How fast is really a PCIe M.2 (NVMe) SSD?

[mnewsham]

Have you actually used one before? I went from the exact SSD in your signature to my current drive and there is absolutely a difference. Not an earthshattering one but it's there.

I regularly switch back between a 950 pro and an 840 evo and there is pretty much no appreciable difference in daily use. Outside of bench marks and a few niche tasks which involve moving large data sets it simply isn't noticeable.

 

[UsandThem]

Have you actually used one before? I went from the exact SSD in your signature to my current drive and there is absolutely a difference. Not an earthshattering one but it's there.

Agreed.

When I see these NVMe vs SSD threads, I should just stay out of them. What always has me scratching my head over this debate is the price difference.

A person can catch a 500GB 960 EVO on sale for $199 pretty regularly. Additionally, a person can buy Tomshardware's "best budget" NVMe drive, the 480GB MyDigitalSSD BPX for $187 every day.

Right now, a 500GB 850 EVO is $164, or the 525GB Crucial MX300 for $160. So that's a $23 to $39 difference. Why would a person not spend that difference for something they will have 3-5 years? I mean there are so many reviews, tests, and Youtube videos out there that show the "real world" difference. So all a person has to do is spend 15 minutes and decide for themselves if it's worth it for their use. Sometimes there is virtually no difference (like booting), but when you get into stuff like Photoshop, video editing, [some] game's load times, opening a browser with 5+ tabs, transferring files, there is a difference. I would understand if NVMe drives were close to double the price of SSDs, but they aren't anymore.

But if someone buys 2 x $700 GTX 1080ti cards to run in SLI, nobody bats an eye. The same thing applies if someone buys DDR4 3600+ over something like DDR4 3200. Or how about someone who spends over $100 on a computer case? It's not necessary at all, but nobody seems to be concerned if the case is $250. Some things around here just make me scratch my head........

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, those 500GB 960 EVO M.2 PCI-E NVMe SSDs for $200 were a great deal. I hope that's repeated in the future, so I can snag one.

I own 4 128GB-class M.2 PCI-E SSDs, and one 256GB-class one, a 600p. Which is a bit lacking in performance.

Wondering if Mushkin will ever come out with some budget M.2 PCI-E SSDs, that utilize 3D MLC NAND. Would be nice to see, even if they end up being PCI-E 3.0 x2 or something instead of x4. If they're cheap enough.

 

[UsandThem]

Yeah, those 500GB 960 EVO M.2 PCI-E NVMe SSDs for $200 were a great deal. I hope that's repeated in the future, so I can snag one.

I own 4 128GB-class M.2 PCI-E SSDs, and one 256GB-class one, a 600p. Which is a bit lacking in performance.

Wondering if Mushkin will ever come out with some budget M.2 PCI-E SSDs, that utilize 3D MLC NAND. Would be nice to see, even if they end up being PCI-E 3.0 x2 or something instead of x4. If they're cheap enough.

The MyDigitalSSD BPX line have MLC, but they haven't dropped in price at all, and are still the same price since launch.

Maybe Amazon will have some computer components at a good price for Prime Day, which starts at 9 PM EST tonight.

 

[Topweasel]

Starting with a my M4 Crucial 256GB SSD to my current XG300 Toshiba NVME drive I can state with assuradeness that NVME drives are sweet. They take up so little space, much easier to manage, and have what seems like unlimited power waiting to be untapped. The end result is, the actual "feeling" inside windows is near nothing. I wouldn't get a drive other than an NVME drive to host an OS. But that is more of a forward facing opinion. What made SSD's originally was its random access time (and still the case). It's the little things that your system does over and over again that affects day to day performance feeling. While speeding up the transfer rate helps and certainly helped a lot back in the day, once we started to get past probably 200mb/s I think response time matter more. Personally I think NVME drives are worth the increased cost over their SATA counterparts none of that is based on day to day feeling.

In games considering the bench tests in consoles going from 5400 spindles to Evo's and the lack of decent increases in loading time. Most of the loading that we see taking place probably has little to do with file loading processes and has more to do with implementation.

 

[DaveSimmons]

My opinion:

It's possibly worth it after your budget includes 16 GB RAM, an i7-7700K (or the Coffee Lake replacement next month?), GTX 1080 ti, a premium heatsink, and a 500 - 1 TB SSD for your Steam drive. It's not worth spending extra on for gaming if it means cutting back on anything else.

 

[Topweasel]

My opinion:

It's possibly worth it after your budget includes 16 GB RAM, an i7-7700K (or the Coffee Lake replacement next month?), GTX 1080 ti, a premium heatsink, and a 1 GB SSD for your Steam drive. It's not worth spending extra on for gaming if it means cutting back on anything else.

I mean it depends. You aren't wrong. The first two are obvious, but the jump from a 1080 to 1080ti is well more than the $50-$60 increase in price. A 1GB SSD would be uses less today in games and honestly a premium heatsink vs. and ok one has no bearing on gaming results and even taking OC into consideration there isn't a major difference till you delid the 7700k. Just saying the relatively minor (a decent but not great HSF) price of an upgrade for a drive that is 4 times faster, even if the actual feeling and direct game performance increase isn't measurable to me is worth it. It's not hard to find room for the difference.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I mean it depends. You aren't wrong. The first two are obvious, but the jump from a 1080 to 1080ti is well more than the $50-$60 increase in price. A 1GB SSD would be uses less today in games and honestly a premium heatsink vs. and ok one has no bearing on gaming results and even taking OC into consideration there isn't a major difference till you delid the 7700k. Just saying the relatively minor (a decent but not great HSF) price of an upgrade for a drive that is 4 times faster, even if the actual feeling and direct game performance increase isn't measurable to me is worth it. It's not hard to find room for the difference.

While for me the HSF to reduce noise, and the large Steam SSD to reduce game load times and save me from re-downloading games are both more important than shaving 4 seconds off the boot time.

Like many build choices it comes down to personal preferences.

 

[Topweasel]

While for me the HSF to reduce noise, and the large Steam SSD to reduce game load times and save me from re-downloading games are both more important than shaving 4 seconds off the boot time.

Like many build choices it comes down to personal preferences.

1GB is large?

 

[DaveSimmons]

1GB is large?

Heh, I fixed that (was meant to be 500 GB - TB) but you'd already quoted me.

But yes, compared to my first 65 MB hard drive (intel 286, 12 MHz CPU, woo!) a 1 GB drive is large

 

[Topweasel]

Heh, I fixed that (was meant to be 500 GB - TB) but you'd already quoted me.

But yes, compared to my first 65 MB hard drive (intel 286, 12 MHz CPU, woo!) a 1 GB drive is large

You have me beat. First PC (mine) was a 366@550 Celeron A Socket 370, 64mb of Ram, 10GB HDD.

As for an actual large Steam SSD. In the past with Steam I can work with just decent NVME drive (500+GB) and just move the games I want to play from very large Storage drive. I don't swap between games enough to dedicate an extra, fast SSD, with a higher $/GB, for the games I am not playing.

 

[Grimner]

Last Friday my C: moved from a Samsung 840 EVO 128 to a Samsung 960 EVO M.2 250. Definitely not worth it. Even worse on a motherboard with only PCIe 2.0 which means the top read speed is at 1650 Mb/s with write speeds a little behind.
Pure file operations are much faster, but it is not an important part of what I do on the machine. There is a little extra "smoothness" here and there, but that probably has to do with programs loading and all the little things Windows does behind the scenes.

With the latest BIOS update, the Asus Sabertooth 990 FX r.2 recognizes an NVMe drive and is happy to boot it.

This was an "upgrade" more due to an overall refresh of storage than anything else - yes, I did read this thread first
Guess this 960 will just have to chill until my next build.