Does the SSD make a big difference?

[alcoholbob]

I'm with @BFG10K here. Even on desktop Windows applications, I barely notice any difference between my two Ryzen R5 3600 rigs, between the 4.2Ghz all-core OC with RAID-0 NVMe (2x QLC Intel 660p 1TB), and the one running stock with a 240GB Adata SP550 TLC SATA SSD.

I'm sure that I could find a workload that was faster on the RAID-0 NVMe, like Windows Defender all-drive scanning (probably, haven't timed it, the RAID-0 build has more files though, so it might actual take long, in real time, even though it might go faster). But for most things, no noticeable difference.

But isn't this just a matter of the application specific optimization? There's no incentive for anyone to optimize based on the disk speed because PC hardware is all over the place. With the next console generation, games will be specifically tweaked to exploit the new hardware to maximize performance. I'm not saying necessarily current nvme drives will benefit from this, but perhaps some next gen ones will, and maybe only accidentally. I do think PC ports will be lazy in general, but sometimes having similar hardware helps. A good example is Detroit Become Human is a pretty lazy PC port that expects 8 core CPUs because of the consoles. It runs like an absolute dog on anything under 8 cores with 100% CPU utilization, regardless of clock speed or IPC of the CPU itself.

Either way, I still like NVME drives for their compactness. They really help with ITX builds as you can add more storage without taking up much real estate in the case, regardless of whether they are faster or not.

 

[Midwayman]

This is absolutely meaningless without video proof. To date there's zero evidence of NVMe being significantly faster for games than SATA.

You might shave 5 seconds off which is basically nothing if multiplayer GTA5 (for example) takes 2 minutes to load. You're server & DRM bound in those cases.

Games aren't I/O bound whether they stream, fast-travel, or whatever once they're on any SSD. Heck, even a 10K Raptor offers comparable gaming performance in many gaming situations I've tested.


Please show us video evidence.

Sata SSD vs NVME 'significant' is your word, not mine. Still there are performance differences.

you actually even quoted me "Sata vs NVME its not really worth talking about,"

Still stand by not knowing why anyone would choose sata given the nominal price difference these days. Not significant in gaming workloads, but I don't only game.

 

[Red Hawk]

SSDs can have performance benefits in some games - or rather, some games can suffer if you play them off an HDD. One example is Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. The level asset streaming becomes a serious bottleneck on HDDs. It doesn't necessarily show up as frame rate drops, but as the game seeming to pause and hitch, and level environment geometry and textures taking a while to "pop in". You definitely get a better experience on an SSD rather than an HDD.

Right now though if you already have an SSD, you reach a point of diminishing returns. There's other bottlenecks beyond just raw read/write times, as Mark Cerny talked about in his PS5 presentation. You'll see a pretty massive difference just in load times going from an HDD to a SATA SSD, but from SATA to NVMe? Not nearly as big of a difference. Once next gen consoles hit and SSD I/O performance becomes the standard for all games to target, things might change.

 

[BFG10K]

Sata SSD vs NVME 'significant' is your word, not mine. Still there are performance differences.

"Significant" is my word, but "notice" is your repeated word. 0-2 seconds difference shown in most of those tests won't be noticed by anyone without an external timer, and just proves my point.

Still stand by not knowing why anyone would choose sata given the nominal price difference these days. Not significant in gaming workloads, but I don't only game.

The highest capacity SATA SSDs are generally cheaper than NVMe. On NewEgg right now the cheapest 2TB SATA vs NVMe is $197.99 vs $229.99.

For gaming that $32 would be far better spent on taking a system from 8GB to 16GB RAM, for example. Once you already have SATA SSD in the budget, NVMe should be the last place to spend money on.

Again, unless all you do is copy files all day, or have some kind of niche I/O workload where you already know you need NVMe. Anyone making a forum post asking whether they need NVMe doesn't need it. Likewise asking about RAM disks or 128GB RAM.

 

[alcoholbob]

Recent Moore's Law is Dead podcast today he talked about how PS5 devs were saying to get an acceptable performance on PC ports of PS5 games you will need something like 64GB (or more) of RAM because they might just opt to load entire levels into RAM to make up for the fact that the PC can't stream assets as fast as the PS5.

 

[Midwayman]

"Significant" is my word, but "notice" is your repeated word. 0-2 seconds difference shown in most of those tests won't be noticed by anyone without an external timer, and just proves my point.

Oh I do notice. Multiplayer games usually have some sort of load timer. NVME nearly always wins. Those are easy to see. I'm almost always the first couple of people to load on nvme. You're right that if you're building your system based on today's gaming load there isn't much of a reason to spend the small premium on a nvme if you have a really limited budget.

However PC's aren't all games and depending on what you're doing it can be a lot more significant. Storage is by far the slowest thing in your PC and spending $32 on storage that is several times faster is a smart move from a holistic perspective. There is also the fact that consoles are moving to SSDs and its quite possible the difference between drives is about to get a lot more apparent in gaming loads.

Given the OP's original question is about upgrading storage only, not a build and not strictly about gaming performance, the answer is an unqualified yes there is a difference. I don't know the OP's financial situation and 'worth it' depends a lot on that. I wouldn't replace Sata drives with nvme in an existing build, but I certainly would pay the premium myself if I were adding a drive or replacing a failed one.

 

[Ranulf]

Have a 2 year old PC that is running on an 840 Evo SSD. Have a chance to get a WD Black SN750, both 500GB. All else being equal, will it make any difference in performance? Will it just be in OS/game boot time but not gaming performance?

This shows the difference is huge... but maybe not where it counts...

UserBenchmark: Samsung 840 Evo vs WD Black SN750 NVMe PCIe M.2 (2019)

No, it likely won't matter except in some edge cases. My only issue would be to watch that 840 Evo for performance degradation. Those models had issues with them retaining data over time and mostly just slowing down over time and as they filled up. Make sure to run Samsung Magician software to keep an eye on that 840 Evo drive.