Best M.2 Drive

[That Mason Guy]

Looking the fastest M.2 Drive for an OS for under $200 AUD... Not USD, Cant afford that. its needed only for an OS and boot drive for my games, but preferably the fastest one possible, any help?

[Oshino Shinobu]

If it's for OS and games, go for a SATA SSD. While M.2 is only a form factor, I assume you're talking about NVMe. If that's the case, NVMe offers basically no benefit over SATA for your use case as neither of those uses benefit much from sequential read/write performance, which is what NVMe excels at. Random read/writes would help, but NVMe isn't much different from SATA in that sense. 

[That Mason Guy]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

If it's for OS and games, go for a SATA SSD. While M.2 is only a form factor, I assume you're talking about NVMe. If that's the case, NVMe offers basically no benefit over SATA for your use case as neither of those uses benefit much from sequential read/write performance, which is what NVMe excels at. Random read/writes would help, but NVMe isn't much different from SATA in that sense. 

Although I though M.2 NVME Drives are faster? would that not make the Boot faster? (Sorry new to this, honestly don't know too much about drives)

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, That Mason Guy said:

Although I though M.2 NVME Drives are faster? would that not make the Boot faster? (Sorry new to this, honestly don't know too much about drives)

NVMe drives are faster for sequential reads and writes. So things like big, sustained transfers will be quick. However, OS drives and loading games don't really benefit from this, as they tend to consist of smaller, random read/writes, especially for boot/OS use. For random read/writes, SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs are about the same, so there'd be no real difference in performance for your use case.

 

NVMe drives definitely have their uses, but for everyday use, gaming and booting, they're not really any better than regular SATA SSDs but are a hell of a lot more expensive. You'd get more for your money by going with a larger SATA SSD over a smaller NVMe drive. 

[Oshino Shinobu]

Here, these may be worth watching: 

 

 

 

Second video shows what I'm talking about. For boot and loading games, it makes basically no difference. For file transfers and some productivity workloads, it makes a big difference. 

[That Mason Guy]

Just now, Oshino Shinobu said:

Here, these may be worth watching: 

 

 

 

Second video shows what I'm talking about. For boot and loading games, it makes basically no difference. For file transfers and some productivity workloads, it makes a big difference. 

Thanks for the heaps of help, and nice build

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, That Mason Guy said:

Thanks for the heaps of help, and nice build

No problem, and thanks

[That Mason Guy]

2 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

No problem, and thanks

Say, if I were to go with the M.2 NVMe not just for OS, and get a larger drive to use a actual storage drive would you suggest something along the lins of this Samsung 960 EVO 250GB M.2?

http://www.umart.com.au/newsite/goods.php?id=37107

Or would you suggest something else?

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, That Mason Guy said:

Say, if I were to go with the M.2 NVMe not just for OS, and get a larger drive to use a actual storage drive would you suggest something along the lins of this Samsung 960 EVO 250GB M.2?

http://www.umart.com.au/newsite/goods.php?id=37107

Or would you suggest something else?

The 960 EVO is one of the best NVMe drives on the market, so if you're going to get one, that's a good choice.

[That Mason Guy]

Just now, Oshino Shinobu said:

The 960 EVO is one of the best NVMe drives on the market, so if you're going to get one, that's a good choice.

, then ill probably go with a 1TB SSD at a later date, because currently I'm only using a HDD