SSD: SATA or NVMe Which is better for gaming?

You already have your gaming computer practically assembled and now the question arises as to which SSD to choose for your system taking into account that it is currently not a small investment. To optimize your budget and get the best performance, from Nfortec we are going to make a comparison of SATA vs NVMe SSD, so you can choose between the models of our new series of storage devices Alcyon, and determine which of the two options is worth in the assembly of a pc mainly intended for gaming. Will you join us in this brief but intense comparison?

An SSD to squeeze the most out of your games

NVMe SSDs are undoubtedly the fastest of the two models, but this speed also has a noticeable impact on the final price. However, we are going to focus on making a comparison taking into account that this SSD will be mounted in a gaming PC, so we have to analyze all the essential aspects for a good gamer computer

Performance and price go hand in hand

If we make a quick performance comparison between a SATA and an NVMe, the clear winner would undoubtedly be the latter. The main difference between the two models also lies in the price. Currently we can obtain at very affordable prices 1 or 2 TB SATA SSDs. And yet, opting for the option that provides the best performance will be much more expensive. At the same price between the two models, we will have to do without space

However, gaming is not all about performance, we will have to analyze key factors such as file storage speed, in-game performance or loading times, among many other features

Comparison of performance and file copying

If we make a comparison between both models on a Windows 10 operating system installed on both computers, we obtain a boot time of approximately 33 seconds with the NVMe and 41 seconds with the SATA SSD. Therefore, the boot of the gaming computer using NVMe SSD is 8 seconds faster

We then tested copying a 30 gb file manually to both SSDs and obtained results of 22.5 seconds with the NVMe and 61 seconds with the SATA. Therefore, in this particular section the difference is abysmal and the clear winner is the NVMe SSD, which offers triple the speed in copying files

which SSD loads games faster?

Finally we are going to analyze what is perhaps the most important aspect of our future SSD. How long does it take to load the games we usually use? The test we performed consisted of checking how long it took for a game to load a saved game depending on the SSD used. We counted the time from the moment we press load game until we can control the character. This test is perhaps the most important of the comparison, since the duration is also applicable to the loading screens, which are currently very numerous in most games on the market

The results given for this last analysis are not very enlightening, since despite the fact that NVMe loads on average one second faster than SATA, the difference is minimal and hardly noticeable on a day-to-day basis

So what is the best SSD option for gaming?

Once this comparison has been made, we can determine that the best option would be to get a SATA SSD, since the price difference is very large and the difference in gaming performance is not so great. The decision depends on how demanding each gamer is, maybe there are people who prefer to have those seconds of higher speed and are willing to pay the difference. Just like SSDs, no two gamers are the same. E

We hope you have found our SSD comparison useful and that you already know which model best suits your current gaming PC