NVME M.2 vs SATA vs DRAM less SSD: What should I upgrade to?

[milesuy]

I am planning to upgrade my system with SSD. I am planning to buy 3 SSDs, one for WIndows 10 (OS Drive), the other for games, and the other for general use (ex: documents, excel files, pdf, game saves etc.).

 

Questions:

1. What kind SSD is suitable for Windows 10, game drive, and (general use) data drive? (NVME M.2 vs SATA vs DRAM less SSD)
2. Does using NVME M.2 have any benefits over SATA SSD in Winodws 10 and games?
3. Would you rather use a Hard Drive instead of an SSD for general use or data drive?

[jaslion]

Just get one big drive. For your usecase it doesn't matter if you get the fastest nvme driver or just a regular good sata ssd like a mx500. So:

 

1. Sata

2. For that usecase no

3. Ssd personally. For very infrequent files and just backup I'll use an hdd as I won't be accessing often it anyways.

[milesuy]

3 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Just get one big drive. For your usecase it doesn't matter if you get the fastest nvme driver or just a regular good sata ssd like a mx500. So:

 

1. Sata

2. For that usecase no

3. Ssd personally. For very infrequent files and just backup I'll use an hdd as I won't be accessing often it anyways.

 Is there a difference in performance in using a DRAM-less SSD vs using a SSD with DRAM? How much difference would it be?

[aDoomGuy]

Well...

 

NVMe has the potential to be faster than SATA SSD but in most cases it is not. The only case I can think about really is if you move large (10 GB) files back and forth between the NVMe drives.. Why one would do this I don't know...

 

What is holding SATA SSD back is the SATA bus. If you get let's say 2,3 or 4 SATA SSD and put them in RAID 0 you will get very nice speeds with SATA you will also get a very large volume to store your data at which can be expanded later on. 

 

1. SATA is perfectly fine. I went from Kingston A400 SSD (DRAM cacheless drive?) to NVMe and loading Windows only took maybe a second less with 2000 MB/s advertised speed.

2. Nope. Not many cases they do I think..

3. SSD. I have 3 SSD 1TB each and a 3TB Barracuda spinning drive which is mostly just a garbage dump for free Epic Store games lol. Music and video files also go on the spinning but the games I play either goes to my SSD RAID or NVMe since my RAID only has 22 gigs free space..

 

 

[Deano727]

It depends entirely on the pure amount of data you're wanting to store and number of games you frequently play.

 

my 2c... I would get an NVMe drive for your OS and "documents, excel files, pdf, game saves etc." (because they don't take up a whole lot of space. Depending on the size of this drive you could save particular programs, games etc that you use frequently and want ultimate performance for. 

 

The rest of your programs and games etc can go onto a slightly larger SSD for very good performance (only slightly less than NVMe). You could also run an HDD with an SSD cache to improve performance and raw storage capacity... 

 

I think 3 separate SSD's is kind of overkill but if that's your flavour it will be pretty awesome and clean.

[aDoomGuy]

5 minutes ago, milesuy said:

 Is there a difference in performance in using a DRAM-less SSD vs using a SSD with DRAM? How much difference would it be?

Depends what you are doing. If you load up Windows and then a game you won't notice it much but if you copy files to it then you will see it's performance crawl. That's what I experienced with my Kingston A400 anyway.