What would justify an M.2 NVMe drive?

[-Ice]

I'm hoping to "retire" my old Crucial M4 and was thinking of getting either another SSD or an M.2 NVMe for an OS drive. I currently also have a Samsung 850 250GB for games and have short-stroked two 1TB HDDs for other games and use the rest of the drive for storage. I do a little photo editing and would like to do some videos later on once I learn how to do it, but aside from Photoshop and the occasional MS Office work, I usually use my PC for gaming.

I've got a strong hunch that most people here would not recommend getting an M.2 NVMe drive since SATA SSDs aren't really being pushed to the limit that often, so what programs or applications would justify buying an M.2 NVMe drive?

I'm guessing for boot times and program startups, an M.2 NVMe would not make much difference compared to a SATA SSD, correct? Same thing for game loading times?

[nobiggieBIG]

fast. thats it

[Bananasplit_00]

timelines scrolling in Adobe Premiere with 4k raw footage maybe?

[Enderman]

6 minutes ago, -Ice said:

I'm guessing for boot times and program startups, an M.2 NVMe would not make much difference compared to a SATA SSD, correct? Same thing for game loading times?

You're right, it's exactly the same as a regular sata SSD.

 

2 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

timelines scrolling in Adobe Premiere with 4k raw footage maybe?

Scrolling will be really benefited by NVME, but it's still better to have lots of ram because ram is still much faster than NVME.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Large sustained transfers is where NVMe shines. For OS drives, they're not all that great as it typically doesn't benefit from high sequential read/writes. 

[stealth80]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

You're right, it's exactly the same as a regular sata SSD.

 

Scrolling will be really benefited by NVME, but it's still better to have lots of ram because ram is still much faster than NVME.

This - Infact I honestly think my m.2 is slower during boot than what my agility 3 SSD was lol

[typographie]

For what it's worth, the Intel 600p NVMe M.2 drives are pretty cheap. At the moment the 512 GB 600p is a bit cheaper than a 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO on Newegg US. It's not a spectacular NVMe drive, but it would probably be faster than a SATA drive in most circumstances.

 

Review conclusion page:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10850/the-intel-ssd-600p-512gb-review/10

[Rohime]

20 minutes ago, -Ice said:

 so what programs or applications would justify buying an M.2 NVMe drive?

 

 

Anything that has LARGE sequential file copies, either between drives inside a PC or across 10Gbps++ connections to external devices.    Almost all other NVMe performance benefit is inconsequential in real life.

 

Still its pretty impressive when windows copy will report a 3GB/s copy speed between NVMe and RAM Disk.

[-Ice]

What is a "large sequential file copy"??