it's true. The 3000-5500 and beyond speeds of nVME have very little compelling to offer gamers over traditional SSDs.

If buying new, obviously it makes sense to go ahead with a well rated nVME drive. However, for someone with a good working SATA SSD, it's definitely far down the list of things to worry about. CPU, GPU, Ram, Display, Network quality, sound setup, KBM, noise levels, everything else pretty much trumps this as one of the last things to upgrade (unless you need more space immediately, then add an nVME if you have the slot, or add a SSD.

I actually have some enterprise NAS Red Pros that I use for bulk gaming storage for certain games, and the loading speed is surprisingly decent when you're not trying to run your OS off of it. Obviously I try to keep anything active on one of the 4 SSDs, but just to have a lot of other stuff in the backlog and such on the PC without having to spend absurd amounts of cash, a couple 8TB Red Pros do the trick nicely. I have some older titles on there mainly. 16TB of SSD would still be $$.

 

[killster1]

0-2 seconds in most games, with a couple of edge cases where the gap is more like 25%, despite the difference normally being 0-12%ish.

If I had to guess, these were games where compression was not as much of a factor, so it could simply stream in the data and go about its business.

It is indeed odd, but it's true. The 3000-5500 and beyond speeds of nVME have very little compelling to offer gamers over traditional SSDs.

If buying new, obviously it makes sense to go ahead with a well rated nVME drive. However, for someone with a good working SATA SSD, it's definitely far down the list of things to worry about. CPU, GPU, Ram, Display, Network quality, sound setup, KBM, noise levels, everything else pretty much trumps this as one of the last things to upgrade (unless you need more space immediately, then add an nVME if you have the slot, or add a SSD.

I actually have some enterprise NAS Red Pros that I use for bulk gaming storage for certain games, and the loading speed is surprisingly decent when you're not trying to run your OS off of it. Obviously I try to keep anything active on one of the 4 SSDs, but just to have a lot of other stuff in the backlog and such on the PC without having to spend absurd amounts of cash, a couple 8TB Red Pros do the trick nicely. I have some older titles on there mainly. 16TB of SSD would still be $$.

your still on this about games and ssd.. funny you mention ssd but that they are to expensive for game storage but yet all your tests revolve around ssd being fast enough for games that you cant even notice between nvme.. ummmm OK.. either play 2 games or install to another medium and not your 1-2tb OS drive. So why not do OS tests on ssd vs nvme since we have established games are to large for ssd/nvme anyway ;P

how about this premier file dump loaded twice as fast, opening chrome tabs almost half the time as a ssd.. so if you are rich and can afford ssd for your games then nvme isnt needed (but if you are rich then it doesnt matter right)

if you already own a high end ssd sure you can put off upgrading but if you are dumping $$ into your system why not get a nvme and put the ssd for storage etc it doesnt hurt anything to have a faster pc. seems like SSD are even more expensive then nvme anyway last few times i priced.

 

[TheELF]

Well, TBH, except for new PS5 console ports to PC (since PS5 will have SSD, probably some flavor of NVMe), most PC games are more-or-less "optimized" for loading / storage on a (7200RPM, mostly?) HDD.

Blu Ray disk actually(with some caching on the HDD) ,unless there are a lot of games on PS4 that do full installs on the HDD which I would find shocking.

 

[Arkaign]

your still on this about games and ssd.. funny you mention ssd but that they are to expensive for game storage but yet all your tests revolve around ssd being fast enough for games that you cant even notice between nvme.. ummmm OK.. either play 2 games or install to another medium and not your 1-2tb OS drive. So why not do OS tests on ssd vs nvme since we have established games are to large for ssd/nvme anyway ;P

how about this premier file dump loaded twice as fast, opening chrome tabs almost half the time as a ssd.. so if you are rich and can afford ssd for your games then nvme isnt needed (but if you are rich then it doesnt matter right)

if you already own a high end ssd sure you can put off upgrading but if you are dumping $$ into your system why not get a nvme and put the ssd for storage etc it doesnt hurt anything to have a faster pc. seems like SSD are even more expensive then nvme anyway last few times i priced.

Haha, yes, I still am, but I feel you are taking this weirdly personally. There are several things to note.

1- This is really only relevant information for people who are far and away primarily gamers in terms of any power use scenario. If your workload is heavily dependent on using apps such as Adobe Premier or other rendering engines, and you spend a great deal of time copying large amounts of data from spot to spot in your storage and network systems, then you will want as fast a storage situation as you can reasonably get.

2- The Chrome tabs was faster, but by two seconds. This may or may not be a priority. Once apps/data are loaded, there will not be a meaningful difference in actual operation, as things will then be in RAM anyway.

3- NONE of this is some attack against nVME or a denial that they are, in basically any synthetic, and many real world operations, a flatly superior option. As noted in #1, this is info that is relevant for purely gamers. We have a reasonably high level of traffic on this site of people taking existing systems (such as Sandy Bridge Builds, Haswell Builds, etc) and upgrading the platform and various bits to current stuff, such as the popular Ryzen 3000 series options. That's where this info comes in handy in a practical basis. Do you mainly game on your PC, and your other activities normally are just light web browsing, the occasional work from home project in MS Office or whatever? In that case, if you (A)- already have an SSD, and (B)- already have the capacity you can work with, then perhaps you do not need to invest in a new SSD with the new rig.

4- Agreed on buying nVME over SATA SSD is basically the 95% defacto default choice these days if you need to buy one for any reason. I hope that nobody was actually confused about that. This info is more applicable in cases where you have existing HW that you are either upgrading to a new platform, or otherwise have older parts that you might want to re-use. If someone has a 500GB or 1TB SATA SSD already, and is satisfied with the storage for their uses, then re-buying a 1TB nVME may be of less benefit than upgrading to a 3700X vs a 3600, or getting a 2070S vs a 2060S for around the same gap in $ spent. The only (rare) case where it may be your choice to actually buy a new or used SATA SSD in a new rig is if you are out of nVME slots, and you're running Intel 115x platform with limited PCIe lanes.

5- Most of this cycles around back to my personal disappointment in what nVME has meant to PC Gaming; eg'; basically a big fat nothing in almost all cases. The promise was amazing. We had been stuck at the SATA transfer limit for 3.0/6Gbps/~550MB/Sec for ages. The flashing neon lights of "up to SIX times faster" would have been outrageously good had they been usable across the board such as game bootup times. Even with an SSD, things like Assassin's Creed Origins/Odyssey can take upwards of 30+ seconds, and then come back in various loads/saves/'quick' travel, etc thoughout the games. Then I got one, and it was immediately clear that although synthetics were superb, and more direct data access was vastly improved, that whatever the average PC game is doing when loading was not really being affected much by the change in storage tech. Compression, DRM, some kind of dependencies in local platform and components, for whatever strange reason it IS in fact true that the gains just aren't much (if any) to be seen in most PC Gaming. Definitely a let-down. This doesn't mean that (4) is not true either. They ARE better, they're just not noticeably better in this one area in most cases, which may or may not be enough to make it NOT worth it for a pure gamer to upgrade from SATA to nVME SSD, etc. Man, it would have been awesome if the gains were direct though. With no non-IO bottlenecking for the game loads and direct proportional increases, we'd have taken 30 second load times and cut them first by nearly 5/6ths, and then 11/12ths with 4.0! Or taken it down from 30 to less than 3 seconds!

Just to drive this point home :

4.0 is clearly a waste of money for pure gamers at this point unless they absolutely have to buy an upgrade and cannot reutilize existing drive.

BUT. If you benchmark productivity/direct file transfer, they will be ranked far apart HDD <<< SATA SSD <<< nVME 3.0 <<< nVME 4.0.

 

[killster1]

Haha, yes, I still am, but I feel you are taking this weirdly personally. There are several things to note.

1- This is really only relevant information for people who are far and away primarily gamers in terms of any power use scenario. If your workload is heavily dependent on using apps such as Adobe Premier or other rendering engines, and you spend a great deal of time copying large amounts of data from spot to spot in your storage and network systems, then you will want as fast a storage situation as you can reasonably get.

2- The Chrome tabs was faster, but by two seconds. This may or may not be a priority. Once apps/data are loaded, there will not be a meaningful difference in actual operation, as things will then be in RAM anyway.

3- NONE of this is some attack against nVME or a denial that they are, in basically any synthetic, and many real world operations, a flatly superior option. As noted in #1, this is info that is relevant for purely gamers. We have a reasonably high level of traffic on this site of people taking existing systems (such as Sandy Bridge Builds, Haswell Builds, etc) and upgrading the platform and various bits to current stuff, such as the popular Ryzen 3000 series options. That's where this info comes in handy in a practical basis. Do you mainly game on your PC, and your other activities normally are just light web browsing, the occasional work from home project in MS Office or whatever? In that case, if you (A)- already have an SSD, and (B)- already have the capacity you can work with, then perhaps you do not need to invest in a new SSD with the new rig.

4- Agreed on buying nVME over SATA SSD is basically the 95% defacto default choice these days if you need to buy one for any reason. I hope that nobody was actually confused about that. This info is more applicable in cases where you have existing HW that you are either upgrading to a new platform, or otherwise have older parts that you might want to re-use. If someone has a 500GB or 1TB SATA SSD already, and is satisfied with the storage for their uses, then re-buying a 1TB nVME may be of less benefit than upgrading to a 3700X vs a 3600, or getting a 2070S vs a 2060S for around the same gap in $ spent. The only (rare) case where it may be your choice to actually buy a new or used SATA SSD in a new rig is if you are out of nVME slots, and you're running Intel 115x platform with limited PCIe lanes.

5- Most of this cycles around back to my personal disappointment in what nVME has meant to PC Gaming; eg'; basically a big fat nothing in almost all cases. The promise was amazing. We had been stuck at the SATA transfer limit for 3.0/6Gbps/~550MB/Sec for ages. The flashing neon lights of "up to SIX times faster" would have been outrageously good had they been usable across the board such as game bootup times. Even with an SSD, things like Assassin's Creed Origins/Odyssey can take upwards of 30+ seconds, and then come back in various loads/saves/'quick' travel, etc thoughout the games. Then I got one, and it was immediately clear that although synthetics were superb, and more direct data access was vastly improved, that whatever the average PC game is doing when loading was not really being affected much by the change in storage tech. Compression, DRM, some kind of dependencies in local platform and components, for whatever strange reason it IS in fact true that the gains just aren't much (if any) to be seen in most PC Gaming. Definitely a let-down. This doesn't mean that (4) is not true either. They ARE better, they're just not noticeably better in this one area in most cases, which may or may not be enough to make it NOT worth it for a pure gamer to upgrade from SATA to nVME SSD, etc. Man, it would have been awesome if the gains were direct though. With no non-IO bottlenecking for the game loads and direct proportional increases, we'd have taken 30 second load times and cut them first by nearly 5/6ths, and then 11/12ths with 4.0! Or taken it down from 30 to less than 3 seconds!

Just to drive this point home :

4.0 is clearly a waste of money for pure gamers at this point unless they absolutely have to buy an upgrade and cannot reutilize existing drive.

BUT. If you benchmark productivity/direct file transfer, they will be ranked far apart HDD <<< SATA SSD <<< nVME 3.0 <<< nVME 4.0.

wow long post, your first post says most users or any gamers, i guess should say most social media users or gamers since ALOT OF people do diff stuff on computers, 3 sec vs 5 sec yes its 2 seconds difference but it also is almost double the speed with 5 tabs on chrome i agree nvme 4.0 no need. but as i stated before large game library's wont even fit on ssd's unless you are rich so what are we even talking about other then reusing old parts (which unless they are Very high end ssd's and not very old) wont compare. the video you posted is a high end ssd 150$ for a 1tb 860 evo. just like your ocz what ever its a 150$ 256gb (what would you use it for on a new build just seems crazy can barely fit anything on it) just being realistic, if reusing parts and you have a high end 1tb ssd and play games and dont care about how fast your other tasks go USE IT! if you are a gamer well then you already dedicated your $$ to a gfx card and dont need to budget between new nvme or better gfx. (altho we all need more storage for games if we did play games haaaaaaa) so just seems like no point in worrying about it.