OS on Old SATA vs new NVME

[Preacher]

My PC has had its OS on a 250GB samsung 850 evo SATA SSD since 2017, and I picked up a WD SN770 1 TB NVME drive to pop into it. Is it worth reinstalling windows 10 on the NVME? Is the performance difference worth the hassle of going through all of that?

Thanks

[BloodShed]

You make it sound like it's hard installing Windows.

Yes, performance it way better on NVME (feels more responsive with startup and general use).

[Preacher]

Originally posted by BloodShed:

You make it sound like it's hard installing Windows.

Yes, performance it way better on NVME (feels more responsive with startup and general use).

It's not but it's still a pain to redo everything.

[BloodShed]

Originally posted by Preacher:

Originally posted by BloodShed:

You make it sound like it's hard installing Windows.

Yes, performance it way better on NVME (feels more responsive with startup and general use).

It's not but it's still a pain to redo everything.

If you mean install everything, that's what 'winget' is for

[smokerob79]

fun fact....windows is still extended 32bit that can execute 64bit code....the OS its self maxes out at 1100mb read and write speeds.....windows is limited to this speed BUT can transfer things and the programs its running in the host environment can run faster

with this said there are things to think about before moving the OS.....(1)...yes you will see a little speed increase on boot times but real world it will be less then 2 seconds on a boot that should only take 15 seconds at the max on a SATA drive.....(2) you will slow down the M.2 drive and never see its max speed as the OS will always be running in the back round

on my system.....5700x with a 570x motherboard 32gb of 3600 with a 3080 GPU.....i have a 1tb gen 3, a 2tb gen 4 and 2 500gb sata SSDs with a old samsung 250gb 870 for the cheery on top.....gen 3 went from 3800 read with 3400 write down to 2000 read and 1800 write speeds with the OS on the drive......gen 4 went from 5000 read speed with 4600 write to 3600ish with 3200 write speeds with OS installed on it.....

the best is running 2 sata drives in raid for the OS to hit the 1100mb the OS maxes out at and leaving the M.2 open as a real storage drive that never has to limit its speed.....the second best is running a single SATA SSD for the OS and still leaving the M.2 as a storage drive.....

the last fact.....most CPU's today only have 24 PCI-E lanes to work with.....all motherboards take 4 lanes to run onboard things like network card, sound, USB host controllers, and the like.....so you only get 1 real M.2 UNLESS your on newer hardware like 7000 series or above AMD CPU's that get 28 lanes so you get 2 real M.2 slots that are not limited.....

the only reason i got a X570 motherboard was because it gave me 2 gen 4 slots with the second one being slowed down by about 500mb total bandwidth on the second slot when i do go to having 2 gen 4 drives......my OS will stay on SATA......

[bstsms]

NVME is much faster than a regular SSD drive.

[_I_]

when installing windows unplug ll other drives, so the os and its boot partitions are all on the same drive, then if for some reason you need to upgrade or swap drives around, the secondary drives can be removed without hurting the os install

[Lixire]

Since you are already on a good SATA drive with DRAM cache on it. moving Windows to the NVMe won't really give you much of a benefit
Keep the EVO 850 as your OS drive while the SN770 will be a storage/game drive.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

Keep in mind that 7 years old SSD can fail at any moment.

[Lixire]

Originally posted by smokerob79:

fun fact....windows is still extended 32bit that can execute 64bit code....the OS its self maxes out at 1100mb read and write speeds.....windows is limited to this speed BUT can transfer things and the programs its running in the host environment can run faster

with this said there are things to think about before moving the OS.....(1)...yes you will see a little speed increase on boot times but real world it will be less then 2 seconds on a boot that should only take 15 seconds at the max on a SATA drive.....(2) you will slow down the M.2 drive and never see its max speed as the OS will always be running in the back round

on my system.....5700x with a 570x motherboard 32gb of 3600 with a 3080 GPU.....i have a 1tb gen 3, a 2tb gen 4 and 2 500gb sata SSDs with a old samsung 250gb 870 for the cheery on top.....gen 3 went from 3800 read with 3400 write down to 2000 read and 1800 write speeds with the OS on the drive......gen 4 went from 5000 read speed with 4600 write to 3600ish with 3200 write speeds with OS installed on it.....

the best is running 2 sata drives in raid for the OS to hit the 1100mb the OS maxes out at and leaving the M.2 open as a real storage drive that never has to limit its speed.....the second best is running a single SATA SSD for the OS and still leaving the M.2 as a storage drive.....

the last fact.....most CPU's today only have 24 PCI-E lanes to work with.....all motherboards take 4 lanes to run onboard things like network card, sound, USB host controllers, and the like.....so you only get 1 real M.2 UNLESS your on newer hardware like 7000 series or above AMD CPU's that get 28 lanes so you get 2 real M.2 slots that are not limited.....

the only reason i got a X570 motherboard was because it gave me 2 gen 4 slots with the second one being slowed down by about 500mb total bandwidth on the second slot when i do go to having 2 gen 4 drives......my OS will stay on SATA......

When it comes to OSes in general. the speed itself doesn't matter too much but rather the latency is.
You can have HDDs with 200MB/s read and write on them but they will feel horribly slow when Windows 10/11 is installed on them due to the drive being overwhelmed in terms of the I/O requests which causes very high latency.
Hence why even a garbage tier QLC DRAMless SATA SSD will feel faster as a Windows drive than an HDD if we purely talk about boot drives
going from 550MB/s to 1100MB/s or even more than that won't improve system snappiness

[smokerob79]

Originally posted by Lixire:

Originally posted by smokerob79:

fun fact....windows is still extended 32bit that can execute 64bit code....the OS its self maxes out at 1100mb read and write speeds.....windows is limited to this speed BUT can transfer things and the programs its running in the host environment can run faster

with this said there are things to think about before moving the OS.....(1)...yes you will see a little speed increase on boot times but real world it will be less then 2 seconds on a boot that should only take 15 seconds at the max on a SATA drive.....(2) you will slow down the M.2 drive and never see its max speed as the OS will always be running in the back round

on my system.....5700x with a 570x motherboard 32gb of 3600 with a 3080 GPU.....i have a 1tb gen 3, a 2tb gen 4 and 2 500gb sata SSDs with a old samsung 250gb 870 for the cheery on top.....gen 3 went from 3800 read with 3400 write down to 2000 read and 1800 write speeds with the OS on the drive......gen 4 went from 5000 read speed with 4600 write to 3600ish with 3200 write speeds with OS installed on it.....

the best is running 2 sata drives in raid for the OS to hit the 1100mb the OS maxes out at and leaving the M.2 open as a real storage drive that never has to limit its speed.....the second best is running a single SATA SSD for the OS and still leaving the M.2 as a storage drive.....

the last fact.....most CPU's today only have 24 PCI-E lanes to work with.....all motherboards take 4 lanes to run onboard things like network card, sound, USB host controllers, and the like.....so you only get 1 real M.2 UNLESS your on newer hardware like 7000 series or above AMD CPU's that get 28 lanes so you get 2 real M.2 slots that are not limited.....

the only reason i got a X570 motherboard was because it gave me 2 gen 4 slots with the second one being slowed down by about 500mb total bandwidth on the second slot when i do go to having 2 gen 4 drives......my OS will stay on SATA......

When it comes to OSes in general. the speed itself doesn't matter too much but rather the latency is.
You can have HDDs with 200MB/s read and write on them but they will feel horribly slow when Windows 10/11 is installed on them due to the drive being overwhelmed in terms of the I/O requests which causes very high latency.
Hence why even a garbage tier QLC DRAMless SATA SSD will feel faster as a Windows drive than an HDD if we purely talk about boot drives
going from 550MB/s to 1100MB/s or even more than that won't improve system snappiness

but it will.....running RAID with 2 SATA SSDs will make the OS run faster....but that is where it max out do to extended 32bit getting in the way......the I/O requests are the reason the M.2 will always be slowed down by installing the OS on it......you cant have long reads without the drive stopping for I/O requests.....

[smokerob79]

Originally posted by Rumpelcrutchskin:

Keep in mind that 7 years old SSD can fail at any moment.

really??? did you miss the fact samsung themselves say most of their 250gb SSD's will go to 150TB write cycles before seeing errors??? my samsung that has had my OS on it since i got it is only at 19TB written.....

https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-introduces-latest-in-its-worlds-best-selling-consumer-sata-ssd-series-the-870-evo

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by Rumpelcrutchskin:

Keep in mind that 7 years old SSD can fail at any moment.

So can a brand new one, what's your point.

Ive have plenty of SATA SSDs used 24/7 ~ 365 for 8-12 years and they still in the 90% wear & tear factor.

If you have a decent existing SATA SSD, it's no a big deal to wipe clean and use for your OS.

Then go get a 2 or 4 TB NVME Drive for Games.

Most of the performance NVME drives are cheaper then SATA SSDs now.