NVME SSD or SATA 2,5 for PC build?

Simon Garrett wrote:

edispics wrote:

Simon Garrett wrote:

edispics wrote:

Simon Garrett wrote:

Morris0 wrote:

Ron Zamir wrote:

Hi. Just a beginner question - My first ever build PC based on AMMD Ryzen 2400G on an Asrock B450 motherboard. I have collected most of the parts but case. I bought the Samaung Evo 860 2,5 Sata SSD. This PC is not for gaming just office and Photoshop and some basic video editing. Saw some review, very impressed with the Kingston A2000. Does it make sense to sell the Samsung SSD and get the Kingston or other NVME SSD? Will I notice any improvement, speed difference and reliability?

The big difference is when you go from hard drive to SSD. There is an additional improvement in load time and responsiveness with a fast NVNM drive yet it's not huge.

Morris

The throughput of M.2 NVMe SSDs can be much faster than SATA SSDs. SATA maxes out at 6GB/s,

Nope, 6Gb as in bits, not B as in bytes per second

SATA I (revision 1.x) interface, formally known as SATA 1.5Gb/s, is the first generation SATA interface running at 1.5 Gb/s. The bandwidth throughput, which is supported by the interface, is up to 150MB/s.

SATA II (revision 2.x) interface, formally known as SATA 3Gb/s, is a second generation SATA interface running at 3.0 Gb/s. The bandwidth throughput, which is supported by the interface, is up to 300MB/s.

SATA III (revision 3.x) interface, formally known as SATA 6Gb/s, is a third generation SATA interface running at 6.0Gb/s. The bandwidth throughput, which is supported by the interface, is up to 600MB/s. This interface is backwards compatible with SATA 3 Gb/s interface.

but M.2 NVMe can reach approaching 40GB/s (potentially double for PCIe 4.0). I can measure that sort of difference between SATA and NVMe SSDs I have.

A typical Samsung 970 Evo PCIe NVMe is rated at 3500 MB per second sequential read and 3300 MB per second sequential write.

Although 5 times the disk throughput would be pretty unlikely to make any program run 5 times as fast, on my machines, Lightroom is significantly faster with M.2 SSDs.

M.2 is just a design factor and can support PCIe or SATA or even USB. I supposed you mean with M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs. But even then that statement is not consistent with Puget's testing, I have posted their benchmark results for Lightroom below.

You're quite right about my use of B vs b, but I was consistent in that in both cases I was quoting bits per sec not bytes, and I did say NVMe. M.2 NVMe has a much higher potential throughput than SATA, and many modern M.2 NVMe SSDs achieve a throughput well beyond SATA capability.

Whether that difference makes a perceptable difference in LR performance is another matter. I can say that my upgrade from i7-6700K to a 3900X and at the same time from a SATA SSD (for LR catalog and previews) to an NVMe SSD with 5 times the throughput made a very perceptable increase in LR speed.

But to be relevant to the OP's original question, you would have to separate out the 3900x effect from the NVMe SSD effect and then specify which LR functions actually were faster, all other things being equal.

Quite right, and sorry if I didn't make that clear: I had no idea whether the change of processor or SSD influenced the difference.

As the Puget testing shows, and to the OP's point, in the case of Lightroom, NVMe SSDs were only meaningfully faster than SATA SSDs in converting to DNG and exporting to jpeg.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Lightroom-2015-8-Storage-Performance-Analysis-875/

That Puget benchmark didn't look right; it implies the same performance for HD, SATA SSD or M.2 NVMe SSD and I checked. I took a catalog and copied catalog and image files (all jpegs in this case) to different drives and measured the time to create 827 1:1 previews. In each case, I deleted all existing previews first.

HD with measured sequential read speed 107 MB/s: 85 secs

SATA SSD with measured sequential read speed 550 MB/s: 83 secs

M.2 NVMe Samsung 950 Pro, sequential read 1862 MB/s: 80 secs

M.2 NVMe Samsung 970 Pro, sequential read 3561 MB/s: 80 secs

In other words: on my 3900x system, disk speed appears to have virtually no impact on LR time to create previews, as Puget reported. Well, sorry for doubting Puget's figures!

Thanks for taking the time to do that testing. Really useful and relevant.