Is switching from a standard SATA6 SSD to a NVMe PCIE4x drive worth it?

[snurp85]

Im building a new system (that Im hoping to have for quite a few years), and I was wondering if it will be worth the extra money to get a Samsung 950 PRO 512GB M.2-2280 over a Samsung 850 Pro Series 512GB 2.5".

Obviously, when switching from a standard HDD to a SSD, you see a huge difference in everything. So I was wondering if you would notice a change when switching from SATA6 to M.2? Spec-wise, the M.2 is about 5 times faster that the Sata6 drive.

What are peoples thoughts on the matter?

 

[JaredDM]

It's not going to make the same major jump as you saw going from a HDD to an SSD if that's what you're thinking. The major advantage of an SSD is it's nearly instant seek time when accessing thousands of tiny files, such as when booting an OS or loading a program. On that front you'll see very little difference going from SATA to PCIe enabled M.2.

Where you might see a difference would only be in the linear read/write speed (copying a big file) which is probably high enough to fully saturate SATA but not PCIe. However in my opinion this doesn't really matter as you'd need to be copying that linear data to something (most likely a large HDD) which is going to itself become the bottleneck.

Also don't be fooled by the "specs" on SSDs. They are often providing misleading specs which only relate to the limits of the connection to the motherboard, not the actual speed of the SSD. Let's be honest there's tons of HDD's out there that are SATA III and advertise "6GB/s connection speed", yet we all know no spinning disk drive has yet to do more than around 175Mb/s anyway.