Those who upgraded to an M.2 from a Sata SSD, are you happy you did? Do you notice any sort of improvements, either with games or other PC usage or both? Those familiar with PCI 3.0 and 4.0, have you noticed any difference between the two?
I only notice it if I’m transferring a ton of files. For day to day gaming. No. I don’t notice a difference.
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There’s a marginal difference in day-to-day that will vary depending on how powerful your system is. Higher end systems will naturally be able to do more with the extra speed of the SSD.
In WoW specifically, with my system (5950X CPU/3080Ti GPU/980 Pro SSD) when entering dungeons, battlegrounds, etc I’m often the first to get through the load screen and in-world. Not that it matters, but it’s an example of where the difference is visible.
One underrated benefit of M.2 SSDs is case cleanliness. It’s two fewer cables per drive to have to think about routing or worry about messing with airflow, which is nice. With nicer motherboards with a lot of M.2 slots you can have many terabytes of storage across several drives with no added cable mess.
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It’s important to keep in mind that M.2 is just an interface. You can get (and some laptops require) M.2 drives which operate in SATA mode, offering no advantage at all over their cabled counterparts. These are supposed to be distinguished by a different “key” in the connector, but often times the connectors have both “keys” present for simplification.
In terms of performance from an NVMe (ie PCI express connection) drive, it will vary greatly depending on what you’re actually doing. I’ve found it makes a small amount of difference in WoW where a large amount of data is loaded in rapid bulk from many sources (lots of seeking), StarCraft II makes a nice difference but you still have to wait for any other players to load, Monster Hunter: World didn’t help, and many Unity-based games will see no difference even compared to an ATA/133 drive due to them dribbling data sporadically at maybe 20MBps.
It’s kinda impressive how badly Unity games are optimized in that regard.
We don’t speak that L-word in my house. Eww. Just no.
more of a PC usage improvement here. alt tabbing out of the game to browse sites is much smoother. I’m only using a PCIE 3x4 M.2 drive for the OS drive, and the game is still on the SATA 3 ssd.
I upgraded the drive where WoW was located from a 500GB SATA SSD to a 1TB M.2 SSD.
I barely felt a difference, despite using like 200 mods in addition to the game itself.
The difference between those two can mainly really be felt if you’re reading, writing, and transferring lots of large files. WoW isn’t one of those games that has a lot of them.
The difference between a SATA SSD and a NVMe SSD is tiny right now. It might shave a tiny bit of time off of your loading screens, but it’s nothing compared to the difference between an SSD and a spinning disk.
Where NVMe will come into play will be with DirectStorage. Right now transfers are limited by old storage APIs that are decades old, where the CPU has to handle transferring data from the SSD into the VRAM of your GPU. With DirectStorage, data can be transferred directly from your SSD to VRAM, which will DRAMATICALLY reduce loading times. But DirectStorage is still new and it’s unknown if it will ever actually be used in WoW.
I hope it is. As short as load screens are on a nice machine it would be a noticeable QoL improvement to just not have them at all, it would help bring back the seamless world appeal the game had originally.
Yah, no kidding. I never really noticed speed differences till the need to transfer hundreds of gigs from one to another. Then the two M.2s feel like I switched on a firehose of data between them.
This is one of the nice thing I noticed about it. I just put one M2 SSD on my new PC earlier this year when I built a new pc. However the m2 ssd seems to sometimes make a clicking sound like those old HDD unlike my Sata SSD which is totally silent. Do you also experience this?
No, I haven’t experienced anything like that with the M.2 SSDs across several machines (both towers and laptops) from a few different manufacturers… are you sure it’s the SSD? I would bet that the noise is actually coming from case fans that are occasionally off-balance or capacitors on the GPU or motherboard whining in such a way that sounds like a click.
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oh the motherboard can make clicking sounds as well? hmm maybe that’s it. To be fair it has gotten less now compared to when I first assembled the entire PC. Was just curious since I thought I would not hear a single clicking sound since I am entirely on SSD now haha
Well, not “clicking” in the same sense that hard drives do, but capacitors on mobos/GPUs can whine and if the load on these capacitors fluctuates rapidly enough it can sound kind of like a click. If it’s more click-like I would lean toward it being a badly balanced fan.
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This is not a sign of a problem on a mobo though right? normal to have it from time to time?
NVME M.2 ssd >>>>>> SATA M.2 ssd. Fastest SATA ssd speed tops out at 600 MB/s, while NVME goes up into the thousands MB/s
The catch is that no current games are designed to use that much bandwidth.
Coil whine, if that’s what you’re experiencing, is normal (though it doesn’t affect all units of a model of mobo/GPU equally). It might be a good idea to spend some time isolating the issue and figuring out if that’s what it actually is, though.
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There are plenty of games that could make use of the extra bandwidth. What is holding everything back are old filesystem protocols that in many cases date back 20 years or more. They require the CPU to handle transferring data between the SSD and VRAM. Once DirectStorage is implemented, this won’t be a problem anymore.
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In WoW the difference between SATA and NVME is next to nothing.
Until we change the storage subsystems (schedulers, filesystems etc) like Playstation did we are bottlenecked by software.
There is no reason modern games can’t stream assets and have 0 loading times at high speeds with modern hardware.