Storage devices are a vital part of your computer. Without them, playtime is over. But, do you even need some of the fastest NVMe drives on the market just to play some of the latest AAA titles in the market? Or, is it just a waste of money? Let’s find that out.
What are NVMe Drives?
NVMe stands for non-volatile memory express. Much unlike system memory, data on these drives never get lost when the power cuts. So, this gives them storage properties like mechanical hard drives.
But, that is the only similarity NVMe drives have with mechanical hard drives. Their construction and the working mechanism are completely different.
Without getting too much into the technical details, let us look at the basic differences between NVMe drives and other competent technology.
To begin with, NVMe drives are much smaller as compared to a 3.5″ hard drive or a 2.5″ SATA SSD. The working principle of NVMe drives means that they are a form of SSDs as well, albeit much smaller.
The second and the most important difference of NVMe drives is the tremendously high transfer speeds they are capable of. While mechanical hard drives max out at 100Mbps read/write speeds and SATA SSDs can do a maximum of 600Mbps, NVMe drives available today are capable of 7500Mbps transfer speeds. The current-gen consoles, the PS5 and the Xbox Series S|X pack an NVMe drive of similar caliber.
Thus, it is quite common that a PC built to perform much better than a console will have to pack an SSD equivalent to that the consoles have. While theoretically, this approach is correct, how much difference does a slower SSD make? Let’s find out.
CrystalDiskMark scores of a SATA SSD (WD Green 240GB 2.5″ drive)
The above picture is the benchmark results of the WD Green 240GB drive. This result is just for comparison to the NVMe drive results.
CrystalDiskMark scores of an NVMe drive (Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 1TB drive)
If you notice from the above example, both drives have higher read speeds as compared to write speeds. This is because all drives spend more time reading data in their lifetime than writing them. Benchmark tests like CrystalDiskMark check both of these performance metrics to give realistic performance data.
Also, It is quite evident from the above example that NVMe drives are much faster than SATA SSDs. Certain cutting-edge drives in the market go above 7000Mbps read speeds. That is tremendously fast and is quite overkill.
Now, let us test the performance of these drives in games.
NVMe vs SSDs In-Game Performance
Test Application | SATA SSD | M.2 NVMe SSD |
Windows 10 | 10.987 seconds | 9.951 seconds |
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition | 29.120 seconds | 26.577 seconds |
Watch Dogs: Legion | 17.221 seconds | 15.454 seconds |
Far Cry: New Dawn | 18.894 seconds | 16.441 seconds |
Kingdom Come: Deliverance | 7.241 seconds | 6.187 seconds |
Shadow of the Tomb Raider | 10.655 seconds | 10.128 seconds |
Battlefield V | 21.887 seconds | 20.078 seconds |
As you can see, the difference in loading times is almost insignificant in between these two drives. Also, owning a faster NVMe drive does not ensure more frames in games either. A mechanical hard drive will give you pretty much the same performance. You will only face performance drops if you are going for something really old school, like say a PATA hard drive.