SATA vs. PCIE, future proofing.

[Vladamir_1]

I am going to be replacing my hard drive soon with an ssd. I have seen that there are 2 kinds, SATA and PCIE. From what i can see, PCIE seems to be similar speeds to SATA, but with more potential. Is it worth getting a PCIE ssd over a SATA one? Also will PCIE ssd work with older motherboards (Asrock Z77). At the moment i am looking at the samsung 850 EVO 500gb/1tb (which im told is the best), or the 960 for PCIE. Is it worth the extra money for a PCIE harddrive over a SATA?

 

[srimasis]

Get a Sata SSD for now and you will have the M2 slot or Pcie slot available for the future. Also Sata SSDs like Crucial Mx300 will give you speeds like 1.5-2 GBps when you turn on Ram caching (Momentum cache in Crucial SSDs). Momentum cache also increases the life of SSD since the smaller writes are absorbed in Ram.

 

[Rexper]

Those are interfaces. M.2" form factor supports PCIe interface and Sata. 2.5" does not support PCIe interface.

An SSDD with PCIe interface would only make a real performance increase if it uses an NVMe protocol and MLC NAND flash, otherwise it will be bottlenecked and end up performing like a high quality sata SSD.

 

[Sakkura]

An SSDD with PCIe interface would only make a real performance increase if it uses an NVMe protocol and MLC NAND flash, otherwise it will be bottlenecked and end up performing like a high quality sata SSD.

That's not true. The NVMe protocol only makes a modest (10-20%) difference, the big speed boost comes from replacing the 600 MB/s maximum throughput of SATA with the ~4 GB/s maximum of PCIe 3.0 x4.

Having an SSD that can transfer data sequentially at a few GB/s isn't going to make a really noticeable difference in regular consumer usage though. It's more relevant for prosumer or workstation.