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3 reasons that SSD speeds don't matter anymore
When it comes to picking hardware for your PC, it's natural to want the latest and greatest. When choosing the best SSD for your build, just from looking at specifications, you'd likely want a PCIe 5.0 SSD which comes with the highest transfer speeds. I'm here to tell you that you probably don't need it though. Unless you're doing specific tasks that require a high volume of sequential read and write speeds, you can buy any SSD that fits your budget and get roughly the same experience in daily use.
If you're still running a spinning hard drive on your PC, it's high time to switch over to an SSD.
Games can only use speed up to a point
Once you get past loading screens, it doesn't matter much
Gaming on an SSD is a transformational experience if you've only gamed on slow HDDs, but nowadays, every SSD is fast enough for gaming use. That's because the only time that games need a faster transfer speed is while loading assets. Even the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs perform similarly to PCIe 4.0 SSDs when on loading screens though, and the difference is measured in seconds rather than anything substantial. And with DirectStorage being slowly adopted by games, and not making much of a difference in the titles it has shipped in, you really don't need the fastest SSD to game.
Even moving between PCIe Gen 3 to Gen 4 to Gen 5, you won't see meaningful differences in how your games play. I have a mix of Gen 5 and Gen 4 drives in my desktop PC, and I've never thought, "oh, I can tell which drive that game is installed on." Similarly, moving between the Steam Deck's PCIe 3.0 interface to the Legion Go or ROG Ally's PCIe 4.0 doesn't make that much of a difference in games. Even when installing games, the limiting factor is often my internet speed, not the speed of the SSD that it's being installed on.
We'll be seeing more games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 in 2024. Is your gaming PC ready for the challenge?
You won't notice the speed in daily use
Those max speeds are rarely used for normal tasks
In the vast majority of cases, you won't notice much of a difference between using a SATA SSD and a recent NVMe drive. Your operating system will still load just as quickly, games and apps will open swiftly, and searching on your drives will be fast. You don't need a super speedy SSD for browsing the internet, word processing, or making presentations. Sure, they help slightly, but it's maybe more of a psychological boost than anything real.
: How Much Longer Will Your SSD Last? How to Tell (Viral Tech)
That's not to say you shouldn't buy NVMe SSDs, especially when they're around the same price as SATA SSDs. In that case, why wouldn't you pick the NVMe when even the slowest PCIe 3.0 drives are four times faster than SATA's maximum speed? But that's all you need. You don't need PCIe 5.0, even if those speeds of up to 14,000MB/s are alluring. That's only for sequential data transfers, like when you're cloning your old drive onto the new one. In the workloads that matter in everyday use, Gen 5 SSDs aren't much different from Gen 4 or Gen 3 ones when moving or accessing smaller files. You don't need to spend the extra money on the latest version of NVMe drives, not when every NVMe drive you can get today is going to be great for everyday use.
While both SSDs and HDDs have their use cases, you might need more storage than you think you do
Even specialized tasks like video editing struggle to max out SSD speeds
You might see benefits in rendering time, but nowhere else
While I'm not going to argue against using an SSD for video editing (because they do help), you probably don't need the fastest speeds available. Even SATA SSDs with their 500-550MB/s speeds are good enough for most video editing tasks, and you can use the money you save to buy a higher capacity SSD which will benefit you more. That's because having all of your working footage on an SSD to draw from will be more advantageous than having the high transfer speeds of the latest NVMe SSDs.
You might notice a difference when first importing video files to be worked with, or in rendering times once you've finished editing and are exporting the final product. But even then, the difference is marginal, and if you only occasionally export video files, you can get away with slower SSDs. For those video professionals that export daily, you already know that every second counts, and likely have the budget to go for the fastest drives.
Making good videos requires skill and a lot of practice, but the right tools can also help.
Any SSD will improve your computing experience, no matter its maximum speed
Upgrading from an HDD to an SSD in an older device will instantly give you more performance for daily tasks, and might rescue that device from becoming e-waste. If you find you want faster transfer speeds than SATA SSDs offer, any PCIe 4.0 SSD will give you plenty of speed, while costing significantly less than the latest PCIe 5.0 models. Plus, PCIe 4.0 drives can be found with 8TB capacity, giving you lots of super speedy SSD storage space to play with.
