Question Would you recommend this M.2 NVMe SSD for my desktop gaming PC?

[Dan Dread]

Hello, I have a Gigabyte GA-Z270X-Gaming K7 motherboard. It is supposed to be able to take M.2 SSD's. This is for a desktop gaming PC for both modern Steam games and a large catalogue of retro games.

From what I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong): SSD's are faster than HDD's. But NVMe M.2 SSD's that go into the PCIe slot on your mobo are around 7 times faster than your regular SATA SSD's.

So in theory, this sounds like a great idea. Right now I have a 512 TB SATA SSD. I would like to take advantage of the M.2 capability for the added speed.

Would this one be good, and work with my motherboard? It's $140.00.
Silicon Power 1TB NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 r/W up to 3,200/3,000MB/s SSD (SU001TBP34A80M28AB)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L6GF81L/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_1?smid=A25SITGFW0OQJA&psc=1

I see the prices for these things seem to range between $140 and upwards of $300. Not exactly sure why. If this $140 one will be 7 times faster, why not?

 

[cdrkf]

Hello, I have a Gigabyte GA-Z270X-Gaming K7 motherboard. It is supposed to be able to take M.2 SSD's. This is for a desktop gaming PC for both modern Steam games and a large catalogue of retro games.

From what I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong): SSD's are faster than HDD's. But NVMe M.2 SSD's that go into the PCIe slot on your mobo are around 7 times faster than your regular SATA SSD's.

So in theory, this sounds like a great idea. Right now I have a 512 TB SATA SSD. I would like to take advantage of the M.2 capability for the added speed.

Would this one be good, and work with my motherboard? It's $140.00.
Silicon Power 1TB NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 r/W up to 3,200/3,000MB/s SSD (SU001TBP34A80M28AB)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L6GF81L/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_1?smid=A25SITGFW0OQJA&psc=1

I see the prices for these things seem to range between $140 and upwards of $300. Not exactly sure why. If this $140 one will be 7 times faster, why not?

Well the '7x faster' is a little misleading to be honest. I would recommend doing a google search on game load times of M2 vs SSD vs HDD.... from what I've seen the difference from HDD to SSD is massive (3 minutes to 30 seconds kinda thing) however going from SSD to M2 is quite small (say 30 seconds to 27 seconds).

The speed rating is the maximum performance in sequential read / write, so in benchmarks NVMe drives score really high, whereas sata SSD's are limited by the interface speed to 600 MB/s so look slow in comarrison. The issue with this is that in actual use, most workloads aren't sequential (or only little bits are) so it's the random read write performance that matter most (measures in 'IOPS'). The speeds of all SSD drives in this scenario are much slower (still way better than HDD) and are typically below the sata limit of 600 MB/s... so in these cases an NVMe drive and Sata SSD will perform the same.

Where you get differnt prices on these drives is down to the type of memory chips and controller used to create the drive. A lot of the cheaper components can achieve very high sequential results (which give great numbers for marketing) but bog down when you throw a complex random workload at them. Take a good look at the radom IOPS figures for the drives, good drives will have higher IOPS for all different types of workload. I actually think in real use a really good quality sata SSD might actually perform better (on average) than a cheap NVMe unit- and even if you do get a really fast NVMe, in games your not going to get that much more performance. It's nothing like moving form an HDD to an SSD.

 

[Dan Dread]

Ah, thank you very much for that information! I will stick with the 512 GB SSD I have now then. Thanks again.