Boot Drive on NMVe M.2 SSD or Normal Sata III SSD ?

[Olivia]

Going to be upgrading PC in the coming months, will be the first time I will have a mb that has M.2 slots.

I understand that the M.2 SSDs can be a lot faster than a regular SSD. So should I have the M.2 as the Windows 10 boot drive or just keep it on a normal SSD like I have been doing already and use the M.2 SSD for other games/apps?

I doubt the M.2 is really going to do anything for the boot time of windows or system responsiveness. So I could keep it on sata SSD, but are there any good reasons to have it on the M.2?

Thanks.

[nullable]

Once you take HDD's out of the equation either is pretty nice. For most uses cases though NVMe won't make a huge difference for normal windows. I've run Windows on SATA and NVMe SSDs and never really noticed a difference in just about any use. Gaming, software development, whatever. As long as I'm not dealing with an HDD it's all gravy.

That being said, the purist in me thinks having Windows on the faster drive would be better. The practical realist in me says it's not worth jumping through big hoops over.

If you can clone the SATA SSD to the NVMe and get on with your life, that's super easy and it's what I would talk myself into doing.

If your boot drive is using more space than the NVMe has and juggling Windows and programs and such would be a hassle, I personally wouldn't bother doing that just because that's what "ought" to be done for a meaningless optimal configuration. And besides you can always juggle that stuff around next time you have to format your OS for any reason too.

[shoopy]

I put my OS on NVMe simply to not have a SATA drive permanently tethered to the PC.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

It won't even have a boot time with NVME it'll go right from post to the OS login once the os is installed and get all the drivers installed such as Motherboard Chipset and NVME

[Supafly]

Just to clarify M.2 can have different types of Nvme. The slower Nvme SSDs will have speeds the same as a 2.5" SSD of the same brand/model.

The faster M.2 PCIe x4 Nvme can be 4+ times faster than standard SSDs.

Unless you're encoding videos or something you won't really notice much of a difference and may not even notice a difference at all for most activities wen using a x4 Nvme drive. If the price isn't an issue a fast Nvme is nice but you really won't see a difference over a stand SSD for the majority of activities.

M.2, whether it's a standard SSD that performs the same as it's 2.5" equivalent or a much faster Pcie x4 SSD the m.2 drive is nicer to have as you don't need a bay + the 2 cables for it to work. So for me I'd go for an m.2 drive regardless of it being a standard SSD or x4 drive.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Most Gen3 NVME SSD can be 10X faster then M2 or SATA3 that average a peak read speed of approx 450-550MB/S

With Gen4 NVME (provided you have PCIE 4.0) can be approx 2X faster then NVME Gen3

Samsung is about to release the NVME GEN4 980 PRO and EVO