Hard pressed to find huge difference in my newer m2 ssd’s.

[Win2000Fan]

Edit update 5/01/2024: I am a family man with family matters so I have been away. But I am doing this update because I am seeing more of a difference. Everything does seem more fluid and quicker to respond. So yes there is a difference. But not huge but yes I do see it.

In comparison to my old school spinning HD’s. I know I will get raked over the coals but I just don’t see it by leaps and bounds like I was lead to believe. For example, I have read where most people claim to run all 4K movies on SSD’s. So I transferred my 4K movies from my external HD, that’s right external, to my new SSD and see no difference, none. So far the games are not loading that much faster either. Yes there is a difference in load times but not by leaps and bounds. The only huge improvement I have witnessed so far is my OS load times. Now that is impressive. Other that that I just don’t see it and starting to wonder if people are forgetting how fast a good spinning hard could be. And no they don’t brake all the time like I have read. I have two that work great and they are over five years old. Yes ssd are small and quite and the OS loads very fast but so far that’s all I am really seeing. Am I the only one?

[emoticorpse]

Copy some larger files from the hdd to itself, then the same for the ssd.

If you want to notice more, do things like...

zip/unzip larger files to the drives to compare the speeds
I think thumbnails generate significantly faster when browsing in explorer
pretty sure it helps running vms
scanning with antivirus?
no disk thrashing is a plus

-Edited

[nullable]

Opprinnelig skrevet av 10Transistor:

In comparison to my old school spinning HD’s. I know I will get raked over the coals but I just don’t see it by leaps and bounds like I was lead to believe. For example, I have read where most people claim to run all 4K movies on SSD’s. So I transferred my 4K movies from my external HD, that’s right external, to my new SSD and see no difference, none. So far the games are not loading that much faster either. Yes there is a difference in load times but not by leaps and bounds. The only huge improvement I have witnessed so far is my OS load times. Now that is impressive. Other that that I just don’t see it and starting to wonder if people are forgetting how fast a good spinning hard could be. And no they don’t brake all the time like I have read. I have two that work great and they are over five years old. Yes ssd are small and quite and the OS loads very fast but so far that’s all I am really seeing. Am I the only one?

You're a few years late to the HDDs are just as good as SSDs party.

For one it kinda sounds like you're listening to rando and their BS and when their BS doesn't pan out you seem to think that means something. Instead of listening to randos and their pseudo-expertise why don't you do a little bit of research about what the actual differences are and why they matter. That will prevent you from needing to do pointless things some uninformed rando thinks is a good idea.

SSDs are faster when it comes to data transfers. There might be some edge cases where the speed isn't impressive or doesn't matter, but that's not a win for HDDs. But the reality is not every time you access the disk do you need or are going to use 600MB/sec. or 3500MB/sec or 7500MB/sec. Most general purpose things users are doing just aren't so bandwidth intensive that every performance increase in SSDs should knock your socks off. So, for me, chalk your claims up to mismanaged expectations.

The one thing SSDs really shine at, and this does matter to users is IOps. HDDs even really good ones can manage a couple of hundred IOps. SSD's can do tens of thousands of IOps or hundreds of thousands of IOps for an NVMe. This matters, especially on the OS drive because it means you have plenty of operations available to access the drive and get data you want. Where on a HDD sometimes you're going to be at capacity and IO requests are going to queue and you just have to wait. That's where a good chunk of HDD slowness comes from.

HDDs and SSDs both can wear out and potentially fail. They're both pretty reliable so quibbling over which is more or less reliable is mostly hair splitting semantics. Although some of it comes from incessant SSD FUD that was rampant in the early 2010's where everyone was terrified by new expensive technology. Well lots of people have used SSDs now, the FUD was all nonsense so there's a lot of pushback against HDDs for anything but large storage/large disk size.

Loading times will vary, loading times aren't solely based on disk speed. The data is read from disk sure and that part can be sped up. But how much work does the CPU need to do? The SSD isn't going to make the CPU go faster, all it can really do is get data into RAM a bit faster and then the performance of the rest of the system is what matters (a bit of a simplification). And if something already loads fast enough, then knocking a few seconds off isn't going to be shocking.

But I'd also argue that loading times aren't the only thing matters either. Every time you access the disk, the SSD will generally be faster and those little performance improvements add up. Everything goes a little faster when you don't have to wait on a slower HDD. Whether or not you notice those improvements personally doesn't really negate SSD performance compared to HDDs. That being said, we used HDDs for a long time before SSDs were cheap enough to be mainstream. And lots of people are disappointed when they expect the sun and the moon and what they get is a nice improvement, but nothing like the sun and moon.

So yeah, you don't care for whatever reason. But lots of other people do and they know better than you. HDDs may work fine for you, great. But any time HDD performance falls short of your needs or expectations, a good SSD might just resolve that.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Well first off when you have 4K movie files (AVI, MKV, MP4) on a HDD they don't even play right. They can be OK if you never jump around the time-line of the movie but as soon as you do that, the drive can't keep up. But overall that's not the biggest issue and I would say BS to moving all movie files to SSDs just because. If you have a large HDD to handle all those files then using a HDD for any loose files like those would be fine.

The biggest upside with any SSD is the need to use it for OS and Games drive(s) or for scenarios where you are doing lengthy reads or writes as this is always slow on any HDD especially where an OS drive is concerned because an OS drive is going to constantly be reading and writing. This is most important part with user experience of the device is back when we used a HDD for OS we'd click something and then have to wait around for it to load. That's basically all gone now and now with OS on SSD it usually can load up various things as fast as we can click around the OS.

SSDs also help greatly for content creation, or moving files around from different areas of a drive or between multiple drives.

[Illusion of Progress]

Opprinnelig skrevet av 10Transistor:

In comparison to my old school spinning HD’s. I know I will get raked over the coals but I just don’t see it by leaps and bounds like I was lead to believe.

If you're comparing "newer M2 SSDs" such as PCI Express 4.0/5.0 ones to prior SSDs and not seeing a difference, that's not too unheard of because most people and most uses won't expose where those extra speeds come into play.

If you're comparing them to HDDs, you should be seeing a vast difference regardless (although, yes, games will be one area where it might be "situation dependent" other than slightly shorter load times). Even a SATA SSD is a massive uplift over an HDD.

So depending on which it is you're trying to state, this may or may not be something I can agree with.

Faster storage is not too unlike RAM or VRAM capacity, or core count; it can matter greatly... but often times might not matter at all if your use case doesn't need it to begin with. It's not like faster per core performance or a faster GPU that just increases performance by default.

Most use cases, and this includes gaming, do not need or even barely benefit from the fastwat storage (but you should at least by on an SSD). Stop listening to gamers who pretend that gaming is some high demanding task that will take advantage of and benefit from every single higher spec thing when it comes to PCs just to justify why they buy their own high end hardware. There's enough information out there, and enough people correctly claiming, to show that high end SSDs are typically a waste for games and basic use because those things usually aren't limited by peak sustained read performance and will show minimal if any gain from the fastest SSD over a more standard SSD. A basic SSD like a garden variety PCI Express 3.0 Samsung 970 Evo or something is all most people need for OS/gaming use cases. And for only gaming (taking the OS out of the equation) it drops further; even a SATA SSD (sometimes even a budget QLC one without DRAM) is unlikely to be wildly different in a blind test for most games.

As for movies, were you seeing hitching or pausing to buffer while streaming from the disk? If not, the obvious answer was that the HDD speed wasn't limiting you to begin with, so it should have been obvious not to expect a speedup by adding more to something that isn't a limitation. If you have 32 GB, but use 20 GB, and add 32 GB more, are you going to see impressive gains? No. People fall for this "higher potential" all the time without realizing it only matters if the thing being uplifted is an issue to begin with. PCI Express version with graphics cards is an infamous one.

An SSD is a massive increase over HDDs but it's not like storage (even with HDDs) is the only bottleneck preventing PCs from reaching unlimited performance. It sounds like maybe you were expecting "instant everything" and didn't get it because it only sped up where storage was the bottleneck, and are now writing SSDs off for not magically uplifting the times where storage isn't the issue?

[pwnograffik]

Opprinnelig skrevet av 10Transistor:

In comparison to my old school spinning HD’s. I know I will get raked over the coals but I just don’t see it by leaps and bounds like I was lead to believe. For example, I have read where most people claim to run all 4K movies on SSD’s. So I transferred my 4K movies from my external HD, that’s right external, to my new SSD and see no difference, none. So far the games are not loading that much faster either. Yes there is a difference in load times but not by leaps and bounds. The only huge improvement I have witnessed so far is my OS load times. Now that is impressive. Other that that I just don’t see it and starting to wonder if people are forgetting how fast a good spinning hard could be. And no they don’t brake all the time like I have read. I have two that work great and they are over five years old. Yes ssd are small and quite and the OS loads very fast but so far that’s all I am really seeing. Am I the only one?

When you say "newer m2 ssd's" are they gen 3, gen 4, gen 5? What motherboard? "most people claim to run all 4k movies on SSD's" says who? HDDs are plenty fast for full UHD Bluray rips. I have 120GB+ rips on a WD Elements external drive and it doesn't even break a sweat. There is no need to put movies on a SSD unless you have money to burn or you have a media server with many clients. You say that games aren't loading much faster, well, what games are you playing? Details, man, details. The biggest difference you will find is in OS and application load times but you absolutely should be seeing a difference in game load times. If you're not, I suspect you're drives are being limited, you have a bottleneck somewhere else or you're being facetious.

In my system I have HDDs, SATA 3 SSDs and Gen 4 NVME SSDs. To be honest, you probably won't notice much difference between SATA SSDs and NVME SSDs when it comes to gaming as it currently stands but that depeneds on what you're playing. When Direct Storage gains more support this may change. However, compared to HDDs the difference is massive.

[Coffee]

There are some smart people posting in here and thanks for the explanation. As a lay user I could never go back to using a HDD as my main drive. You said it yourself the OS load time is impressive. I went from almost a couple of minutes with a HDD to less than 10 seconds being on the desktop and able to use the PC. That is huge. Waiting is the most annoying thing about using PCs for me. Game load times are much faster too so I can't really agree with you there. I agree there's not a lot of difference in video between the 2 but the previous reasons make the experience of using a PC much less irritating.

[tiger305]

try cloning m.2 c drive to m.2 d drive... takes me 5 minutes to accurately clone 400gig
cloning old mechanical drive , even the 7200 rpm ones, to another mechanical
one takes hours...

[Pepe]

Nice try, Jester farmer.

There is no way there's no visible difference, there is a clear difference from SATA HDD to SATA SSD. You must be trolling hard.

That or you must have bought the worst M.2 SATA SSD and before you had RAID 10 Raptors.

[Win2000Fan]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Pepe:

Nice try, Jester farmer.

There is no way there's no visible difference, there is a clear difference from SATA HDD to SATA SSD. You must be trolling hard.

That or you must have bought the worst M.2 SATA SSD and before you had RAID 10 Raptors.

Your right I am on here wasting my time trolling hard. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. Did you read any of what I said at all? Had you you might have responded differently.

[Nabster]

Starting internet browser in ssd 1 second
Starting internet browser in hdd 8 second

[kiwikev]

I can share my experience from switching from a HDD to a m.2 (pcie3 x4 drive)

In ETS2 when updates come out, it used to take 20 min's to patch the files on HDD, On the m.2 drive it takes only about 1 min to do the same thing.

[Win2000Fan]

I am not saying that I do not see any differences, I do see them. Lets face it the companies that make these SSD's push them off as being so great for games and that is where I see the smallest difference. Some games can still really drag between cut scenes. My 3D Mark bench mark program still drags loading and I played an old Quake 4 game the other day and it still dragged to load and that game is old. Also as I review these answers I see very little to nothing about how your SSD's have vastly improved the load times for any of your games. Yes the OS's and that includes Linux, really load fast and moving files from one SSD to the other with incredible speeds, yes I see it in those places too. But lets face it, we buy these SSD's to improve our game experiences and the reason's we dump hundreds of dollars into them and I just do not see it.

[Win2000Fan]

Opprinnelig skrevet av nullable:

Opprinnelig skrevet av 10Transistor:

In comparison to my old school spinning HD’s. I know I will get raked over the coals but I just don’t see it by leaps and bounds like I was lead to believe. For example, I have read where most people claim to run all 4K movies on SSD’s. So I transferred my 4K movies from my external HD, that’s right external, to my new SSD and see no difference, none. So far the games are not loading that much faster either. Yes there is a difference in load times but not by leaps and bounds. The only huge improvement I have witnessed so far is my OS load times. Now that is impressive. Other that that I just don’t see it and starting to wonder if people are forgetting how fast a good spinning hard could be. And no they don’t brake all the time like I have read. I have two that work great and they are over five years old. Yes ssd are small and quite and the OS loads very fast but so far that’s all I am really seeing. Am I the only one?

You're a few years late to the HDDs are just as good as SSDs party.

For one it kinda sounds like you're listening to rando and their BS and when their BS doesn't pan out you seem to think that means something. Instead of listening to randos and their pseudo-expertise why don't you do a little bit of research about what the actual differences are and why they matter. That will prevent you from needing to do pointless things some uninformed rando thinks is a good idea.

SSDs are faster when it comes to data transfers. There might be some edge cases where the speed isn't impressive or doesn't matter, but that's not a win for HDDs. But the reality is not every time you access the disk do you need or are going to use 600MB/sec. or 3500MB/sec or 7500MB/sec. Most general purpose things users are doing just aren't so bandwidth intensive that every performance increase in SSDs should knock your socks off. So, for me, chalk your claims up to mismanaged expectations.

The one thing SSDs really shine at, and this does matter to users is IOps. HDDs even really good ones can manage a couple of hundred IOps. SSD's can do tens of thousands of IOps or hundreds of thousands of IOps for an NVMe. This matters, especially on the OS drive because it means you have plenty of operations available to access the drive and get data you want. Where on a HDD sometimes you're going to be at capacity and IO requests are going to queue and you just have to wait. That's where a good chunk of HDD slowness comes from.

HDDs and SSDs both can wear out and potentially fail. They're both pretty reliable so quibbling over which is more or less reliable is mostly hair splitting semantics. Although some of it comes from incessant SSD FUD that was rampant in the early 2010's where everyone was terrified by new expensive technology. Well lots of people have used SSDs now, the FUD was all nonsense so there's a lot of pushback against HDDs for anything but large storage/large disk size.

Loading times will vary, loading times aren't solely based on disk speed. The data is read from disk sure and that part can be sped up. But how much work does the CPU need to do? The SSD isn't going to make the CPU go faster, all it can really do is get data into RAM a bit faster and then the performance of the rest of the system is what matters (a bit of a simplification). And if something already loads fast enough, then knocking a few seconds off isn't going to be shocking.

But I'd also argue that loading times aren't the only thing matters either. Every time you access the disk, the SSD will generally be faster and those little performance improvements add up. Everything goes a little faster when you don't have to wait on a slower HDD. Whether or not you notice those improvements personally doesn't really negate SSD performance compared to HDDs. That being said, we used HDDs for a long time before SSDs were cheap enough to be mainstream. And lots of people are disappointed when they expect the sun and the moon and what they get is a nice improvement, but nothing like the sun and moon.

So yeah, you don't care for whatever reason. But lots of other people do and they know better than you. HDDs may work fine for you, great. But any time HDD performance falls short of your needs or expectations, a good SSD might just resolve that.

Wow you really copped and formed an attitude towards me over a stupid opinion I wrote. This is nothing more than my dumb opinion and it is based on my experience and nothing more. Nowhere did I proclaim myself smarter than anyone on this thread I started. Here is the difference between a fact and an opinion. Fact, numbers do not lie, so 1+1 will always equal 2. 1+1 will never equal 3 but always 2. Opinion, the weatherman's forecast is based on an opinion. If it was a fact it would snow or rain at the exact time he said it would snow or rain. He/she would know when, date and exact time a Tornado would, in fact, destroy a family's home and maybe save their lives. Hope I helped you understand the difference between someones opinion and a fact.