Nvme over Hdd

Gary kk

Hey guys

I am using a Hdd at the moment with SSD for booting. Just wondering given the prices are not to bad would a NVMe have just have better load times or would it have more benefits?

Outkast_IRE

There would be a massive difference between a standard hard drive and a nvme drive.

Mostly on boot times on startup and load times but the improvement over a standard hdd is night and day.

Before you purchase are you sure your board can take an NVME drive, and to get the most benefit you would need to move your operating system over to this drive.

Gary kk

Yeah it has a M.2 . So I think it should work with out issues.

MidlanderMan

Gary kk wrote: »

Hey guys

I am using a Hdd at the moment with SSD for booting. Just wondering given the prices are not to bad would a NVMe have just have better load times or would it have more benefits?

If you're using the HDD for storage and nothing else, don't bother.

To be honest 99.9999999% of people don't need an nvme drive, a basic SATA sad is plenty quick enough for gaming and day to day tasks.

Keep the HDD, there's no harm having it to store picture s, documents etc.

If you want to store your games on an SSD and your current boot drive isn't big enough there's no harm buying another bigger sata SSD just for games, but honestly, if it's just for a boot drive, the difference between a sata SSD and an nvme drive are nominal in everyday use unless you're regularly transfering large files (10s of GB each way).

My current setup has 1 512gb nvme SSD for a boot drive. 1 1tb SATA SSD for my steam library and other games (means this drive is essentially hot swap able to other machines, so I can move my games libraries if/when I need to) and 1 1tb HDD I salvaged from an old laptop that I used purely for documents, images, audio, and video files.

Outkast_IRE

Gary kk wrote: »

Yeah it has a M.2 . So I think it should work with out issues.

Sorry missed the part where you said you are booting from an SSD currently . In that scenario the nvme is a nice to have but by no means a must have upgrade. I did a new build recently and went nvme and there would be very little between it and my previous SSD boot times.

Spear

Gary kk wrote: »

Yeah it has a M.2 . So I think it should work with out issues.

A small caveat, not all m.2 sockets are the same. Not all chipsets support both PCI-E mode and SATA mode NVME drives. The odds of this being the case are small, but it wouldn't hurt to double check before committing cash to something.

TheValeyard

NVME are awesome. Real fan of M.2. My boot time is 6 seconds. From button to Win10.

I've ordered a new motherboard which I'm delighted has 3 M.2 slots. Definitely going to take full advantage of it.

Wouldnt buy one special if boot drive already on ssd

That said i had occasion to upgrade and theres a decent jump in performance even from my old ssd- nothing i needed in fairness

Squidgy Black

If you clone your ssd boot drive to the nvme and then use your SSD for storage and games, you'll get marginally faster boot time with the nvme, and a decent jump in read/writes with the ssd over the hdd you were using, particularly in loading times for games and any file transfers etc.

Bit of a win/win situation if you have the money to do it.

Retr0gamer

I've upgraded all my drives to NVME for my new PC. A super fast 1TB boot drive and a 2TB not as fast but still insanely fast drive for storage. I do have a HDD inherited from the old build with movies and stuff on it but looking to replace that with a SSD in future.

I will never go back to other drives. My PC boots faster than it takes for my Monitor to turn on and is perfectly responsive on boot.

H3llR4iser

If your boot SSD is getting old or you simply want your system to be more up-to-date with the available technology, go for it; From the performance standpoint, the difference between a SATA SSD and a PCI-E NVME is massive in benchmarks, but almost undetectable at an user level - unless you're doing extremely heavy file operations (e.g. video encoding or moving very large files).

Case in point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA

Other than that, when it comes to storage devices it's usually a good idea to replace the critical, constantly stressed units (e.g. boot drive) with new ones every few years...as long as they're the same quality (don't replace a Samsung SSD with a FattyDove or something like that )

Gary kk

Ok cool thanks everyone. Yeah am doing a light upgrade and your points are welcome.

Calibos

TheValeyard wrote: »

NVME are awesome. Real fan of M.2. My boot time is 6 seconds. From button to Win10.

I've ordered a new motherboard which I'm delighted has 3 M.2 slots. Definitely going to take full advantage of it.

Yeah I was persuaded to change my Drive config in my PCSpecialist order to a 500GB 980 Pro NVME Gen 4 for the OS and most programs and a 2TB 970 EVO NVME Gen 3 for my Game drive. I’ve currently got 2x 500GB 970 EVO SSD’s from current PC going to go to other builds and I’ll keep the 1TB 970 EVO (bought last Autumn for aborted build) for the new PCS build for games overflow along with the 2x 3TB Toshiba 7200RPM HDD’s from the current PC for Media storage in the new PC.

Upgraded my case to a Lian Li O11 Dynamic XL from the Midi version after I had reason to look into my current Air540 for an internal USB Header last night and realised that the Dynamic Midi was about the same size....and the components in my current PC look decidedly cramped.

Not that I need much media storage in the new rig given I am about to finally start building my media server once the New PC arrives and the current PC components are freed up for the Server.