Does a difference in SSD speed matter a lot ?
Posted by StarLongjumping8041@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 10 comments
i was planning my pc build and saw that two SSDs ( 1 TB, both gen 4 ) had a decent price gap, one had read/write speed upto 3500/2200 mbps, the expensive one had 7400/6800 mbps.
does this difference in speeds make a significant change in usage ? its a budget build for some 1080p gaming, basic video editing and college-related tasks. If i can save some money on this area it would be really great.
also i some comments about difference in game loading times, can someone just drop examples on how big the difference one can expect between these two ?
ptok_@reddit
It's not only about speed.
Cheapest drives are QLC drives. Those drives are not as reliable. Have shorter warranties and TBW values. With drive degradation you may have latency problems and system lockups. Then you can buy mid range TLC drives with longer 5 years warranties (that is maximum time producers offer) and with twice TBW value. Highest end do not only have highest speeds but also better reliability due to higher end memories modules but this is still TLC with 5y warranty.
In my honest opinion you should avoid QLC drives as the price difference is not that much right now.
Mr_SlimShady@reddit
For gaming? No. Direct Storage never really came to be, and that was the only thing that promised some improvement.
Unless your job has you working with terabytes of data every day, there really is no reason to spend more money on a faster drive. You should spend more money on a better drive tho, as in from a reputable brand that will not die two months from now.
For gaming tho, you will not notice a difference between an NVMe 5.0 SSD and a SATA SSD.
-UserRemoved-@reddit
DirectStorage is utilized in many games, there just isn't much to talk about.
https://steamdb.info/tech/SDK/DirectStorage/
Smooth_Database_3309@reddit
It is talked about when it makes games run worse - like in Ratchet and Clank. And i have a suspicion that Forbidden West is also affected, or it just have very bad textures on surfaces
-UserRemoved-@reddit
Those are sequential speeds. If you have sequential workloads, then it would make a significant difference.
Gaming is not a sequential workloads, since games are not single large files. As such, these speeds are rather meaningless for games.
Your video editing might, depending on your video and project sizes, but that isn't information provided here. Considering people have been editing videos long before NVMe, whether or not you want to spend extra here is up to you. Gen4 and beyond is a luxury, not so much a necessity.
Generally fractions of a second, nothing noticeable unless you had 2 PCs side by side and that's how you use them.
StarLongjumping8041@reddit (OP)
Thanks. I think i can go with the cheaper option here.
As for video editing i'll be learning some colour grading and basic effects/elements, no 3d renders or flashy vfx. Its personal use and no commercial work.
winterkoalefant@reddit
the absolute cheapest SSDs can be slower for loading things. I would recommend something decent like Adata SX8200 Pro.
mprevot@reddit
It depends on what you do. But I measure huge differences in latency between NVMe and sata SSD. Also, random read/write are more important than you think, ie., when you do compilation with many files, you will see a difference. Sequencial read/write are more imporant when you read big files, like opening virtual machien, opening/saving snapshots.
If you just load your OS you won't see much difference, if you have a daily work with heavy read and writes you may feel the difference.
For instance, I remarked than I read/write around 1TB per day. I do mostly programming with Visual studio 2022. I have 970 EVO plus 1 and 2TB (pcie 3, \~3300-3500MB/s, \~550,000 IOPS etc). I wished I had gen 4 or 5 and 2-4x as much random read-write. I also have lots of VM editing/snapshots, GB rw cumulate very quickly; and I cannot work with sata SSD (\~500MB/s), too slow.
TLDR: latency, random rw, seq rw are important. NVMe is best. Higher generation is best.
Emerald_Flame@reddit
Depends on your use case, but for most people, there isn't a significant real-world difference.
GeraltForOverwatch@reddit
There's barely any difference in most games and "basic" usage.
Video-editing might be if you're importing/exporting huge ass files but not worth the money unless the saved time gets you paid IMO.