pcie ssd vs sata 3 ssd

[SiriusD]

I have one ssd on pcie and want to buy another one on sata 3. How much slower is it speed wise? Thank you.

 

[Zach_01]

In benchmarks a lot, in real life (opening apps or gaming) almost nothing.

 

[X71200]

Some things need to be told more clearly here, like what SSDs are in question? None of those drives in that video use the PCI-E SLOT. They are M.2 drives, which is also the PCI-E PROTOCOL.

PCI-E SSDs are mostly enthusiast / server grade stuff. They can be faster than M.2 drives, or slower depending on what they use. The controller, the flash etc etc. You need to delve deeper and look at what the actual specifications of the drive offer you in terms of speed, and even efficiency... because some SSDs overheat quite a bit.

A SATA SSD can theoretically outperform an M.2 drive or even a PCI-E drive. While peak speeds on the latter are rated to way more, what really matters more is the smaller file 4k read / write speeds. This however is usually not the case since SATA is today pretty much an outdated platform and they like throw old controllers on SATA drives rather than throwing them to the bin. The better ones are kept for M.2, thinking in the most basic way. There are loads of Chinese SATA drives floating today and a lot of them will perform bad actually. Like, noticeably bad. You want quality, and you want speed at a good price. As such, you obviously need to do your research.

 

[Zach_01]

That video shows 2.5” drives which are SATA3 of course, and m.2 drives which are NVMe = PCI-E 3.0/4.0 protocol.
I don’t remember if any of those drives is m.2 under SATA protocol but those drives are the same with the 2.5” SATA.

I’m not sure what are you saying exactly as the video covers all SSD protocols, from the fastest NVMe (PCI-E 4.0) to the slower SATA3. And even covers (up to a point) the different cell tech that SSDs have today.

The OP must be more specific about if his existing m.2 drive is NVMe or SATA. The video has all protocols shown.

 

[lemoncarbonate]

In benchmarks a lot, in real life (opening apps or gaming) almost nothing.

I love that video. I prefer SATA to NVME PCI all the way because I need capacity more than speed.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I love that video. I prefer SATA to NVME PCI all the way because I need capacity more than speed.

And why would NVMe be limiting in terms of capacity? You can currently get 4TB in either formfactor.
I have a 2TB NVMe drive, a 1TB NVMe drive and 1TB SATA drive.

 

[lemoncarbonate]

And why would NVMe be limiting in terms of capacity? You can currently get 4TB in either formfactor.
I have a 2TB NVMe drive, a 1TB NVMe drive and 1TB SATA drive.

Price. SATA drives are still much cheaper.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Price. SATA drives are still much cheaper.

Questionable.
Sure, if you go with bottom of the barrel SATA drives maybe, but something half decent like a WD Blue 1TB drive costs more than their NVMe equivalent.
$106 for SATA, $95 for NVMe, I know which one I'd pick.

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-NAND-2TB-SSD-WDS200T2B0A/dp/B073SBQMCX

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-SN550-1TB-NVMe-Internal/dp/B07YFFX5MD/

Also, price isn't limiting in capacity, is it now? It just means NVMe costs more, in your mind.

 

[X71200]

The OP must be more specific about if his existing m.2 drive is NVMe or SATA. The video has all protocols shown.

This is where the catch is, there are lots of different kind of drives out in the market. Just saying it uses PCI-E means nothing. It could be a SATA based M.2 drive, it could be an NVMe drive that use the PCI-E slot - such as the HP Z-Drive, it could even be an older PCI-E stick that may or may not be NVMe.

 

[Zach_01]

This is where the catch is, there are lots of different kind of drives out in the market. Just saying it uses PCI-E means nothing. It could be a SATA based M.2 drive, it could be an NVMe drive that use the PCI-E slot - such as the HP Z-Drive, it could even be an older PCI-E stick that may or may not be NVMe.

Understood...
My point and also the point of that video is that whatever you use the differences are small and in most cases none. Unless someone is transfering large amounts of data across the drives. Only then all drives must be the fastest and if user seeks absolute speed. In almost everything else the actual (real life) performance is very similar, between all protocols and cell tech. Cell tech alone is more of a longevity matter (TBW).

The OP asked how much slower the SATA3 SSD will be against a PCI-E SSD. Assuming he is talking about NVMe m.2, the video shows that even tho on benchmarks the difference could be x4~5 or more, in real life its almost none. So it does not matter if he has NVMe m.2 or SATA m.2. If he has done some benchmarks on his drive then he can easily conclude that whatever drive he already has it wont be much different form a SATA3.

Thats my point...

 

[John Naylor]

While you can use certain benchmarks to **prove** that one SSD is superior than another....But if you look at how SSDs are tested,,, the "real life" differences between then are so small as no one going about their daily routine would ever be impacted. If you took a job as IT manager and recommended an office wide replacement of SATA SSDs for PCI-E based SSDs for SSDs (or even SSD's for 7200 rpm SSHDs or HDs) because it would increase "productivity" ... and agreed to prove it, with your job at stake ... start updating your resume now. There are instances where it does have a ROI such as photo / video editing, animation and rendering for example.... but in your typical home of office, it's not a life changing experience.

For example what does a boot time of 17.6 versus 18.4 secs do for you ? How is your life changed if BF1 loads a level in 16.8 vs 18.2 seconds ? ... or Watch Dogs to in 45.8 vs 46 seconds ? Not mine ... a new level loading usually means a trip to the bathroom or a snackie. and if not, Im loading a map of the new area on a 2nd screen. Life is a lot less stressful and results actually relevant when you focus on things you actually do on ya PC rather then benchmarks and other things you never or rarely do . Time to run a backup or AV scan .... who cares, I'm sleeping. Time to compress / uncompress a large amount of files ? ... never done that. Time to install Itunes .. 14.2 vs 15.1secs ? ... You do that once every 3-4 years ? MS office Installation ... well that took 166.7 seconds on the NVME Samsung 970 EVO and 55.6 secs on the SATA Samsung 850 EVO ... but again, who cares... a once every 3-4 years thing and you are doing something else while it happens. Aside from user bragging rights, and marketing folks, SSD speed differences really are not having a real impact on productivity outside a very small % of boxes using aforementioned applications

That being said, of course people with certain afflictions .... nerds, engineers, IT folk (aka folks like TPU forum members) .... will almost certainly have 1, more likely 2 or more, on their own boxes. Our SOHO network has at least 1 SSD and 1 SSHD on every box, about half have 2 ... On the SO side (Small Office), the main activity is CAD. Back in the day, the state of AutoCAD was such that $1,000 SCSI 10k 1.0 GB Hard Drives were the norm ... today file loading from SSD , SSHD and HD is indistinguishable. On the HO (Home) side, sure we can measure tiny differences in game loading, but does it matter if a level loads 2 seconds faster when you are using the break to grab a sammie, hit the "can" or open web pages, chat on discord ? Worrying about which SSD is faster is kinda like wondering if you should get a sports car because you are worried about being late for work. Whether I take the SUV or the Porsche to a job site, Im still going to get there about the same time.... if you ate 20 minutes late instead 20 minutes and 11 seconds late, won't change anything. How fast i could get there if there were no traffic and no speed limits really isn't that important because that's nor reality. Our approach is:

a) Look at the things you do every day and determine the real impact on productivity
b) Set a performance threshold at which a faster product actually has a financial ROI. If you do photo / video editing for example, if you are currently completing X projects in 8 hours .... if you can reduce that to 6 hours, that could increase your income by 25% and that investment will be paid off rather quickly.
c) Look at what you are doing on that 0.8 seconds it takes Windows to boot or that 0.2 to 1.4 seconds it takes a level to load .... Can you get something done in that time ? if not, then you are not really getting anything from your additional investment in a faster storage device.

 

[dirtyferret]

For example what does a boot time of 17.6 versus 18.4 secs do for you ? How is your life changed if BF1 loads a level in 16.8 vs 18.2 seconds ? ... or Watch Dogs to in 45.8 vs 46 seconds ?

Gives Mrs. Ferret an extra second of lovin.

 

[Voluman]

In benchmarks a lot, in real life (opening apps or gaming) almost nothing.

In general you are right. There is noticable different in hdd vs ssd, than ssd vs ssd not so much in everyday usage.
Of course there are differences, but it depends on your software environment and your usage modell.
But there are programs wich are clearly opened faster with nvme than sata, for example fortnite

 

[dirtyferret]

I have one ssd on pcie and want to buy another one on sata 3. How much slower is it speed wise? Thank you.

I have SSDs via M2 NVMe, PCIe x4 and SATA and I've yet to see a difference on any daily program with the naked eye.

 

[X71200]

The thing is, NVMe does not cost a lot more than SATA today. If you look at this TPU review of the A-Data Swordfish, it's exactly a case of that. The review's point is "no reason not to NVMe" ...

and it is true. Even if you don't have an M.2 slot, you can buy a PCI-E to M.2 adapter for like 5-10 bucks and boot from it (if your board allows this).

In the point of buying in bulk, you do obviously save with SATA in that case. But you really don't save a load of money in your own PC. The actual point of the OP however is buying SATA because he seems to be on a platform with already an NVMe drive and he can not run another NVMe without losing PCI-E lanes. SATA is a dying tech, mobo manufacturers are ditching most SATA ports on higher end boards for the favor of using the chipset switch for 2.5 or 5g ethernet purposes (and a bunch of other similar stuff). SATA, being serial attached, is a pretty long in the tooth standard. The cabling and some of the limitations make NVMe ultimately superior. Even servers moved on from SAS to cheap NVMe U.2 drives today. Those that upgrade, anyway.

To answer the OP's question with all these considered, I might suggest a SATA Crucial MX500 and calling it a day.

 

[Deleted member 193596]

do you copy tons of giant files all day long?
No?
take a SATA SSD (MX500, 860 Evo)
you can't barely measure the difference between SATA and a highest end Gen 4 SSD.

 

[X71200]

Just don't buy some random VERY cheap SATA drive, I've done it once and it performed horribly. It was a Transcend drive and probably didn't have cache. Performed similarly to a harddrive while doing some tasks. MX500 is good.

 

[lemoncarbonate]

Questionable.
Sure, if you go with bottom of the barrel SATA drives maybe, but something half decent like a WD Blue 1TB drive costs more than their NVMe equivalent.
$106 for SATA, $95 for NVMe, I know which one I'd pick.

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-NAND-2TB-SSD-WDS200T2B0A/dp/B073SBQMCX

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-SN550-1TB-NVMe-Internal/dp/B07YFFX5MD/

Also, price isn't limiting in capacity, is it now? It just means NVMe costs more, in your mind.

I don't live in US, your prices are invalid. Blue NVMe is still a bit higher than the SATA here.
Besides, the options for cheap NVMe drive is very limited, and you'll get the very bottom one. Majority of SATA SSD even higher end Crucial or Samsung are still much cheaper here compared to NVMes for the same size.

I know you may have a very opposite reasoning in choosing hardware and may not understand what I'm about to say, but personally I prefer a higher end SATA one to lowest end NVMe drive within similar price range. If I were to get NVMe, I would get the higher end one like WD Black, Samsung EVO, or Seagate Firecuda or Crucial P1.
But I just don't see any reason to do it.

Indeed, price is not limiting factor in capacity, but getting lowest end of NVMe is just not worth it for me, especially when it has little to no difference in real world performance.
SATA or NVMe, whichever is fine, it's up to the individual to choose based on their preferences.

Let's not hijack other's thread.

 

[agentnathan009]

I have one ssd on pcie and want to buy another one on sata 3. How much slower is it speed wise? Thank you.

A SATA 3 SSD won't really be noticeable slower in day to day tasks or loading games etc. Really, the only time you will be able to notice a speed difference is by transferring large files (example 50 GB size). If you read TPU reviews you will see that load times and startup times are all pretty close for SSD drives no mater the interface (SATA 3 or NVMe). So, if you don't plan on swapping large files around regularly, SATA3 is fine. I use a MX500 drive that uses SATA 3 and I am quite happy with its performance. I also have an NVMe drive for games and a HDD for archival storage.

 

[Gungar]

Questionable.
Sure, if you go with bottom of the barrel SATA drives maybe, but something half decent like a WD Blue 1TB drive costs more than their NVMe equivalent.
$106 for SATA, $95 for NVMe, I know which one I'd pick.

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-NAND-2TB-SSD-WDS200T2B0A/dp/B073SBQMCX

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-SN550-1TB-NVMe-Internal/dp/B07YFFX5MD/

Also, price isn't limiting in capacity, is it now? It just means NVMe costs more, in your mind.

You aren't comparing the same ssd in sata and nvme... one is 64 layers and the other is 96 layers.

 

[TheLostSwede]

You aren't comparing the same ssd in sata and nvme... one is 64 layers and the other is 96 layers.

And this matters how?

 

[Gungar]

And this matters how?

The question was if sata ssd were less expensive than m2 and they are.

 

[TheLostSwede]

The question was if sata ssd were less expensive than m2 and they are.

No, they're not, as I proved. Why is your comment relevant though? Why won't you answer it instead of coming up with something else?

 

[xman2007]

There's little point in buying a SATA SSD drive these days unless you are super budget limited and every last $ counts, otherwise for a 1TB drive there's probably $20 difference between them, only other reason is if you are on an older platform and you dont have nvme, then stick with SATA otherwise I can't really see any reason to buy a SATA SSD over and nvme drive in this day in age, and this is coming from a guy who has a 240GB SATA SSD as his main windows drive, when I built this PC literally the $10 difference was too much for me at the time so I chose SATA but I was on a limited budget of about $300 for an AM4 system and I saved the $10, the rest of the specs were just as pathetic at the time, 2200g, 8GB ram, no GPU, 300w PSU etc etc, specs to the left you can see that none of that no longer exists as I upgraded it over time, but I kept the SATA SSD as it works very well as a C: drive

 

[lemoncarbonate]

Wow, just be a douche then.

I tried to explain kindly, but from the beginning you sound very offended by my choice of using SATA instead of NVMe.