PCIE NVMe vs SATA

I am really curious about this subject. I have never been able to afford a NVMe drive, I currently use a the ADATA Premier SP550 SATA drive. I was wondering how much better is PCIE in the real world. I mean my drive feel snappy and fine. I don't transport a lot of large files around. So how does help it help with program load time. I just don't see how it can be worth the extra price, but then again I didn't really think that the spinning rust I was using was bad until I got to my SSDs. Now when I use some of my family's computers, and I try to launch a program I think thier computers are crashing for a second because of how long it takes to launch. So I am I just missing out, or is it really not that big of a deal.

I put an NVME drive in my laptop and barely notice a difference. There's almost zero real world impact between the two.

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If it gives you a worthy advantage, you shouldn't notice anything; i.e., no slowdowns.

I would consider an nvme drive only if/when you're already considering a new SSD. The price difference isn't that extreme unless you're getting a really big one, but yeah it's a marginal upgrade if you're already on a sata ssd. I mean why go 0-60 in 2.5 seconds when you can do it in 2.3? ....

I would liken it to 10-bit displays. The marketing makes "HDR" sound like a display can be blindingly bright and pitch black in one frame, but all it does is provide an image that just has nothing wrong with it, since it isn't crushed to 8-bit.

real world difference if your not editing 4k videos or moving 10+gb files all the time? none.

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For boot time program load etc, very little difference. But if you work on video editing etc, the difference is massive!

I think the biggest gain on a SSD is the seek time being reduced to about 0 vs a mechanical drive.
Since a NVMe drive doesn't improve the seek, the 'snappiness' is going to be similar.
Unless you move some big data around, you probably won't notice a huge difference.

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I largely agree with everyone.

The only thing I would like to add is that NVME does come in handy where ram quantity and control becomes an issue.

If you are going over your ram capacity, then having an NVME ssd can greatly improve performance over a sata ssd.

It also does seem to make a big difference in games like skyrim where the game is poorly coded and relies a lot on the hard drive.

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There's no real world performance except if you're trasnfering a lot of small files back and forth often, because of the insane IOPS of those drives. Also you might see a difference during installation of large programs (same reason as before), but that's something that I'm not sure about. Not even scrubbing 8K footage requires a PCIe SSD because it's recorded on an SSD SATA equivalent or slower so must work both ways.
Program's code optimization is still not up to the performance of the hardware we use. I'm pretty sure that almost every component in a system is ahead of it's time. Just think about DX12 or Vulkan. Those APIs allow Doom to run on a potato pretty well.

Furthermore when using M.2, or U.2 or SATAe you are obviously using (2/4) PCIe Lanes to that storage. So this is limited by the amount of PCIe Lanes coming from the CPU. Normally there are more than 8 SATA connectors on most Motherboards.
Just something to have in mind...