# Samsung 960 EVO NVMe M.2 vs Samsung 860 EVO



## vonKoga (Jan 30, 2019)

Is it worth it? Could we see drastic perfomance change in using M.2 in comparison to regular SSD ?


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## P4-630 (Jan 30, 2019)

Well I personally found it worth it, however I bought a 970 evo recently, not a 960, previously had OS and games on samsung 860 pro SSD.
If you do plan to buy a M.2 NVMe you could look at the new 970 evo PLUS M.2 NVMe's, they cost about the same as the 970 evo's but gives you overall slightly better performance than the previous ones.

https://nl.hardware.info/reviews/89...dediging-hardwareinfo-2018-ssd-prestatiescore


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## bajs11 (Jan 30, 2019)

it entirely depends on what you want to do with it
if its mainly for games then I would say its not worth it IF the 960 costs more than the 860
because you would only save a few seconds in load time in most games while it doesnt give you more fps at all
but if you're doing a lot of read/writes of large files like real time video editing then get the 960


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## Mussels (Jan 30, 2019)

You might not notice much of a difference now, but in the future as more programs are optimised for it, you'll see the benefits.

Also helps keep cable mess down in your PC, worth it for that alone imo.


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## Nxodus (Jan 30, 2019)

vonKoga said:


> Is it worth it? Could we see drastic perfomance change in using M.2 in comparison to regular SSD ?



I don't like the thermal aspect of NVMe drives. The barely noticable speed increase compared to m.2 SATA is not worth putting another heat source straight on your Mobo. Also I've read something about NVMe drive cache: Once it fills up, performance drops to SATA levels. 

I'm just running a nice m.2 860 EVO and it's 30% cheaper too.


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## Mussels (Jan 30, 2019)

that 'heat source' uses 3W of power, just because one part of them heats up, doesnt mean they produce any meaningful amount of heat


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## Nxodus (Jan 30, 2019)

Mussels said:


> that 'heat source' uses 3W of power, just because one part of them heats up, doesnt mean they produce any meaningful amount of heat



well, 80+ celsius under load is pretty high for me.


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## bonehead123 (Jan 30, 2019)

go nvme or go home, and play with yourself while you wait for your stuff to load


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## londiste (Jan 30, 2019)

vonKoga said:


> Is it worth it? Could we see drastic perfomance change in using M.2 in comparison to regular SSD ?


Normal usage/gaming? Not a drastic change, no. But there definitely is a difference, more felt than seen. The more you (or your computer) multitask the better it comes out. Fast NVME system drive and larger SATA SSD is probably the optimal solution for now. 
System does benefit from NVME SSD, games benefit little (with some exceptions). Price difference is quite steep though.


Mussels said:


> Also helps keep cable mess down in your PC, worth it for that alone imo.


This! 


Nxodus said:


> Also I've read something about NVMe drive cache: Once it fills up, performance drops to SATA levels.


Cache is far from being this straightforward. Different SSDs have a different amounts of cache, different setup for it and depending on the actual Flash on the drive the speed drop is not quite that steep. This applies to all SSD's, including SATA ones with a drop to rather low speeds. This is rarely a problem in normal usage though. As long as there is free space on the drive and you do not copy tens to hundreds of gigabytes constantly


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## Mussels (Jan 31, 2019)

Nxodus said:


> well, 80+ celsius under load is pretty high for me.




1. If its rated for the heat, thats fine
2. 80C means nothing as far as heating components nearby, the wattage is what matters there. 3W of heat can be dissipated by a good fart, so it wont heat any other components at all.


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## vonKoga (Feb 1, 2019)

Thank you all for answering. For what I understood from these answers is that it's not a big difference in the means of performance. I mostly use Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe XD and VSCode.


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## bonehead123 (Feb 1, 2019)

vonKoga said:


> I mostly use Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe XD and VSCode.



If you can spring for a 2 or 4TB unit, I would suggest you try using the 960 as a scratch disk for Photoshop/Illustrator.....I think you will be pleasantly surprised 

My buddy did this recently and constantly raves about the difference (speed) it makes in his daily image-manipulation/creation processes... 'cause for in his business, time *IS* money !


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## John Naylor (Feb 1, 2019)

Without a benchmark or stopwatch, you'll never notice the difference.   When folks create a 'test" to compare two thijngs, you'll notice that they choose 'tests' with no bearing on reality.  I once saw one on you tube where the guy, in earnest trying to show how great his new SSD was, used "opening 100 windows in chrome" as his "test".  Since I have never done such a thing, this test showed me nothing.  Why are any of these significant ?

MS office Installation - OK you did that once in the life of your PC and you did something else in the minute it took to install.  Y 5 year old Samsung 850 Pro did it in 55 seconds.

AV Run - takes from 50 to 54 seconds best to worst in TPUs test, it gets done in the background, who cares ?

iTunes Installation - 13 to 15 seconds best to worst, who cares.

Chrome Installation - 7 to 9 seconds, who cares.

Adobe Reader - 16 to 19 seconds, who cares

Photoshop startup - 4.1 to 4.7 seconds, who cares

Photoshop Editing - here we finally get to something where speed matters, well maybe.  The range here was 46 to 89 seconds ... but the test is a script of a series if actions on very large files ... do you use such a script on an every day basis ?   or do you press a ket=y between opening a file and doing each of the actions .._."open ten 50 megapixel images at the same time and, once done, process each image, one by one. The operations performed on each image were crop, move, auto levels, resize to 1024x768, and save for the web. "  _ For most folks, the answer is yes thereby making the test non applicable to every day usage.

Watchdog 2 level loading -  45.7 to 46.3 seconds ... woot I'll save 0.6 seconds ! .... just think how much more progress I can make !

BF1 level loading -  16.8 to 19.7seconds ... Im upgrading, 2.9 seconds ! .... That's $18.97 per second gained between your 2 choices.  That makes your time worth  $62,275 an hour   ...  But hey it's only $55 ... if budget not an issue, then it's not an issue to get the 960.

I was so curious about this subject that we ran side by side tests with 5 users for 6 weeks.  Desktop Test -  One desktop equipped with twin SSds , twin SSHDs and 1 HD .... in the morning I'd go into BIOS change which device the box booted from.... users were asked to document "any slowness due to the new AV software" ... got one report (HD boot)  "I can't be sure but boot up time seemed slow today".    BTW Boot times were 21.2 seconds on the HD, SSHD was 16.5 and SSD was 15.6 secs.  Laptop Test used two otherwise identical lappies, one with 120 GB SSD (OS Only)  + 1 TB, 7200 rpm HD an the other with 1 TB , 7200 rpm SSHD.   Same conditions, same users but went 6 months ... no one reported any differences tho i did have to clean the 120 GB SSD of excess file storage where folks would drop stuff info "my Folders" on C or just forget"clean C". 

 In the "real world", assuming folks boot the boxes in the morning, after pushing the button, most do other stuff.  In one instance an employee who had one of our older boxes, asked me to get him an SSD to make it more productive.  As his job title included 'engineering economics for construction projects", I asked him to "make his case" and if it had a positive ROI, I'd order it.

He estimated 30 seconds saved per day (his actual boot time was 24.5 seconds) for the slow boot time.  At 330 work days per year, that was 2.75 hours or $247.50 which was what they were going for in those days.   But installing it, and reloading OS and all the software would eat all that.  However, I noted the time / actions next day (he sat right outside my office). 

-Arrived at work took off jacket and started PC - 08:26
-Walked around said good morning to a few folks, made fresh coffee, asked what I had on agenda for him today, sat at desk, listened to phone messages, checked his imbox, garbbed some coffee, asked what I had on agenda for him that day, sat at desk, shook his mouse to wake up PC - 8:42 ... if his box took 16 minutes to boot it would be ready for him before he was ready for it.  

This happens with most of what we do, scripts of 100 MS Word operation times don't matter as in real life, a kry needs to be pressed in between each one.  back in the day, we used $1000 SCSI drives for AutoCAD but today, AutoCAD has completes it's "thing" before I get my next key press or mouse action in.   In gaming, when i launch or game or move to a new level, I don't sit there staring at screen w/ stop watch running ... I'm grabbing a snack, taking a bio, reading my notes as to what I need, realoading web maps on my browser, chatting on discord ... again, game is ready for me well before I'm ready for it.

In short, on the desktop or lappie, I wouldn't stress about it.  Will you "see a drastic performance change" ?  Outside workstation apps in a "production environment" doing animation, video editing or rendering, the answer is Yes, the performance will pay for itself over time, not as quickly as you might think tho.  Doing everyday stuff, even AutoCAD, the answer is no, you will never recover the investment in "saved time".  No legal secretary ever prepared an extra  Legal brief before 5:00 because he / she had an SSD.  For the most part, doing every day stuff, the machine will spend more time waiting for you than you for it.  That being said   ... the cost difference is small enough that we are putting 250 / 500 GB 960 Evo NVMe's in just about every build not because we will see any perceptable increase in performance in every day tasks but cause the price difference is insignificant.

In your case, if you are using scripts with numerous large files to do your PhotoShop and other workstation type work, you will likely see a percetable but not really significant productivity improvement unless it's an every day / much of day activity.  I'd suggest a pair in this instance (OS Programs for one and scratch for the other) making sure that MoBo / CPU will support the necessary PCI lines w/o impacting performance.


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## pigulici (Feb 1, 2019)

"Is it worth it? Could we see drastic perfomance change in using M.2 in comparison to regular SSD ?" 
1. Depending on each person, a 2 seconds more for some it is too much, for others it is nothing.
2. Drastic, no, a difference will be.

A month ago I switched from my 2Tb samsung 850pro sata to my new 1Tb 970pro nvme, I work a t least 4hrs per day with Photoshop+some games+browsing+movies = I feel my pc more snappiest, maybe around 15%, so no drastic, for me it is worth it.


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## vonKoga (Feb 5, 2019)

Thank you all, I have my answers.


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## trparky (Feb 7, 2019)

I had a 860 EVO SSD as my boot drive and then I changed to a 970 EVO. Did I notice a difference in performance? Nope. Why did I do it then? Well, I wanted a separate SSD for my games so when I went to get a second SSD I figured why not get an NVMe SSD for the boot drive and downgrade my existing SSD to be my game drive. Again, I noticed no performance difference.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 7, 2019)

I'm not sure, but I think you can't turn on rapid mode on nvme samsung, but you can on 2.5"


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## trparky (Feb 7, 2019)

Most people suggest to stay away from Rapid Mode like the plague.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 7, 2019)

trparky said:


> Most people suggest to stay away from Rapid Mode like the plague.



May I know why?


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## jaggerwild (Feb 7, 2019)

TMI!


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## trparky (Feb 7, 2019)

Borna Horvat said:


> May I know why?


Some people report data corruption if you don't have good clean stable power. If your power were to cut out during a write operation with Rapid Mode enabled the chances of data corruption are higher than without. And besides, Rapid Mode only contributes to faster benchmark numbers; not real world performance.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 7, 2019)

No offense, but that seems ridiculous to me. Performance is roughly 10 times higher with rapid mode on, and about 1.6 times higher then any nvme drive. I recently got one and installed it into friends rig, and he couldn't be happier with it. Fastest thing on the market. If you reside in area with frequent power shortages, any kind of consumer ssd isn't advisable, or at least an UPS is.


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## trparky (Feb 8, 2019)

Even with Rapid Mode you're limited by the SSD itself. Think of Rapid Mode as a sort of write cache, so instead of writing directly to the SSD you're instead writing to system RAM. Sure, writing there is going to be very damn quick because obviously system RAM is very fast. But as with any and all caches you're going to reach the point where you'll have filled it up and then you're going to have to wait until the data that's already in the write cache is spooled out of the cache and then written to the real storage device, the SSD. Rapid Mode just makes for a rather large write cache, sometimes as big as 2 GBs depending upon how much system RAM you have in your system. Rapid Mode isn't some sort of magic that instantly makes your SSD faster.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 8, 2019)

So, when copying is finished, 10 times faster, I can't unplug the drive? You sure you investigated this matter thoroughly?

What it really does is reading ahead, with a smart algorithm. It stores files into ram before you start copying them + it keeps often used files in ram. Obvisouly, RAM is smaller in size then your drive, so not all of it can be kept in RAM, so app tries to anticipate users move. The larger the cache, the bigger the cache hit rate. It may not speed up 100% of your copied files, but it will a portion of it, if it's coded properly. Maybe it will even dump old cache in favor of your new files you want copied. It's an awesome thing. During DOS days, we had norton cache 2.


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## trparky (Feb 8, 2019)

No, you cannot do that unless of course you want to kiss any and all data that's still in the Rapid Mode write cache goodbye. And yes, I know how Rapid Mode works! You can't get around the idea that NAND Flash Memory is only so fast when it comes to writing data to it.

Rapid Mode only masks that issue by making a write cache in system RAM to make it seem like your file copy is complete. You can see this by writing a large file to a Rapid Mode enabled SSD and then pulling up the Windows Resource Monitor (or the Windows 10 Task Manager) and looking at the activity of the SSD, you'll notice write operations going on behind the scenes regardless of the fact that your file copy is "done".


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 8, 2019)

And I'm telling you you can unplug the drive the moment it says it's finished copying.


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## trparky (Feb 8, 2019)

Borna Horvat said:


> And I'm telling you you can unplug the drive the moment it says it's finished copying.


Then you're playing with fire.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 8, 2019)

Nope, the tech is called deferred-write


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## trparky (Feb 8, 2019)

See this article over at The SSD Review for an understanding about how Rapid Mode works.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 8, 2019)

Well if that article substantiates your theory, then it is wrong. I've had the pleasure of testing primocache and rapid mode on my own pc. I know how it works.


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## trparky (Feb 8, 2019)

OK Mr. Smarty Pants, how do you get around the very real idea that you can only write so much data to NAND Flash Memory per second? If you saturate that data channel then you can't write anymore until, you know, the data has been written. It's like the speed of light, you cannot go faster than the speed of light. At least not in this universe.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 8, 2019)

It doesn't matter what type of drive it is. It can be a regular hdd, doesn't have to be nand flash. You can run a benchmark to see how fast it does, and it's not unlimited, but roughly 10 times the speed without cache being used. I get about 5k writes seq on rapid mode samsung 2.5" and about 7k writes seq on regular hdd with primocache. And at this very moment, veloram is being gifted for free with a lifetime license, over at sharewareonsale.com, which I'm hoping to get when they fix the serial key issue.


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## trparky (Feb 8, 2019)

Have you ever started a file copy and then at some point during that file copy operation it suddenly slowed down? That's the point where you saturated the write cache and you have to wait for the hardware itself to catch up to what you're doing. I don't care about synthetic benchmarks, I care about real world usage like when you're doing a file copy in Windows Explorer. There's a reason why when you're writing a file to a USB Flash Drive (which is essentially the same as an SSD but on a different interface) and then you go to Safely Eject the USB Flash Drive Windows will tell you that something is using the drive, it's because data is still being spooled to the drive in question out of the write cache.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 8, 2019)

Well, I can't cache usb drives, but I have hot plug, and I have tried removing the drive when file explorer was finished with copying. The data was there. Google deferred-write primocache. They could have simply made hdd's with cache builtin, and you would get the same performance, but an expensive drive. SSHD's are somewhere in between, they don't use RAM on HDD for speedup, they use SSD.


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## trparky (Feb 8, 2019)

> PrimoCache is able to complete write requests quickly by writing incoming data to fast cache devices first and writing back to target disks later, greatly improving the system writing performance.


They even say it right there, "fast cache devices". And what do you think those "fast cache devices" are? *System RAM!!! *And they even say it right there in that quote that the data is written to "fast cache devices" first and then is written to the target disk later. It's that "later" part that scares me.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 8, 2019)

If you copy a 50GB file for example, first it reads 1GB (depending on whatever RAM ammount you decided to allocate), then it writes to drive from ram and waits for drive to finish first portion of copying, deletes 1GB of what's already done, and reads another 1GB ahead. You don't hold entire 50GB in RAM, nor will it cache the entire file. HDD's tend to be fast at sequential write, especially if data to be copied is already in ram, and not waiting for another drive, so the gain there is highest. Depending on how much ram you decided to allocate, and how smart the algorithm is, you can get a nice cache hit rate for such large files.


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## trparky (Feb 8, 2019)

Borna Horvat said:


> first it reads 1GB (depending on whatever RAM amount you decided to allocate), then it writes to drive from ram and waits for drive to finish first portion of copying


This much I very much understand. But here's the scary part... what if you yanked out the drive during the part where you say that it does this "then it writes to drive from ram and waits for drive to finish first portion of copying" Oops. Your data is gone.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 8, 2019)

Yes, the data stored in cache is gone


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## trparky (Feb 8, 2019)

Borna Horvat said:


> Yes, the data stored in cache is gone


And that's where I get really scared really quickly. Anything that messes with data write operations beyond what Windows already does natively at the kernel-level scares the living shit out of me.


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## Borna Horvat (Feb 8, 2019)

Backup is always a good idea. A UPS if power shortages are often, is too. You use this for speed, not security of data.


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## R0H1T (Feb 8, 2019)

Borna Horvat said:


> No offense, but that seems ridiculous to me. Performance is roughly 10 times higher with rapid mode on, and about 1.6 times higher then any nvme drive. I recently got one and installed it into friends rig, and he couldn't be happier with it. Fastest thing on the market. If you reside in area with frequent power shortages, any kind of consumer ssd isn't advisable, or at least an UPS is.


You do understand it's only RAM caching, literally hundreds of software have done it before, some still do & work better than Samsung's branded RAPID mode. And as with all forms of RAM caching, a power loss could result in catastrophic loss of data. It's not rocket science, just well established data & history.


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## Mussels (Feb 8, 2019)

Looks like hes been banned for a duplicate account, no use arguing with someone who isnt here.

Clearly he doesnt get how caching works, nor our forum rules.


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## Wavetrex (Feb 8, 2019)

As a owner of both those drives, I can say that there is no practical difference in everyday use.

The system was very fast with the 860 anyway before I changed it to the NVMe one. (And no, I didn't use RAPID, for the dangers explained above by some people, even if I DO have an UPS). I'm not new to RAM caching and got burned a few times before...

Why I changed it ?
2 less cables to deal with, and actually I needed the SATA port for another storage HDD.

 Obviously NVMe drives are the future, but currently the consumer workloads simply aren't big enough to justify one if the price difference is significant ( And today IT IS, because SATA drives have dropped in price dramatically, much more than M.2 NVMe drives )

~~~
There is one exception that I noticed in my use case:
_Adobe Lightroom_.

This particular program has quite heavy I/O when searching for a photo in it's database of over 40000 of my photos, and here the NVMe shines !!! It's quite a lot faster, the entire UI feels more responsive and preview photos "de-blur" 3 times as fast as I browse through them.

As a gaming PC however, I wouldn't care. Any SSD is the same, low end, mid-range, ultra High-end Samsung PRO drive. No difference.


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## cucker tarlson (Feb 8, 2019)

nvme is slightly faster than sata ssd,but for a hefty price premium.up to anyone to choose.I'd choose a bigger sata ssd over nvme every time but people are welcome to sit with a stopwatch and report a few seconds faster installation times as crucial and a must for everyone.
and 960/970 evo are overpriced drives,there are many as fast but cheaper.look for xpg 8200pro or hp ex920.


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## Mighty-Lu-Bu (Feb 22, 2019)

vonKoga said:


> Is it worth it? Could we see drastic perfomance change in using M.2 in comparison to regular SSD ?



I just don't think we are there with NVME yet. I spent a lot of money on my NVME which I use as a boot drive, but it wasn't a significant improvement over my Evo SSD. Regular SSDs are still plenty fast and as long as NVME drives are expensive I am going to keep recommending standard SSDs.


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## Mussels (Feb 23, 2019)

When it costs like $20 more for a drive thats 6x faster and a lot more physically convenient, i'll always recommend NVME
In current circumstances NVME may have only small benefits over SATA, but over time as programs are adapted to be able to use faster speeds, it'll get better with age.

Also, i can throw my 1TB NVME drives in a USB 3.1 enclosure and have a USB stick that does 3GB/s lol


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## Mighty-Lu-Bu (Feb 23, 2019)

Mussels said:


> When it costs like $20 more for a drive thats 6x faster and a lot more physically convenient, i'll always recommend NVME
> In current circumstances NVME may have only small benefits over SATA, but over time as programs are adapted to be able to use faster speeds, it'll get better with age.
> 
> Also, i can throw my 1TB NVME drives in a USB 3.1 enclosure and have a USB stick that does 3GB/s lol



$20 more? How do you figure that? A Samsung 970 Evo NVME 1TB drive is $247.99 on Amazon. A Samsung 860 Evo is $147.990 that is a hundred dollar difference.

The Samsung 970 Evo NVME 2TB variant (according to the Tom's Hardware review) has the best performance... the drive is $547.99 on Amazon, that's more than most GPUs, CPUs, motherboards, cases, RAM, and gaming monitors. However, the 860 Evo is just $297.99. Even if you are transferring a ridiculous amount of data, you would still be fine with a regular SSD. Also, I primarily game on my PC and browse the Internet... and my NVME hasn't boosted anything here. Great so I can transfer some files a bit quicker...? If that and form factor are the big appeal then it isn't really that appealing- I'm just being honest. I can see the argument for mini ITX systems... but I have a full system in a midtower with massive GPU and I am not dying for space.


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## Mussels (Feb 23, 2019)

locally near me, the price difference is almost nothing for 512GB drives, with some NVME being cheaper. My intel 6000P 1TB was only $350 Au, new.


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## Vario (Feb 23, 2019)

Mussels said:


> When it costs like $20 more for a drive thats 6x faster and a lot more physically convenient, i'll always recommend NVME
> In current circumstances NVME may have only small benefits over SATA, but over time as programs are adapted to be able to use faster speeds, it'll get better with age.
> 
> Also, i can throw my 1TB NVME drives in a USB 3.1 enclosure and have a USB stick that does 3GB/s lol



Just did the shopping and comparison on this myself for my own system and I could do $140 for a 860 evo or MX500 2.5" SSD or.... I could do $140 for a generic Phison E12 1TB SSD that is substantially faster or $125 for a Intel 660P 1TB for an SSD that is often much faster than the 2.5" and at worst case the same speed, there are a number of other budget options out there in the same price range of $140-50 for 1TB.  For another $30 more there are proven drives like the Adata XPG 8200 Pro, 970 Evo on sale, etc.  There isn't much reason not to do NVME at this point if you have the PCI-E channels and a board that has the M.2 Slot available for use.


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