Since I only have sata2 on my Asus P6T SE I'm kinda limited on improving performance. Best thing I did, around 4 years ago, was drop in a 2.5” SSD as my boot drive (still going strong). So, any point replacing it with a PCIe SSD? Haven't the budget for a full system upgrade for at least another year or two but could throw c120 at one from Plextor or Kingston... Cheers! Cleggy.
The real world performance benefit just isn't very large between different ssds. Only real reason to upgrade from one ssd to another is capacity. Unless you get a pci-e ssd for the same price (or at least very close) it won't be worth it (unless you have money to blow).
Unless you are doing things that would actually benefit from potential increased iops... nope. I put an msata to pci-e adapter with sata6gbps and sure it benched faster, but day to day use didn't feel a bit different... it did free up all my sata ports for more storage hdd though, so that was it's real point anyway. If you do go that way, I would recommend to just get an m.2 to pci-e card with a nice fast m.2 disk so it will be able to move forward and you can ditch the card later on motherboard that has m.2 built in.
This is simply not a reasonable statement to make as (a) the OP's working from a 3Gb/s starting point & (b) even if they weren't then it's entirely usage dependent. Taking them in order - (a) Whilst it'd be completely valid to say that the big jump is from a HDD to almost any modern SSD, that's does not mean that a user can't perceive any difference beyond a single 3Gb/s SSD. So, using my SSD history as an example, going from 2x 3Gb/s SSDs -> 4x 3Gb/s SSDs (on a proper raid card) --> 2x 6Gb/s SSDs (on a 6Gb/s intel controller) then each time there was a noticeable improvement in the 'feel' of using the machine... (whilst obviously these all weren't on the same machine, the SSD upgrades didn't coincide with a new build) ...though, the difference in 'feel' between 2x Samsung 830s in R0 & 2x 840 Pros in R0 was non-existent. (that's not saying that there was no actual difference of course) Whether the OP would notice enough of a difference to make it worthwhile is clearly something only they could answer, but it's simply not true that there's none... ...& they are way more likely to notice a difference because they're coming from a lower starting point (most people noticed a difference going from a 3Gb/s to a 6Gb/s SSD & controller) - not looking at buying a different sata SSD to use on the same controller. (b) Then there's usage. Well, imagining someone were after a recommendation for a whole computer, it wouldn't be sensible to either blindly recommend a £XXXX machine to someone, when they might just want to browse the web... ...or a Hudl, when they wanted to be running bunches of VMs & playing the latest high spec PC games. So, firstly, simply to cover it, whilst the per activity gains for a bit of browsing & Office & gaming & the odd thing in Photoshop & whatnot could be, there equally 'could' be a reasonable argument made about cumulative gains. So, whilst it may only be a fraction of a second here & there, over time these add up - so, for something a bit above a very basic usage, it'd be about how much the OP would value potentially gaining a few minutes over a week. (somewhere between this & the next bit there could be something like more in depth Photoshop usage - esp if loading bunches of large plugins &/or for the temp folder when working with huge images) More importantly though is that this clearly does not cover every usage scenario that someone might for their machine & the OP's not said what their usage is. Now, on the basis of their machine clearly not being a key part of providing data for a local network (which rules out some things), if they have a significant usage where either there's a very high queue depth &/or iops requirement (as the most likely need, some types of VM usage could potentially be relevant here) or, probably more likely, some very highly sequential r/w speed task that's disk bound (not cpu &/or gpu bound) then things obviously change. So, to give a couple of examples using my usage as the starting point (it's by no means intended to be an exclusive list) - - With premiere, jumping from a ~200-250MB/s (separate source & destination HDDs), to a ~400-500(+)MB/s (either separate R0 15K SAS HDDs or a single 6Gb/s SSD), to a 1000(+)MB/s (2x 6Gb/s SSDs in R0) sequential r/w speed made a huge difference when it came to exporting the video... ...&, with large projects then the time we're talking about can be very significant. Now, d.t. when i changed other kit, i can't 100% state that the OP wouldn't be cpu (&/or gpu) bound going above ~500MB/s - but clearly they're not at that point yet. Similarly with other video editing or transcoding s/w then there will obviously become a point where their cpu (&/or gpu) are the limiting factor, though this will depend on the task - & unless there's a billion effects, shonky s/w or they've got an alt solution, it's almost certainly the case that they'd currently be disk bound. - Likewise, there's a whole set of batch processing tasks that could come into play. So, for example, i need to regularly batch convert many 10s of GBs of lossless audio files. Now, using dBpoweramp, d.t. it being single threaded then converting to wav is completely cpu bound on my machine, & would be on the OPs; whereas, being multithreaded, there is a significant speed advantage in converting to flacs (@ 8) up to ~6-700MB/s or so using my kit. Similarly, using Audition for some other batch tasks, both its importing (as it scans the files) & exporting is significantly improved to around the same level. Again, obviously, the exact point at which the OP's kit would gain nothing more will be lower than mine but, once more, i would be surprised if they'd not currently be disk bound. &, whilst it's not something i do, the same can apply with some image batch processing tasks. Now, i'm certainly not saying that a faster SSD would be the best use of money for the OP in improving their system, not least as i also have no idea of their usage or how tight money is or... (so, for example, if they were currently video editing or transcoding using only 1 HDD, having 2nd reasonably fast HDDs solely dedicated to being separate source & destination drives would be a much more economical buy... ...or a better graphics card for gaming... ...or saving the cash towards a complete upgrade... ...or...) ...but it would be wrong to blithely assume that it wouldn't &, metaphorically, the OP only needs a Hudl.
If you've got 120 to spend on a component, get a new graphics card. Check out the market place as you can grab some great cards at that price.
The op is on a limited budget of £120, which would limit him to the cheap low capacity entry level performance pci-e ssds. Plus pci-e ssds won't keep any value whatsoever as they will all be rendered obsolete the instant nvme becomes available in consumer products. So yes, it was a reasonable enough statement to make in the context of this specific thread because I didn't feel like writing an essay on usage scenarios that affect maybe 0.001% of pc owners to cover all potential bases and most likely won't affect the op as due to the capacity limits he would face on the budget he mentioned there is no chance he will frequently move large amounts of data to and from the ssd.
Oh dear me... So you're saying that no one's who's on a tight budget or can't justify spending on the latest top notch kit (bearing in mind that they may well have paid a pretty penny for their X58 set up if bought when it was current) wants to do stuff like video editing or batch processing? (i accept that running VMs is more niche) What do you think people did before 6Gb/s SSDs on a decent 6Gb/s controller - simply not do anything other than use Word & browse the web & play solitaire??? Clearly they (as i always have done) used the best that they could afford to carry out all manner of tasks - & when tech improved & they could afford it then they upgraded... ...& most of the build threads on here are about people trying to achieve specific things on a ltd budget - so why not the OP? Now, whilst clearly not everyone will have my exact usage (hence them being *examples*), something like editing & transcoding video is now pretty common, as is converting audio files between formats having ripped the CD collection & whatnot. So as these are tasks where a faster sequential r/w speed (above the ~270-75MB/s max for 3Gb/s) can be of significant benefit... (obviously s/w & task dependent) ...they are obviously not ltd to 0.001% (of 1st world home users) - given that a fairly significant proportion will own smart phones &/or cameras that can record video at a decent quality & could well want to edit their video properly... ...or need to convert video regularly to watch on a portable device... ...& apparently there's these new fangled things called mp3 players that i've heard a few people own that don't all play lossless files (depending on the s/w, converting to a lossy format is usually multithreaded &, up to a point, ltd by disk speed)... ...as, whilst it's obviously ltd in size for both, i in no way stated that, *if* they had a significant usage that would benefit, the OP should use it for both this & the OS & whatnot. So it's complete nonsense to claim that the are no common uses that the OP could regularly have where a 128GB SSD that can do 770MB/s & 580MB/s sequential r/ws would be of material benefit in speeding up tasks that can take a long time.
Depends on the pcie ssd, and your budget I'd say. Tiny Tom Logan has just done a review of a pcie ssd and he was seeing reads in the order of 1.5Gb/s. That's insane. It needs to be said though, that the ssd in question is something in the order of £550 for 480gb. Can you justify that? I can't.
All of the PCI-E SSDs that I've seen are far too expensive to bother with (£500 or more). I wouldn't bother TBH.
Only worth it if you want to extend your epeen or have some application that massively needs IOPS. It is probably more cost effective to make a RAID0 using your motherboard controller. Won't be quite as fast but offers you more control over what you end up with.
