Hello I'm in the fun process of shopping for parts for a long overdue upgrade but wonder whether it's worthwhile buying a new NVME v4 for boot / Windows 11 (I do have one for the most important task of storing games...) or whether I would barely notice a difference in boot times and basic operation if I just re-use an old SSD (Crucial MX500 or Samsung 840 - of which I have 120GB and 250GB of one or the other). What do y'all think? I only really use my machine for gaming, web browsing and porn.
Even if your board can maximize pcie4.0 I'll doubt you'll notice any difference. I have a pcie 3.0 boot nvme, saves space but I can't say I've noticed any difference. Actually I've a pcie4.0 nvme that will be going in but that was just cheap for the storage space. I mean, I would. I did. Is it necessary to make a noticeable difference? No, but I would.
I don't know about W11 and how that fares with storage space, but from W10 experience you might find the biggest issue you notice is space running out on a 120GB drive as a boot drive. I don't have any fancy pcie 4 drives but I didn't see any real difference between SATA and NVME in terms of speed or feel.
Probably best, 2tb nvmes are cheap now, hell a 1tb is forty odd quid. A 125 needs disappearing to a caddy to be used as a massive thumb drive
One of my spare rigs has a SATA SSD and the game loading time is noticeable, when compared to the other machines running the same game. It isn't horrific, just noticeable.
Gracias David. Thankfully I've made the choice already to have a 2TB NVME purely as a games drive. Stupid Steam sales.... Grrr!
Rather annoying that my 1TB Samsung 970 Pro, cost £385 5 years ago. Now a 2TB 990 Pro, is £238 cheaper on amazon...
I just picked up a 4Tb SSD for not much more than I paid for a 64Gb M225 back in the day. No regrets on that though, the HDD to SSD move blew my tiny little mind.
My first solid-state storage was 32... kB. Yes, kilobytes. And I had to put it under a UV lamp when it got full, which erased everything over a period of about half an hour...
Yarp - not a chip, though, but a cartridge for the Cambridge Z88. It's still boxed up from the move at the mo', but you can see one in this shot: There's a 128kB RAM cartridge at the left, the PC Link cartridge in the middle, and a 128kB EPROM (the luxury) at the right. You worked in RAM, then you could write a file to the EPROM in case the batteries died - once. If you wanted to write it again, you had to change the filename. You also couldn't load from the EPROM directly; you had to manually copy it from the EPROM to RAM again. When the EPROM was full, you pulled the card and stuck it under a UV lamp quartz-window-up for half an hour to wipe its contents. If you didn't have one, you put it on the windowsill for a day or two and hoped you got some sunshine...
I always appreciate your posts Gareth, and please take this the right way, but I often feel like I'm in that Python sketch...
