NVME vs SATA m.2?

manny1222

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So with black Friday coming, I'm hoping for deals that allow an upgrade (sidegrade) from my 2.5 inch SSD (850 Evo 500gb) to an m.2 SSD to get rid of some cables in my cramped rig (also getting rid of 1tb hdd for general storage). With about similar pricing would you do 500gb NVME or 1tb sata m.2?
Rig is used primarily for gaming and without mass storage I would be getting near capacity for 500gb. I'm not too sure I fully understand SSD technology but I'm under the notion that speed falls drastically when you're near max capacity for any type of SSD. Also I'm not sure how much the speed advantage of NVME matters for real life, but at the same time I would want this to be "future proof" (of course I'm using that with a grain of salt), so I wouldn't need another for a long time.
So what do you think?
 
You'd be hard pressed to notice any difference between SATA and NVMe SSDs for the kinds of things most people use their PCs for. Probably better off going for more capacity.
 
NVMe is great if you can utilize it, and it's also nice especially in laptops where things like on/off hibernate is practically instantaneous. But in this scenario for a primarily gaming rig I would recommend the 1TB SATA M.2 over a 500GB NVMe for sure as the performance difference in that case is negligible at this point in time.
 
Yeah I recently put an NVME in my main rig. While its great for less cords from the psu and to the board (itx build) can't say I notice much difference
 
Yeah I recently put an NVME in my main rig. While its great for less cords from the psu and to the board (itx build) can't say I notice much difference

Same, went from an older 2.5" sata to NVME Adata SX8200 and really notice no difference. Adata 480GB was only $93 and the cheapest 500GB M.2 Sata I had seen at the time was around $70 so I went with NVME. If you are looking at 1TB drives the price difference is a lot higher for some reason.
 
Here's a new question...

How much does it being a retail purchase matter to you? Do you trust in the Samsung quality to go with an OEM Pull? Because I've been seeing Samsung 500GB nVME drives going for near $100 on eBay. They are brand new, but pulls from systems, so they're OEM and lacking any official warranty. Also important to mention is they do not support Magician Wizard or Samsung firmware upgrades. The latter is the biggest thing I was really bummed out about, as I bought a 240GB model earlier in the year during an eBay %-Off Promo.

I've found three right now in searching quick. They're between $100 and $110. They're not the absolute latest model, but they're still very recent models. Two are PM961, and one is an SM961. The PMs are EVO and SM are PRO, as I understand it. These are, again, OEM though, but still their performance is 95% of what the retail-firmware equipped models attain.

And for what it's worth, I found some 1TB OEM models for only $200-$210, and even a retail 960 EVO 1TB for $217 shipped.

(I'm not posting links so that if Manny is interested, he gets first dibs :pompous:)

EDIT: Well, ok I guess that $217 isn't quite as good a deal as I had thought. Been a couple months since I looked at pricing on them and it's come down quite a bit. A 970 EVO 1TB, but out of stock, on NewEgg (sold by NewEgg) were priced at $227. Not sure why, though. A similar 970 EVO 1TB is $379 (newer variant based on model number), but does have a PromoCode for "Extra Savings" at least. :p
 
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Same, went from an older 2.5" sata to NVME Adata SX8200 and really notice no difference. Adata 480GB was only $93 and the cheapest 500GB M.2 Sata I had seen at the time was around $70 so I went with NVME. If you are looking at 1TB drives the price difference is a lot higher for some reason.

I just did the exact same upgrade. I also bought the SX8200 480GB for $93 and it replaced a 2.5" sata SSD. Other than having double the space on my C: drive (went from a 240GB to the 480GB) I can't say much is different. Boot times are about the same. Things like expanding a zip file are way faster, but those are the exception. My PC doesn't really feel any faster or more responsive.

I'm now wondering if I should have bought a 1TB 2.5" SSD for a few dollars more and maybe could have done away with the two mechanical drives I use for storage.
 
Am looking around on Amazon and can't help but notice that the Samsung 960 2TB is $100 off and only $300.
However I'm extremely interested in this item, which doesn't seem to be in stock anywhere yet: https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categ...2-SSDs/Force-Series-MP510/p/CSSD-F1920GBMP510
While obviously more expensive, it does seem to have a good bang for the buck.
For a machine I use for everything from gaming to Adobe Creative Suite (very little video, though) - will I notice much difference?
 
Yeah I recently put an NVME in my main rig. While its great for less cords from the psu and to the board (itx build) can't say I notice much difference

Just to clarify because i think this point is still confused by some people, the whole "no cables" thing isn't NVMe specific. You can get both SATA and NVMe SSD's in the M.2 form factor.
 
Just to clarify because i think this point is still confused by some people, the whole "no cables" thing isn't NVMe specific. You can get both SATA and NVMe SSD's in the M.2 form factor.
I think he was implying that even going from a SATA protocol drive, to an NVMe drive, he didn't notice any real difference in every-day speeds. So regardless of cabled or not, it's still a valid observation. I've never bothered to look, but I wouldn't expect the m.2 SATA drives to really see any speed difference given it's still held back by the limitations of the SATA protocol.

Though while irrelevant to this thread, a fun fact some may not have known, is that there are (well, were I suppose given m.2 seems to have phased it out) some laptops with multifunction mPCIe slots, as they have support for cards operating on the USB protocol (which is just something mPCIe was capable of), as well as mSATA cards. Thought the mSATA is another ball of wax as it either did not have mPCIe electrical connections, or was a hodgepodge by the manufacturer that managed to be capable of all three.


Am looking around on Amazon and can't help but notice that the Samsung 960 2TB is $100 off and only $300.
However I'm extremely interested in this item, which doesn't seem to be in stock anywhere yet: https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categ...2-SSDs/Force-Series-MP510/p/CSSD-F1920GBMP510
While obviously more expensive, it does seem to have a good bang for the buck.
For a machine I use for everything from gaming to Adobe Creative Suite (very little video, though) - will I notice much difference?
I have no issues with Corsair, I strictly would use their RAM and PSUs back in the SDR and DDR days, and they still make good stuff... However, with SSDs, I dunno how well their actual failure rates are in terms of real world vs their specs, and as such I've come to have a bit of a bias towards Samsung. I know that 3D NAND isn't exclusive to Samsung products anymore, and while it's very well possible this is true, without doing research for a day I have a hard time believing that the other guys making 3D NAND are going to have much of a leg-up on Samsung in NAND endurance.

That being said, there are two things that give me pause about that drive. First is not too big of a deal since it's marketing, but they flaunt "Up to 3000MB/s Writes", yet in the Specs section they say in CrystalDiskMark (CDM) test it's only 2700MB/s. heh

The other is the endurance... To start off, on Samsung's 960 Pro 2TB it has an endurance of 1,200 TBW (Terrabytes Written), the 970 Pro 1TB has 1,200 TBW, and the 970 EVO 2TB has 1,200 TBW. On all of their drives, for each capacity, its endurance is 2x that of the next. So in theory we can extrapolate that if Samsung came out with a 970 Pro 2TB then it'd have 2,400 TBW.
Granted, this is a combination of things that allow for that, and I know the Pro drives do come with an extra chip that acts as provisioning vs the EVO which sacrifices a little out of each chip's overall capacity (hence EVO being a 480GB and Pro being 512GB), so that helps.

However, Corsair is claiming that the MP510 2TB has an endurance of a massive 3,120 TBW... Based on the pictures they only have 4 NAND chips for the storage, the buffer chip, and the controller. Do we feel that's a legitimate, or even plausible claim? From my understanding, the performance SSDs, for the buffer they use SLC now instead of DRAM? So if their's isn't using SLC but MLC for the buffer, that'd surely increase it's lifespan as I would think it's the SLC that fails, or no? (unless that SLC is baked into the 3D NAND chips?) Same with if they used DDR4 instead of a NAND buffer. Yet... in either case, wouldn't that call into question their performance claims?
 
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