[SOLVED] SATA, PCIe card, or M.2 for 4 lane PCIe 3.0?

[Zanzibari]

I’m looking to install a new SSD boot drive in my computer and hoping someone can advise me. It’s a desktop CAD workstation built in 2017. I currently have a 512GB SATA Samsung SSD as my boot drive. It works fine and is pretty speedy, but it is nearing 450gb used space. With my CAD packages getting bigger with new releases, I need to bump up to 750gb or a 1TB. I’m thinking that I’ll install a new larger one as my boot drive and leave the old one in the computer as a backup boot drive in case the new one ever fails.
My question is what type of SSD would be best for me to get. It would be nice to get an even faster drive if it’s not crazy expensive.

My computer has one PCIe 3.0 4x NVMe slot available, and it has M.2 slot available with space for a long M.2 card. The motherboard spec for the M.2 slot says:

• Support up to PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA 6Gb/s
• Supports 2242/ 2260 /2280 22110 storage devices
• Support PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe U.2 SSD with Turbo U.2 Host Card (host card is not included)
• A web promo page for this motherboard also says: “Turbo M.2 with Steel Armor: NVMe support, up to 32 Gb/s using PCI-Express Gen3 x4”.

Would a PCIe SSD in my 4x slot give me any appreciable transfer speed increase over a SATA SSD? How about the M.2 slot with an NVME M.2 SSD card? Since both are PCIe 3.0, not 4.0 and only 4 lanes, I’m wondering if I might not get any noticeable transfer rate increase over just a standard SATA drive at 6Gb/sec. Thank you for any insight into this!

 

[rgd1101]

pcie 3.0 x4 is have much higher thruput than sata

 

[popatim]

IMO - Just get a bigger Sata SSD.

An NVME drive would just about require a fresh installation of Windows & all your stuff. Booting from an NVME drive is different then booting from Sata and cloning doesn't work so well.

An adapter card thru the x4 slot would probably be routed thru the PCH (southbridge) chip plus your x4 slot may not be x4 electrically (You don't mention which motherboard you have.) and may not be bootable. This depends on which SSD you use in it but then you dont have a 2nd NVME drive so the option shouldn't even be in the picture at this point IMO. Save it for when you do need a 2nd NVME drive.

Since you current drive is a Sata SSD, you would just need to clone to the new larger drive, increasing the C: partition as part of the process.

Easy. I like easy.

 

[USAFRet]

How is your current performance with the SATA drive?
If it is fine, just upgrade to or add a larger SATA SSD.

What motherboard is this on? What are the rest of the specs?