ssd NVMe speed and value

[George.]

Hey, so I own a Lenovo ideapad flex 5 with ryzen 3 4300u with 8GB RAM and I found out that it has a second m.2 (PCI-e 3.0) slot (2280) in addition to the already occupied (2242) one.

The ssd this laptop came with is quite tiny for me (250GB), so I figured It'd be nice If I occupy the second slot with another 500GB NVMe ssd.

Consider that I'll use whichever of the 2 drives is faster for the system allocated partition as well as page file.

Question is, is there any actual real world benefit to buying something speedy and fancier like a Samsung EVO Plus (3500/3300 r/w) or should I just go with whatever is the cheapest 500GB one that goes up to 2000/1500 r/w.

Are there any actual benefits to having 1GB extra max speed cap or is it just an overkill anyways?

Things I do: some light engineering stuff (CAD, Matlab), photo editing (Photoshop), light gaming (WoW, CS:GO), I play around with Linux distros in VMs and I do office work.

I am a seeker of performance (deminished by a tight budget lol) so value it is for me.

If there are any benefits (e.g. faster page file r/w, quicker load times) then I could go for the Samsung one and max out the PCI-e 3.0 interface...but if it's just BS, I'd rather not.

 

No ram slots (I know it sucks, but I can actually multitask with no problems considering my workloads even when I open everything just to watch it struggle, it's still snappy enough), so I do have a lot of page file actions going on sometimes, so that's the main think I care to boost with a faster drive, if possible.

 

Thanks in advance!

Cheers!

 

P.S. Also how would that go for the battery life? I assume it'll drain faster with 2 drives powered on. 

A faster SSD would finish file transfers in less time so that'd reduce power usage I guess.

If the workload consists of tiny transfers happening all the time that wouldn't be valid, tho, I also guess.

[AnirbanG007]

2 minutes ago, George. said:

Hey, so I own a Lenovo ideapad flex 5 with ryzen 3 4300u with 8GB RAM and I found out that it has a second m.2 (PCI-e 3.0) slot (2280) in addition to the already occupied (2242) one.

The ssd this laptop came with is quite tiny for me (250GB), so I figured It'd be nice If I occupy the second slot with another 500GB NVMe ssd.

Consider that I'll use whichever of the 2 drives is faster for the system allocated partition as well as page file.

Question is, is there any actual real world benefit to buying something speedy and fancier like a Samsung EVO Plus (3500/3300 r/w) or should I just go with whatever is the cheapest 500GB one that goes up to 2000/1500 r/w.

Are there any actual benefits to having 1GB extra max speed cap or is it just an overkill anyways?

Things I do: some light engineering stuff (CAD, Matlab), photo editing (Photoshop), light gaming (WoW, CS:GO), I play around with Linux distros in VMs and I do office work.

I am a seeker of performance (deminished by a tight budget lol) so value it is for me.

If there are any benefits (e.g. faster page file r/w, quicker load times) then I could go for the Samsung one and max out the PCI-e 3.0 interface...but if it's just BS, I'd rather not.

 

Thanks in advance!

Cheers!

 

P.S. Also how would that go for the battery life? I assume it'll drain faster with 2 drives powered on. 

A faster SSD would finish file transfers in less time so that'd reduce power usage I guess.

If the workload consists of tiny transfers happening all the time that wouldn't be valid, tho, I also guess.

You could just go with a cheap but good nvme ssd like sn550, it is 2280 afaik. IMO, there is not a whole lotta benefits from having multi-gigabyte transfer speeds like that unless you're transferring large files all day, otherwise you don't really get that speed, what really matters in everyday performance is random read/write.

[George.]

1 minute ago, AnirbanG007 said:

You could just go with a cheap but good nvme ssd like sn550, it is 2280 afaik. IMO, there is not a whole lotta benefits from having multi-gigabyte transfer speeds like that unless you're transferring large files all day, otherwise you don't really get that speed, what really matters in everyday performance is random read/write.

Yeah, I'd be bottlenecked way before nvme speed caps by my external storage medias and LAN,WAN link speeds haha.

 

[AnirbanG007]

3 minutes ago, George. said:

Yeah, I'd be bottlenecked way before nvme speed caps by my external storage medias and LAN,WAN link speeds haha.

 

Yeah of course, no point in that. Those are more needed in servers where they actually serve a purpose other than being a number on the marketing page.