Nvme, sata 3, or hdd?

[ChaseDown]

Hi! 

I'm building a new pc and wonder what the benefits are of nvme over ssd ?

My old pc had a 1tb wd green, and a 250gb wd blue as the ps drive.

Other than My fans and gpu the next most noticible noise is my hdds. So I was thinking of going add ssd!  I was looking at a 480gb adata spg sx8200 Nvme drive with a 1tb wd blue ssd sata 3 drive. Or for around the same price doing a 250gb we blue ssd sata 3 with a 2tb micron ssd. The first combo comes out to be about 330 bucks( based on pcpartpicker) the second option is about 370 bucks. Both are all ssd setups, what I'm asking is would I be missing out on the nvme speed for the extra storage?

 

The only experience I have with ssd's is my wife has a lenovo yoga with a 512 nvme drive and I love how fast and quiet it is!

 

Thanks for the help!

[Electronics Wizardy]

How much data are you using total?

 

Id be tempted to get a single hp ex920 drive, about 300 for a 1tb fast nvme.

[LionSpeck]

1 minute ago, ChaseDown said:

Hi! 

I'm building a new pc and wonder what the benefits are of nvme over ssd ?

My old pc had a 1tb wd green, and a 250gb wd blue as the ps drive.

Other than My fans and gpu the next most noticible noise is my hdds. So I was thinking of going add ssd!  I was looking at a 480gb adata spg sx8200 Nvme drive with a 1tb wd blue ssd sata 3 drive. Or for around the same price doing a 250gb we blue ssd sata 3 with a 2tb micron ssd. The first combo comes out to be about 330 bucks( based on pcpartpicker) the second option is about 370 bucks. Both are all ssd setups, what I'm asking is would I be missing out on the nvme speed for the extra storage?

 

The only experience I have with ssd's is my wife has a lenovo yoga with a 512 nvme drive and I love how fast and quiet it is!

 

Thanks for the help!

SATA SSD over HDD is a waaay bigger improvement than NVMe SSD over SATA SSD. If it's a boot drive, I'd say it's not a waste of money to go NVMe, especially for professional applications, but if it's not a boot drive, I can only recommend SATA SSDs

[Sniperfox47]

NVMe drives are nice. But it's nowhere *near* the difference you see between a HDD and AHCI SSD. Honestly if you stick with the slower SSD you probably wouldn't even notice the difference in most cases.If you're planning to use it for things that need the extra bandwidth like as a scratch drive for video editing then by all means, but otherwise it's not worth a huge investment.

[KarathKasun]

SATA 3 and NVME will give you effectively the same experience.  If you do very heavy data transfer tasks the NVMe drive will be faster, but loading times for apps and games will not be significantly different.

 

The main advantage of NVMe is physical size.

[DocSwag]

NVMe drives don't help with boot times and app launch times. If you're transferring large files, using it as a scratch disk for video editing, etc. it can help. Otherwise, a decent SATA SSD is fine.

[Sniperfox47]

3 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

SATA 3 and NVME will give you effectively the same experience.  If you do very heavy data transfer tasks the NVMe drive will be faster, but loading times for apps and games will not be significantly different.

 

The main advantage of NVMe is physical size.

NVMe chips are about the same size as AHCI chips.

 

AHCI/SATA, AHCI/PCIe, and NVMe/PCIe can all come in m.2, PCIe card, 2.5" or any other form factor.

 

NVMe's benefit over AHCI are not size (same size of chip) or throughput (both can use PCIe) but rather efficiency and low latency for improving the performance for lots of small random accesses.

[ChaseDown]

Thank you everyone. I don't plan on doing alot of video editing, maybe some, as my brother in law got a new drone and wants me to help him make some videos. I mostly game and consume content, YouTube or twitch or read articles or watch movies while gaming or combination of those things.

 I looked and for 30 bucks more than the second option I can get a 240gb nvme and thw 2tb ssd would that be worth it for the boot drive or are we talking about fractions of seconds difference on everyday tasks?

[Sniperfox47]

Just now, ChaseDown said:

Thank you everyone. I don't plan on doing alot of video editing, maybe some, as my brother in law got a new drone and wants me to help him make some videos. I mostly game and consume content, YouTube or twitch or read articles or watch movies while gaming or combination of those things.

 I looked and for 30 bucks more than the second option I can get a 240gb nvme and thw 2tb ssd would that be worth it for the boot drive or are we talking about fractions of seconds difference on everyday tasks?

Honestly for your workload I wouldn't even spend the extra $30. You're talking fractions of fractions of fractions of a second here for most of the stuff you'd be doing.

[ChaseDown]

5 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Honestly for your workload I wouldn't even spend the extra $30. You're talking fractions of fractions of fractions of a second here for most of the stuff you'd be doing.

In that case should i even bother with a dedicated boot drive? Would just the 2tb micron drive be ok? I don't currently use all of my 1.25 tb space in my current setup?

[Sniperfox47]

1 minute ago, ChaseDown said:

In that case should i even bother with a dedicated boot drive? Would just the 2tb micron drive be ok? I don't currently use all of my 1.25 tb space in my current setup?

I have no idea what the Micron drives performance is like, particularly without having any idea what drive it is xP

If it's a drive that performs decently there might not be much incentive to have a dedicated boot drive. If it's on the slower side it may be worth getting a faster drive as a boot drive.

 

When looking at boot speeds see if they list IOPS because that will give you a little better idea of how fast it might load your OS than the raw sequential reads. But of course even that's not really a substitute for looking at reviews.

[KarathKasun]

20 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

NVMe chips are about the same size as AHCI chips.

 

AHCI/SATA, AHCI/PCIe, and NVMe/PCIe can all come in m.2, PCIe card, 2.5" or any other form factor.

 

NVMe's benefit over AHCI are not size (same size of chip) or throughput (both can use PCIe) but rather efficiency and low latency for improving the performance for lots of small random accesses.

For end users M.2, be it NVMe, SATAe, or SATA, costs more per gigabyte than 2.5" SATA.  The only real benefit to the user experience is size and placement.  It has nothing to do with the size of the chips, NVMe has no 2.5" formfactor priced for the mainstream market.

 

Also, the only WD Blue 250gb drive is 2.5" SATA.  Nevermind, found the M.2 one that is 250gb instead of 256gb.

[ChaseDown]

5 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

I have no idea what the Micron drives performance is like, particularly without having any idea what drive it is xP

If it's a drive that performs decently there might not be much incentive to have a dedicated boot drive. If it's on the slower side it may be worth getting a faster drive as a boot drive.

 

When looking at boot speeds see if they list IOPS because that will give you a little better idea of how fast it might load your OS than the raw sequential reads. But of course even that's not really a substitute for looking at reviews.

Its a micron 1100 2tb drive ive seen reviews on the 500gb version and its at the top of the low end or bottom of tbe middle usually lol.

[ChaseDown]

1 minute ago, KarathKasun said:

For end users M.2, be it NVMe, SATAe, or SATA, costs more per gigabyte than 2.5" SATA.  The only real benefit to the user experience is size and placement.  It has nothing to do with the size of the chips, NVMe has no 2.5" formfactor priced for the mainstream market.

 

Also, the only WD Blue 250gb drive is 2.5" SATA.

Yes the only nvme drive I mentioned here is the adata xpg sx8200 drive.

[seagate_surfer]

Hello ChaseDown,

 

Nowadays there are hundreds of reason to get a SSD over a HDD, they have become so popular and now affordable in comparison to what they used to cost just a few years back that the decision seems to almost be obvious... Not quite! It all depends on the application of where those hard drives will be. If you have a budget to get a PCIe NVMe hard drive go for it, booting from an NVME device feels sweet but nothing else than opening everything faster, one SSD working with a large storage HDD seems to be the right option for most of us as we like to collect things but for some other people just one SATA 3 SSD or just one NVME hard drive is enough and SSDs (either SATA 3 or NVMe) will always be faster than a HDD.