Standard SSD vs M.2 for OS drive...?

[atomicus]

Looking at 250GB for an OS drive (games on another drive, so this would be general desktop apps etc). Is it really worth spending the extra on the 960 EVO M.2? I know the figures speak for themselves and the M.2 is quicker, but in real world terms is it REALLY going to be that noticeable and worth the 40% price difference?? I know on paper there's a clear speed winner, just curious if anyone has used both and found the M.2 noticeably quicker at all?

 

The two drives in question are...

Samsung 960 EVO Polaris 250GB M.2 vs Samsung 250GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5"

[zzzzzzzhhh]

If you don't want to pay the extra price, it is completely fine, go with the 850 EVO, it is faster than most SSDs anyway.

 

An alternate option is going with the Crucial MX300 M.2, which would be a very good choice.

[Oshino Shinobu]

It makes basically no difference for booting, OS use and games. NVMe drives excel for sequential read/writes but are not much better than regular SATA SSDs in terms of random read/writes. All of the tasks you mentioned use primarily random read/writes, so NVMe and SATA drives are about equal for those use cases. 

[GirlFromYonder]

2 minutes ago, atomicus said:

Looking at 250GB for an OS drive (games on another drive, so this would be general desktop apps etc). Is it really worth spending the extra on the 960 EVO M.2? I know the figures speak for themselves and the M.2 is quicker, but in real world terms is it REALLY going to be that noticeable and worth the 40% price difference??

 

The two drives in quesiton are...

Samsung 960 EVO Polaris 250GB M.2 vs Samsung 250GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5"

Well the 960 evo has a 3 second faster boot time? Like 9sec vs 6 sec

[TheKDub]

8 minutes ago, atomicus said:

Looking at 250GB for an OS drive (games on another drive, so this would be general desktop apps etc). Is it really worth spending the extra on the 960 EVO M.2? I know the figures speak for themselves and the M.2 is quicker, but in real world terms is it REALLY going to be that noticeable and worth the 40% price difference?? I know on paper there's a clear speed winner, just curious if anyone has used both and found the M.2 noticeably quicker at all?

 

The two drives in question are...

Samsung 960 EVO Polaris 250GB M.2 vs Samsung 250GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5"

 

There wouldn't be much of a difference. 

 

The other option is an 850 EVO 250GB M.2 SSD, https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-850-EVO-Internal-MZ-N5E250BW/dp/B00TGIVZTW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500219394&sr=8-1&keywords=samsung+850+evo+m.2

It looks like it's slightly cheaper than the regular 850 EVO 250GB. https://www.amazon.com/250GB-Samsung-2-5-inch-powered-V-Nand/dp/B00P736UEU/ref=dp_ob_title_ce

 

I have both the 850 Evo 250GB (SATA version) and an 850 Evo 500GB (M.2 version), both work flawlessly.

 

Both would perform pretty much the same, the big difference being that you don't need to worry about running cables around your case for the M.2 SSD.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, DeezNoNos said:

Well the 960 evo has a 3 second faster boot time? Like 9sec vs 6 sec

If you reboot every 5 minutes, those 3 seconds might stack up, being worth 40% price increase. But if you reboot about once every 3 months or so, it gets rediculously xpensive. + who doesn't think/stare at a blanc screen once a day/week... Not worth the price difference in my book.

[atomicus]

Yes, lack of cables is a bonus for sure. I've got an M.2 in a build at the moment as my boot drive, and having had SSD before also I think it does boot a TOUCH quicker, but I can't say there's justification for the big price difference.

[Mira Yurizaki]

After having an NVMe drive for a year, I can barely feel a difference, if any, between it and any other SATA SSD I've used. There's no "oh my god this is slow" when I jump to my laptop which has a SATA M.2 drive.

 

I usually say go with a SATA drive, M.2 or otherwise, because you can usually get double the capacity for the same cost as an NVMe drive. Better to have more things that can take advantage of immediately noticeable speeds.

[Scruffy90]

Standard, very few programs will utilize the speeds of an nvme, and depending on your mobo, you may have some issues (I have some oddities with my 960evo and my mobo).

[iRileyx]

I think you're under the wrong impression here. (atleast from the wording of the title)

 

M.2 is simply a form factor, you can have SATA SSD's and SATA M,2's, both will run the exact same speed as they're still SATA,

[Sakkura]

30 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

It makes basically no difference for booting, OS use and games. NVMe drives excel for sequential read/writes but are not much better than regular SATA SSDs in terms of random read/writes. All of the tasks you mentioned use primarily random read/writes, so NVMe and SATA drives are about equal for those use cases. 

The 960 Evo does have much higher random read/write performance than SATA SSDs like the 850 Evo.

 

At QD1 (most relevant to consumer usage), the 960 Evo gets 16616 and 59964 random read/write IOPS. The 850 Evo gets 11335 and 38433. So the 960 Evo is about 50% faster.

 

It's just that booting and loading processes are not that storage-bottlenecked with a SATA SSD, so the time difference is pretty small.