Honestly I went from HDD to SATA SSD to PCIe 3.0 SSD to PCIE 4.0 SSD. While both m.2s are measurably faster than the SATAs, the diminishing returns in day to day use were so extreme that I would not be able to tell you which I had as my boot drive if I didn’t already know. If i were building my whole system from scratch today I might be tempted to spend all of my storage budget on a single large SATA drive, rather than get a faster but smaller m.2.
The SATA drives are slow enough, for example, that when I was using my 1TB SATA drive for video editing it was a noticeable bottleneck, to the point where I could see the CPU usage drop as it waiting for storage. I alleviated this with a PCIe 4.0 m.2, but actually booting from the drives or installing games from them, I personally can’t notice the difference between m.2 and SATA. It’s also worth remembering that these are 2014 era Samsung EVO drives, so not exactly state of the art anymore.
Yes, I would agree with you - but when you can get m.2 PCIe 3.0 for more or less the same price as SATA, there is no reason at all to go for the 2.5" SATA drive. Not that SATA is that much worse, it’s just that if the cost is the same then why not simply go with m.2? Easier to install, better performance, less clutter inside the box, same price.
Obviously if it’s like $50 more for the NVMe drive, then yeah there’s still a place for SATA. But now the difference is $5-$15 for NVMe gen 3.0, and then NVMe makes more sense. As for spinning rust… Only reason to bother nowadays is for a cold backup drive or true bulk storage. Most have already moved on due to the space and power savings from spinning rust.
I haven’t done any research into m.2 prices, but tbh I wouldn’t just find the cheapest noname brand drive available as you seemed to do above.
Edit: I’ve just looked on Samsung’s website and seen that the 970 EVO m.2 is the same price as the 870 EVO SATA. You have to drop down to the QVO to save like £60, so yeah. OK. If you have an m.2 or a PCIe slot available, use that xD
Kingston has very cheap consumer M.2s. Faster than SATA and same price per T. Around 80€ per TB. The only reason for SATA today is hotplug and limited pcie lanes/slots for M.2. Yes they are on the slow side of M.2, but it’s still orders of magnitude faster than SATA.
One reason to still go with SATA imo is the convenience of being able to easily access the drive. Even in a non hotswap location they’re easier to access than an M.2 drive. Another reason that isn’t mentioned in either of these posts is capacity you can find SATA SSDs up to 32TBs atm, but you can find an 8TB Samsung QVO for sometimes as low as $600. So if you’re looking for a high capacity SSD SATA is still the way to go.
As for the topic of this thread the newest generation of Optane is priced out of the hands of most consumers imo and the older generations are overpriced for it’s niche use case. Was looking at the older Optane drives because I was messing about with something where I wanted low latency and endurance, but mostly endurance. When I started looking at it from a price to endurance perspective unless I REALLY needed the lower latency from those older optane drives they made no sense to buy. Which really just leaves their use case as “Do you really need that lower latency and don’t care about capacity at all?” since the endurance angle doesn’t make sense from a cost perspective.
I asked if it would be worth to use an Optane 16-32 as a boot drive.
I could get 16TB for about 340€
Definitively not. Either it is back on the board so I have to take everything out to just change out M.2 or it is under the Graphics Card which on my board and most other boards is the case.
16 TB SATA SSD for ~$350? Are you sure you’re not talking about an abysmal, slooooooooooooow 5400 RPM HDD with atrocious read speeds now?
The m.2 is most certainly easier to install, sure you might need to pop out your GPU for a second, for easier access - but then it’s just a single screw and you’re done. SATA is at least four screws + two cables.
Ooooor… You could have it on a PCIe card.
OOOOOOOOOOR… You could have one of those fancy cases with a hollow motherboard tray, those also allow for an m.2 swap. And if you do not, I’ve seen several cases that require you to remove the drive bay to put an HDD in, since the drive would collide with the RAM otherwise.
To be fair, I can see that. One of the m.2 slots is easy, it’s just by the chipset. The one that goes straight to the CPU, though is behind the Graphics Card, so I have to take that of. I can’t get at the PCIe clip, though, unless I take my CPU cooler off. Getting at that slot is a major pain in the arse.
“Atrocious” is relative. I bought a 13TB HDD for about that, and its speeds are actually faster than my old 2TB WB Black HDD. Yeah it’s not comparable to an SSD, but I wouldn’t call it abysmal because I know I’m compromising speed for storage speed, and the data that goes there doesn’t require speed anyhow.
I don’t have to screw the Sata drive and the cables are already there cause I’m currently holding the sata drive in my hand. Same could be said for sata ssds. But the thing is, I have 4TB of storage on really old HDDs almost full and 90% of my games are on HDDs.
I’m not completely spoilt by SSDs. I mind the startup of the OS but not game load times because I can go get a glass of water or something.
And for essentials, there for I have 1TB of nvme storage.
But alright. This seems to be case closed as I was recommended not to get a 16-32 Optane.