I'm currently running my operating system on a Samsung 860 Evo 500GB SATA SSD with a speed of 600MB/s. I recently acquired a Samsung 990 Evo Plus 2TB NVMe SSD that boasts up to 7000MB/s. Right now, my startup time is about 9.1 seconds. My question is, would transferring my OS to the new NVMe SSD make a significant difference in gaming performance? I'm curious if games only retrieve files from the drive where they are stored, or if they rely on the system drive for specific DLLs and drivers. What do you think?
5 Answers
Just so you know, the 990 Evo Plus is technically a Gen 5 drive, but it only uses two PCIe lanes, which effectively limits it to Gen 4 speeds. So while it's definitely faster than SATA, the practical difference might not be as large as you'd expect.
Honestly, it might not be worth the trouble. First off, does your motherboard fully support Gen 5 drives? Even if it does, the advertised speeds are often just peak numbers. In everyday use, you probably won’t notice a huge boost in performance, so unless you’re doing a fresh OS install, I’d say keep your setup as is. Just to clarify, games primarily load from the drive they’re actually on, so they won’t pull from your system drive for that unless they're specifically set up to do so.
Honestly, it’s probably not worth the hassle right now. If you decide to reinstall Windows for any reason later, then I’d absolutely recommend using the new drive for that, but for now, I'd stick with your current setup. (By the way, check out this video I found: https://youtu.be/gl8wXT8F3W4—it has some insightful info!)
I actually moved my OS to an NVMe SSD while keeping my games on the older SATA SSD. Sure, I had to go through some technical steps like rebuilding my EFI partition and updating to GPT, but in the end, I don't see a drastic difference—9.1 seconds startup isn’t that far off from what I experienced. It’s not a game-changer, really.
There’s barely any difference in real-world use. Game loading and startup mostly rely on read speeds, and SATA SSDs handle those loads excellently. Unless you're constantly writing large files or installing new games, SATA is still fast enough. Also, modern games are mostly self-contained on their respective drives; they only reference the system drive for a few specific tasks.
Yeah, I agree! I think if you were starting fresh, putting the OS on the faster drive would make sense, but with your current setup, it sounds like you're fine.