Is an M.2 SATA SSD fast enough for an operating system, or is NVMe worth it?
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MellowCedar47
I have two NVMe drives in my desktop, one 128GB and one 1TB, plus a spare M.2 SATA SSD. I originally bought the SATA drive for a laptop, but that laptop only supports NVMe drives, so the SATA drive is currently unused. My plan is to keep the operating system on a separate drive to make dual-booting and switching between Linux distributions easier, while storing games, downloads, and projects on an NVMe drive. Would running the OS from the M.2 SATA SSD be noticeably slower than using NVMe, or would the difference mainly matter during large file transfers?
Answers
You don't strictly need a separate physical drive for multiple operating systems; partitioning the 1TB NVMe can work too. But if keeping the OS isolated makes distro-hopping or reinstalling easier for you, using the spare SATA SSD is a sensible choice. I wouldn't buy another NVMe solely for the operating-system drive unless you have a particularly storage-heavy workload.
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One terminology note: M.2 describes the physical form factor, while SATA and NVMe describe how the drive communicates with the system. M.2 SATA drives and M.2 NVMe drives use different keying and aren't always supported by the same slot, so check the motherboard manual. If your board supports that SATA drive, it is perfectly reasonable to use it for the OS.
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For normal desktop use, an M.2 SATA SSD will feel very similar to an NVMe drive. Booting, launching applications, gaming, and everyday tasks generally won't show a meaningful difference. NVMe mainly pulls ahead in benchmarks and workloads involving large sequential file transfers.
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The advertised speed gap is real—SATA SSDs top out around 500–550 MB/s, while NVMe drives can reach several thousand MB/s—but most operating-system activity consists of smaller random accesses rather than huge sequential transfers. You should notice the difference mainly when copying very large files or doing heavy storage work, not in system responsiveness or gaming performance.
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