Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazrim
Two questions for you based on what you said here:
- I read that M.2's main difference over SATA III is simply in large file transfer, and for gaming it's not a huge difference. Do you agree with that?
|
I think that's a pretty fair generalization. SATA III drives are likely going to be bottlenecked by the interface these days, so they're going to max out at 600MB/s, where an m.2 drive could go much higher depending on the drive and interface (m.2 drives could also be SATA drives in which case they have the same limit, or they could be NVMe drives which can go much higher).
For gaming if a game is loading a bunch of small files then the SSD will be much faster in either case. If the game is loading a large level file say, then it still might benefit from the faster SSD, able to load the file in 2 seconds instaed of 5 or something, it would depend on the game (and I'm sure there's benchmarks out there for load times with SATA vs NVMe). But I don't think the difference would be all that significant vs the huge increase from spinning disk to SSD, and you don't have much choice anyway.
Copying files from NVMe to NVMe drive of course will usually go a lot faster since it'll be bottlenecked by the drives themselves (which might be 4-5 times faster than SATA III or even more)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazrim
I haven't heard about smaller SSDs having slower performance before. Is 1 TB a sweet spot for speed, then? 2 TB SSD costs are pretty rough IMO.
|
It usually has to do with the amount of nand chips on the drive, the more chips there are the more it can split writes between them to improve performance, and bigger drives usually have more chips.
Not sure if there's a sweet spot, I think it might vary on each drive line, I'd probably just get a size that works and not worry too much about the performance difference.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12674...-evo-nvme-ssds
For example the Samsung 970 EVO the reads are almost the same from 250GB to 2TB. The sequential writes double at each step until 1TB to 2TB. While the pro model has little change from 500GB to 1TB.
You'd probably have to check the tests for the specific model but if you're limited to a SATA III drive then it's not going to matter anyway, just look for good warranty and quality.