Worth upgrading to a NVMe PCIe 4.0 "wave 2" SSD? (currently have a wave 1 SSD)

E

echn111

[H]ard|Gawd
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Currently have an older NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, the Aorus Gen4 SSD 2TB, that came out in the initial wave of Gen4 SSD's. I'm happy with it, but am aware that like many "wave 1" PCIe 4.0 SSDs, it uses older controllers (i.e. Phison E16 in this case) that aren't optimised to fully take advantage of PCIe 4.0 so real world performance isn't that far ahead of the previous gen.

But the second wave of PCIe 4.0 SSD's are coming out, for example the WD Black SN850 and the Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0. These look great and have better controllers giving superior random reads and writes which SHOULD give superior real world performance. But that's theory. Or maybe firmware updates might improve my current SSD? Or perhaps the 3rd wave will be far better and it's not even worth considering? Who knows?

Anyway, wondering if it's worth upgrading or waiting?
 
Depends on what you hope to achieve, in day to day use the difference between SATA SSD's and NVMe drives is minimal so the increase between NVMe types would be even less noticable in that use case, now if you have a use case for large transfers or some faster iops it may be of some use, if it is to load games faster I would no bother.
 
The second wave SSDs do offer tangible, measurable benefit over the first wave of Gen4 drives. However, that extra performance is not utilized by most workloads out there. If gaming is your workload, then for the most part SSDs are all the same, from SATA to PCIe Gen4. That won't be the case forever, but it is the case for now.

If you already have a SSD of adequate capacity, I would wait until you need more space, and then buy the biggest and fastest SSD you can at that point. I think, for future-proofing, folks should probably try to get a decent better-than-SATA SSD drive in their system, but it is going to be a long time before a SATA SSD is insufficient, let alone before a wave 2 Gen4 drive can differentiate itself from a wave 1 Gen4 drive in gaming.
 
Ok thanks. I somewhat guessed it wouldn't matter too much. My "use case" is that I'm stuck in the house, a bit bored, and looking to upgrade something, more for fun than anything. But there still needs to be a decent reason as not going to waste money for nothing. I guess I'll wait a bit. And maybe upgrade the furniture in my home office instead or something...
 
Stick with what you got, it’s crazy enough. I’d bet you wouldn’t feel a difference or it wouldn’t be worth the $$
 
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