970 EVO or 860 EVO?

[Guest]

Hey everyone, I bought a Gigabyte Aero 15X, which comes with a 512 GB SSD, and I would like to buy an additional 1 TB SSD so that I don't have to worry about running out of storage for my games (and frankly way too many mods...). After some research, I found both the Samsung 970 EVO and the 860 EVO currently on sale and would like to buy one of those two. I'm most likely going to go for the 860 EVO, as all the information I could find on the internet points to there being almost no real-world noticeable difference between SATA and NVMe SSDs, especially when it comes to the loading times of games. Would this information indeed be correct? Are there any other benefits to having an NVMe SSD that might make me consider the 970 EVO a bit more carefully, or should I listen to the screams of my wallet and try to empty it slightly less? Finally, does anyone happen to know if the 860 EVO is even compatible with the Aero 15X in the first place? The empty M.2 slot in the laptop is a combined NVMe/SATA slot, which means that it should work fine in theory, right?

 

Thanks!

[Firewrath9]

More ssd storage > faster. Get both if you can, else the 860

[IdiotPenguin]

Get the SATA SSD. If all you’re doing is everyday use and games the speed difference between m.2 and sata is incredibly negligible.

[TheKDub]

The 970 EVO has read/write speeds up to 3500/2500 MB/s, whereas the 860 EVO is only around 550/520 MB/s.

 

While the 970 EVO is significantly faster, save the money and grab the 860 EVO, it'll be fast enough, and is compatible.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

More ssd storage > faster. Get both if you can, else the 860

Oh, believe me, I would if I could, but the dying screams of my wallet would haunt me forever...

7 minutes ago, IdiotPenguin said:

Get the SATA SSD. If all you’re doing is everyday use and games the speed difference between m.2 and sata is incredibly negligible.

7 minutes ago, TheKDub said:

The 970 EVO has read/write speeds up to 3500/2500 MB/s, whereas the 860 EVO is only around 550/520 MB/s.

 

While the 970 EVO is significantly faster, save the money and grab the 860 EVO, it'll be fast enough, and is compatible.

I thought so.

 

Thanks for your replies guys!

[Alex Atkin UK]

In my experience so far the only obvious improvement is if you run out of RAM.  The instant Windows decides to dump something into the virtual memory an NVME takes a few seconds vs the whole machine hanging for 30 seconds or so on SATA.

 

So really, as long as you have plenty of RAM you probably won't notice the difference.

[Sakkura]

49 minutes ago, TheKDub said:

The 970 EVO has read/write speeds up to 3500/2500 MB/s, whereas the 860 EVO is only around 550/520 MB/s.

Those are the relatively unimportant sequential speeds.

 

Something like the 4K random read QD1 performance is much more relevant to the typical user experience. And where the 860 Evo hits 9,000 IOPS, the 970 Evo only ups that to 12,000.

[Guest]

Thanks everyone for your replies, I bought the 860 EVO!