SATA 3 SSD vs NVMe M.2 SSD

[lordholmz]

I have a standard 1tb hdd, and I want to upgrade to an ssd, I am debating on whether I should get a 250gb NVMe SSD or a 512gb SATA SSD. I use my computer for gaming and game development (Unreal Engine 4). Which would be the best price to performance option?

 

[USAFRet]

I have a standard 1tb hdd, and I want to upgrade to an ssd, I am debating on whether I should get a 250gb NVMe SSD or a 512gb SATA SSD. I use my computer for gaming and game development (Unreal Engine 4). Which would be the best price to performance option?

This depends a LOT on what the rest of the system is.
OS, motherboard, CPU, desktop, laptop, etc...

 

[lordholmz]

I have a standard 1tb hdd, and I want to upgrade to an ssd, I am debating on whether I should get a 250gb NVMe SSD or a 512gb SATA SSD. I use my computer for gaming and game development (Unreal Engine 4). Which would be the best price to performance option?

This depends a LOT on what the rest of the system is.
OS, motherboard, CPU, desktop, laptop, etc...

I have Windows 10 Home 64x, Ryzen 1600, 16gb ddr4 RAM, Gigabyte AB-350M Mb, GTX 1060 6gb. Is that enough info?

 

[kraelic]

Samsung seems to be in the lead, Good performance and good software for data migration and drive tools.

EVO 860 SATA M.2 500GB $135
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147677

EVO 960 NVME M.2 250GB $118
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147593


My 850 EVO 250 GB 2.5 SATA seems as fast as my 960 EVO 250GB M.2 in daily tasks, but file transfers and benchmarks clearly favor the 960.

 

[Solandri]

You have to invert SSD benchmarks to get real-life speeds. Instead of MB/s, you have to compare them in sec/MB, or how much time you have to wait for an operation to complete. When you do this you find that the biggest jump is from going from a HDD to any SSD. And the jump from a SATA 3 SSD to a NVMe SSD is relatively small. e.g. If you're reading a 1 GB file (sequential read speed):

8 sec - 125 MB/s HDD
4 sec - 250 MB/s SATA 2 SSD
2 sec - 500 MB/s SATA 3 SSD
1 sec - 1 GB/s PCIe SSD
0.5 sec - 2 GB/s NVMe SSD

So if the speedup from a HDD to a 2 GB/s NVMe SSD is 100%, then

The 250 MB/s SATA 2 SSD gives you 53% of that speedup.
The 500 MB/s SATA 3 SSD gives you 80% of that speedup.
The 1 GB/s PCIe SSD gives you 93% of that speedup.

Unless you're doing a lot of read/writes of large files (e.g. real-time video editing), generally the extra price of a NVMe SSD isn't worth it for the 20%-30% extra wait time reduction over a SATA SSD. Just get a cheap SSD with good 4k speeds (high IOPS if you can't find 4k benchmarks), and you will be fine.

SSD (and HDD) manufacturers and reviewers use MB/s because it exaggerates the effect of faster speeds, when they make practically no difference in real-life applications. Both Toms Hardware and Anandtech have done stories in the past where they compared SSDs in sec/MB. And their conclusion was that there's practically no perceivable difference between SSDs when benchmarked that way. So they continue to use MB/s because otherwise people could buy SSDs based solely on $ per GB. They wouldn't want to read reviews anymore, which would be bad for advertising revenue for the review sites.

 

[mdd1963]

MOst gamers who have used both (NVME vs. normal SATA SSD) are fairly quick to admit the difference in jumping from normal SATA SSD to NVME is not that noticeable....

(it is indeed impressive to install Win10 pro from USB in ~4 minutes flat with a nice M.2 NVME drive, however...; but the gaming level load times are not drastically affected...)