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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RandyDSok" data-source="post: 178349" data-attributes="member: 201">NVMe M.2 drives.... are just another type of SSD. The only difference in SSD types are the types of interfaces and the available speeds they are capable of. The various PCIe generations also have an added speed advantage with the newer ones being twice the potential throughput of the previous generation. The amount of increase that a user will notice will depend on use case where the Operating System showing a seemingly larger improvement, programs also appear to get a nice boost with file loading typically coming in behind the others and are often not as noticeable. I'm not going to give percentage improvements since user experience is very subjective as is the specific actual OS, program or file loading that is seen.A typical hard drive with 7200 rpm and using an IDE interface will get at most around 133 Mbps speeds but most are limited to 100 Mbps. The  SATA hard drives are capable of getting up to 150 Mbps but are often still using the IDE interface internally so are typically only getting that 100-133 Mbps speed. The SSD SATA drives have a max of 600 Mbps throughput but typically real life only sees up to around up to 550 Mbps on the higher end models with cheaper models falling somewhere close to the 300 Mbps range although these will vary a lot. Still that would see an 3x-5x ( rounded ) increase in file load times and can seemingly "wake up" an aging computer extending their usable lifespan. When they introduced PCIe type devices, they added another "layer" of complexity to consider ... PCIe has a certain number of lanes to them up to 16x. These rank from 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x with each doubling the potential throughput. Always remember while there is a potential throughput, there is overhead in that rated amount and realtime throughput will be a bit lower. Since a lot of PCIe drives ( of which NVME is one type ) are rated to use up to the 4x lanes at PCIe Gen3 speeds their max throughput is at 4000 Mbps but the max real throughput on the top end drives of this class is closer to around 3500 Mbps with the remaining be data overhead you won't see even if it's there. A typical PCIe Gen 4 drive will double that potential and real performance at the top end. Very few users would actually notice much of a difference of a drive rated at say around 2000 Mbps vs one at 3500 Mbps unless they are working with large workloads such as long video files that they need to edit or possible really large CAD or 3D rendering workloads. That means going from a top end PCIe Gen 3 drive to a top end Gen 4 drive, most typical users wouldn't notice the differences much even though they are there and show up in the testing. Since at this time Gen 4 drives will cost around double the cost of an equivalent sized and quality of a PCIe Gen3 drive, its hard to justify the extra spend unless you fall into the category of uses ( large transfers ) that can actually see a benefit that they can actually feel. The majority of users today will be well served by a PCIe Gen 3 drive rated at around 2100 Mbps read and 1700 Mbps writes. That is the approx speed of the 1 Tb NVMe drive I have currently. Because I'm a data horder ( I have thousands of pictures and hundreds of games )... I chose to use a SATA hard drive for my large storage needs but it's size isn't needed by many. If you can... get a large 1-2 Tb SSD drive of any type for any add larger file storage needs and it should suit most users for years to come. If you do horde files like me, then consider what amount of storage you need now, and at least double that or go 4x that amount so you can fit your future needs and pick the drive that you can afford to get and you should be fine. If you have some needs that are in between... consider adding a 3rd fast SSD for your working files/programs.</blockquote>

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