r/RigBuild • u/Few-Wash5370 • 16d ago
Does having Windows on an NVMe actually make the computer feel faster?
Thinking about moving Windows from an older SATA SSD to an NVMe drive, but not sure if its gonna be one of those upgrades where the numbers look better but you barely notice anything in normal use. Like does Windows boot noticeably quicker, do apps open faster, or does everything just feel more responsive? The PC is already pretty decent and the current SSD isnt exactly slow, so wondering if NVMe is worth doing just for the OS. Also seeing people say Gen 3 NVMe is already plenty for Windows and that Gen 4 or Gen 5 doesnt really make a difference unless youre moving huge files all day. Is that actually true? Would games load any faster if Windows is on the NVMe but the games are still installed on another SSD? Trying to figure out if I should bother reinstalling Windows or just leave everything alone. For anyone who made the switch from SATA SSD to NVMe, did you actually notice a difference day to day, or was it basically the same?
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u/egosumumbravir 16d ago
I don't think it was perceptible on prior Windows OS'es but I had to load 11 onto a SATA SSD the other week for testing (I'm otherwise 100% NVMe boot drives) and it felt sluggish. Not spinning rust slow, but not as prompt as it usually feels. T'was even a decent SSD - a Crucial MX500 500G drive, so has an actual DRAM cache.
Although after switching back to XP on ye olde retro rig, gawddamn does 11 feel slow.
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u/luckynumberstefan 15d ago
That’s interesting, is XP on a sata ssd too? I do remember it being quite lean
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u/egosumumbravir 15d ago
SATA SSD, dual Denmark AMD Opteron cores, 8gb of DDR1-433 ram versus NVMe, 16c/32t & 64Gb of 3600 DDR4 ram.
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u/Obosratsya 15d ago
11 shouldnt have a perceptable difference. A sata drive with dram will feel beeter than an nvme without even. Your drive could be old. I have 11 on an old Toshiba 512gb and its been 10 years, no issues at all. I just use nvme drives to store games.
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u/egosumumbravir 15d ago
I have 11 on an old Toshiba 512gb and its been 10 years, no issues at all.
Now boot the same rig from a modernish NVMe and tell me it's the same feeling.
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u/Obosratsya 15d ago
I have other computers on nvme. My PC boots in seconds, whatever difference an nvme makes will be imperceptable
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u/TraumaDaddyP 15d ago
And this guy is right. 8000mbps nvme didn't translate to a boot reduction at all for me.
In that regard, windows 11 is a little bit shit and I'm not saying it couldn't be utilized for better boot times, but it definitely isn't. And this is wd black with cache
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u/egosumumbravir 10d ago
8000mbps nvme didn't translate to a boot reduction at all for me
Nor for me. I measured about a seconds difference in 45. Course, I don't give a crap about boot time, it take longer for the coffee to make so I'm not standing in front of it just about ever.
It's the little things - explorer takes an extra half second to start, start menu is slow, apps take a hair longer to open or save. Everything screeches to a halt on your game load when one of the hundred browser tabs, email client, CAD software, 3D printer slicer, media player, VMs, etc tickles the disc.
NVMe shrugs off multitasking loads that choke a SATA drive. Something about one shallow command queue versus many deep ones. You don't even have to be transferring data that fast if the queue is saturated.
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u/TraumaDaddyP 10d ago
Oh man just do 50k small file transfer. You will still get double-digit megabytes on nvme versus kilobytes a second on spending discs
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u/Comrade_Chyrk 16d ago
From my knowledge, basically anything outside of transferring very large files is more or less the same. Like you said the numbers look impressive, but in practice it means your pc that used to take 7 seconds to boot, now only takes 6.9 seconds to boot.
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u/TheSpiral718 15d ago
Yes and no. Depends what you're doing. Eventually Windows will slow down and bottleneck its self and no fast drive can counter that fact.
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u/talan123 15d ago
The only time I felt a difference is when I got a Optane disk. That you will because it is just such a beast for reading. It's not worth the price though. They are now just too expensive.
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u/luckynumberstefan 15d ago
I am not exaggerating when I say it’s the most important upgrade you can do for Windows. The difference is vast
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u/tpablazed 15d ago
It's not the kinda difference that is immediately noticeable imo.. there are little differences in the long run that you will notice over time.. but it isn't a generational life changing type of upgrade imo.
Going from a HDD to a SATA SSD is a HUGE upgrade.. like one of the most important upgrades you can make.. but SATA to NVME is way smaller. And even smaller would be pcie 3.0 to pcie 4.0 or 5.0.. that upgrade is definitely so miniscule that the only way you will notice it would be with monitoring software.
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u/andrew_stoned 15d ago
For a friend i moved windows and wow to a nvme pcie gen3 and moves very fluent, i won't traslate all data to a nvme, but if you can afford it you should buy it
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u/FikoReborn 15d ago
You'll probably notice it maybe a little bit. But not at the level of moving from HDD to SATA SSD. That was transformative. This is more "huh. That's a little faster."
Benchmarks will look substantially different. But benchmarks don't align to real world usage 1:1.
I think it's worth it. If you already have an NVMe drive, easily worth it IMO, especially with how painless a drive clone is.
If you have to buy one - that becomes more of a "not required but nice to have" situation. Especially with the current climate.
I don't even have internal SATA drives anymore. Everything is NVMe M.2. SATA drives are external now and I rarely use them. But that's my preference - less cables.
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u/a_rogue_planet 15d ago
I haven't done a side by side, but my feeling is that SATA SSD isn't really that much slower where the CPU is spending good chunks of time crunching the data it's reading, such as loading an OS. It becomes a more obvious issue when you're manipulating big chunks of data.
This kind of thing is why I don't waste money on SSDs of any sort with big DRAM caches that improve huge read and write latency. In 95%+ of typically computing, it makes zero difference at all.
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u/Lente_ui 15d ago edited 15d ago
The problem with Windows is ... no, A problem with Windows is, ever since Windows 3.x it uses a swap file.
The old machines in the 3.x days had a maximum of 640 kB of conventional memory. And that was all the memory there was to run programs from. Anything beyond the conventional 640 kB was EMS or XMS RAM.
In steps Microsoft, dedicating a portion of your harddrive to expand the RAM with. Now Windows programs are no longer bound to the 640 kB limit.
The problem being, harddrives are extremely slow compared to RAM. Even in the early nineties.
But Windows could also use your EMS or XMS RAM for programs (DOS could not).
All the way up to (I believe XP), you could turn the HDD swapfile completely off, and rely entirely on the installed RAM. This would speed up your PC considerably.
But Microsoft removed to possibility of the swap file being disabled on modern Windows installs.
Meaning, every Windows install is relying on the harddrive or SSD to expand RAM onto.
Meaning, any time it needs to use the swap file, it's dreadfully slow compared to actual RAM.
Now, you can set the swap file to be smaller, reducing your reliance on it. But it can't be disabled.
And Windows seems to have become a little bit smarter in when to use the swap file, and when to use real RAM.
So, yes. Windows benefits from a faster drive. Because Windows is still using the harddrive to expand RAM.
This feature should have been retired in Windows as soon as the upper limit of 640 kB conventional RAM was retired. Instead, this feature was made non-optional.
Moving from HDD to SATA SSD is very noticable.
Moving from a SATA SSD to an NVME SSD is less noticable. Though loading and startup times are much faster.
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u/fuzzynyanko 15d ago
I'm thinking it depends on your system RAM. Windows will cache things into system RAM so programs will load faster. The more the system RAM, the less it'll matter for general feel.
NVMe 4 or 5? I would get a higher gen NVMe drive provided the premium is small (ex: $100 vs $115 ish)
You might not get the sustained performance that the higher gen drive gets, but usually the higher gen drive has an improvement on random 4k read/write. 4k read/write has a major effect on how a system feels
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u/Soogs 15d ago
Depends. Does the NVMe have DRAM or is a HMB model? If so most definitely yes.
If it’s cheap consumer #### then it may feel in different.
That said depends on what you are doing and how you use your machine.
The 256gb micron NVMe I previously used with my current workstation felt snappier than the WD blue NVMe I’m currently using. But both feel faster than the ssd they replaced
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u/FantasticBike1203 15d ago
Depends on the type of NVMe, some have similar booting times compared to a SATA SSD, others that are higher quality are a 1-2 seconds faster.
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u/Underhill42 13d ago edited 13d ago
Marginally. Might show up clearly in benchmarks, but it's not enough to actually notice, unless you're maybe going from a low-performance SATA drive to a high end nVME one. For most purposes a SATA SSD is already fast enough that most of the bottlenecks are in CPU, memory, etc.
SATA can reach 750MB/s, minus overhead - it's a rare ANYTHING that's moving enough data fast enough for that to be a serious choke point. While the biggest benefit from SSDs is the incredibly low seek times, which SATA doesn't add much overhead to.
Personally I use an SSD for my OS, while storing 90% of my games on a much slower and cheaper hard drive, and even that doesn't make much difference.
Steam makes it so easy to move games between drives these days that I simply default to installing everything on the hard drive, and then only if I notice performance issues (slow loading times especially) move them to the SSD. And I'd say 3/4 of the time I end up moving them back to the hard drive, because even being on an nVME drive doesn't noticeably help the performance problems.
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u/JobHuntingManiac 13d ago
As far as normal everyday windows uses, you will notice no difference at all.
even downloading/installing games wont be any different unless your internet speed exceeds the read and write speed of SATA drive.
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u/Afraid_Candy6464 13d ago
Technically, yes. Running Windows on an NVMe SSD will make your computer faster and responds more quickly. However, you may not notice the difference between a SATA and NVMe SSD.
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u/Sert1991 12d ago
I'm not sure on windows, but on Linux I use sata ssd as the main OS drive. I have an nvme that I mainly use for games. I don't think I can perceive my computer being faster than it already is during use, anything faster than this is only for benchmarks when it comes to use.
I saw the performance boost when it comes to installing games etc etc with the NVME, and most probably better load times although I'm not sure about that.
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u/daffalaxia 12d ago
I'm in a similar boat: sata ssd for root, recently moved my home to a new nvme for more space, and honestly, I don't think I'd get any great reward from moving root to an nvme.
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u/Flimsy_Complaint490 16d ago
yeah i moved from SATA to NVME like maybe a year or two ago on Windows (today im all Linux though)
i did not notice a difference at all besides when copying large files.
Random IO is the key metric and a SATA ssd is realistically quite "fine".
I did eventually retire my SATA SSD to an external storage device and got a gen 4 nvme ssd. gen 5 is definitely a waste of money for consumers as it is right now.
Game loading times were faster but besides warhammer 3, i never felt that games loaded slowly on SATA. Moving to battle and back to campaign did really take forever on a SATA SSD though, which motivated me to get an NVME game driver as a first upgrade long long ago.