M.2 Vs. SSD

[bmanthomas]

I am going to build a new computer. My price range is like that of the latest video by Luke, $1700. 

I am not that much of a data hog and don't need 2 terabytes of hard drive and like to have only SSD's. I am looking at getting two SSD's, a main hard drive around 500 GB and a second at around half that. I was looking at a M.2 SSD  and wondering if it would be more beneficial if one of my SSD's are M.2, will it make a difference, and if so how large should the drive be?

[79wjd]

To be honest, you likely wouldn't notice any difference between the fastest NVME PCIE M.2 drive and a decent Sata 3 SSD. So I would personally say just get two Sata 3 SSDs (120gb SP550 for the OS and then a 500gb SP550 for storage). M.2 drives just aren't worth the price premium as far as I'm concerned. 

[mockedarche]

djdwosk97 is in all honesty really really right there gets to a point were that speed just isnt the bottleneck anymore yes sata can be much slower but with how cheap their getting I would a larger ssd and call it a day unless you are constantly having to transfer data over a very fast connection or maybe inside your computer you wont see much of a boost now if you want to go crazy for for a really fast low capacity m.2 and just have your os on there kinda for shits and giggles but on a good hdd windows 7 and up are really buttery smooth and on a ssd any really slow downs are just gone so I personally dont see that extra money helping

[79wjd]

2 minutes ago, Ohsnaps said:

djdwosk97 is in all honesty really really right there gets to a point were that speed just isnt the bottleneck anymore yes sata can be much slower but with how cheap their getting I would a larger ssd and call it a day unless you are constantly having to transfer data over a very fast connection or maybe inside your computer you wont see much of a boost now if you want to go crazy for for a really fast low capacity m.2 and just have your os on there kinda for shits and giggles but on a good hdd windows 7 and up are really buttery smooth and on a ssd any really slow downs are just gone so I personally dont see that extra money helping

To add to this, M.2 drives are / have the potential to be MUCH faster than Sata 3 SSDs. However, it's important to understand why an SSD is "fast". There are two important metrics to consider, there's read/write speeds and there is latency.

• High read/writes (where PCIE drives can have a huge advantage over Sata 3 drives) are good if you're reading/writing large amounts of data from/to another equally fast drive or if you're doing some intensive rendering and your write speeds are limiting your render time (rather than your CPU speeds).
• The second factor is latency. This is what makes opening chrome or booting the OS seem snappy. PCIE and Sata 3 drives both have relatively similar latency. 

 

[vanished]

moved to storage devices