EL1TE:

1TB SSD still expensive these days, and as a gamer i still see barely any improvement in load times versus a standard SATA SSD like the 850 series. http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/samsung-970-pro-m-2-512gb-nvme-ssd-review,12.html If i was to buy a new SSD for gaming i'd still go with a 1TB SATA like the 850 EVO or MX500.

Fox2232:

Getting 500GB M.2 SSD with at least 3 times higher read speeds with only 27% price premium is very good investment for cases where speed may be important for quality of life. Same goes for 1TB M.2 where 1500/1000MBps r/w comes with only 29% premium over cheapest SATA3 1TB SSD. (Fun part here is that while mentioned MX500 costs reasonably less than faster M.2... EVO 850/860 cost about same without delivering speed.)

Aekold:

Do you think this was caused by lowering memory prices, poor demand for the old pricing model, or both?

Kaarme:

What are you saying? Samsung lowered the prices because Hilbert told them the prices are too high. Samsung just did what they were told to do. How would they dare to disobey?

Humanoid_1:

A while back I saw some guy over at oc.net forums who did a big test of SSD performance with a focus also on game load times. Ranging from a control mech HDD, SATA SSDs and M.2 also, sad thing was that games showed almost Zero load time improvement going from SATA SSD to a fast M.2. Apparently something to do with the way they are all made is holding them back massively. I'm still interested in one for non-gaming purposes, but I really wanted it for games and sad to say it is totally not worth it for them 🙁

Fox2232:

That's likely effect of compressed data files. Heavier compression, higher CPU bottleneck vs storage bottleneck. I think that today, in time where games are 40GB+ and people still buy them, developers should move from heavy compression favoring HDD and take lighter compression approach favoring SSDs. Then M.2 will see some bigger benefit. Then there is single to multiple data files access. Many games use single bigger data file and single file handler thread. Very good for HDD as read is then more sequential. On other hand SSD can't care less and queuing multiple files for simultaneous access brings benefits if CPU can handle loaded data. Coding something to have maximum benefit from M.2 reading 3GB/s would kill HDD performance. So middle of the road is best, or having 3 code paths which would handle loading based on 'mini' IOPs+read speed benchmark.

Fox2232:

That's likely effect of compressed data files. Heavier compression, higher CPU bottleneck vs storage bottleneck.

Fox2232:

I am eyeing M.2. With that in mind, Cheapest 500GB SATA3 SSD cost tiny bit more than cheapest M.2 500GB SSD with And they perform about same. Apparently that would be waste of bandwidth M.2 slot offers. So, cheapest good upgrade in speed is Kingston A1000 w/ 1500/900MBps r/w costing 27% more than that cheapest 500GB 2.5'' SATA3 SSD. That's very reasonable. And for that I think that in my situation: 128GB SSD for OS 240GB SSD for Games 500GB HDD for Games where loading speed is not needed 500GB HDD for Projects / Data ... Getting 500GB M.2 SSD with at least 3 times higher read speeds with only 27% price premium is very good investment for cases where speed may be important for quality of life. Same goes for 1TB M.2 where 1500/1000MBps r/w comes with only 29% premium over cheapest SATA3 1TB SSD. (Fun part here is that while mentioned MX500 costs reasonably less than faster M.2... EVO 850/860 cost about same without delivering speed.)

Humanoid_1:

A while back I saw some guy over at oc.net forums who did a big test of SSD performance with a focus also on game load times. Ranging from a control mech HDD, SATA SSDs and M.2 also, sad thing was that games showed almost Zero load time improvement going from SATA SSD to a fast M.2. Apparently something to do with the way they are all made is holding them back massively. I'm still interested in one for non-gaming purposes, but I really wanted it for games and sad to say it is totally not worth it for them 🙁

Agent-A01:

The issue is not that. It's due to several reasons. Most game files are packaged into certain formats that are composed of many small files. Since most assets aren't large contiguous files, there is not much benefit from M.2. M.2 is much faster on sequential/write IOs but not much faster if at all on small file IOs, i.e. 4k and less. A lot of those budget NVMe M.2s are actually slower in small IOs and have poorer read/write latency which is why they can be slower than a fast regular SATA drive such as an 850/60 PRO/evo. Only the top M.2s are really good in smaller IOs, i.e new 970 Pro/evo can do >70mb/s 4k random and top SSDs are around 40-50 max. Those will do better than most SSDs, not the budget M.2s.

Agent-A01:

The issue is not that. It's due to several reasons. Most game files are packaged into certain formats that are composed of many small files. Since most assets aren't large contiguous files, there is not much benefit from M.2. M.2 is much faster on sequential/write IOs but not much faster if at all on small file IOs, i.e. 4k and less. A lot of those budget NVMe M.2s are actually slower in small IOs and have poorer read/write latency which is why they can be slower than a fast regular SATA drive such as an 850/60 PRO/evo. Only the top M.2s are really good in smaller IOs, i.e new 970 Pro/evo can do >70mb/s 4k random and top SSDs are around 40-50 max. Those will do better than most SSDs, not the budget M.2s.

nizzen:

In many scenarios, loading of programs/games is bottlenecked by the cpu. Look at loading of new maps in BF 1 in taskmanager. It's using all cpu threads 100%. Even on my 7980xe 😀 36 threads...

The Goose:

I have a Samsung 960pro 512gb with my most used games on including Ets2+Promods and rusmap mods, Farcry5, GR Wildlands and SGW3, the loading time difference between my 960pro and my Sandisk UltraII ssd is like comparing night and day, Ets2+Promods and rusmap mods can take 2-3 mins on my Sandisk but on my 960pro....less than a minute.