JANUARY 2022 PCWorld 91(fave.co/2Z26gQg).
SATA SSDs typically hit
speeds of up to 500MB
per second. (However, as
with NVME drives,
performance can vary
between individual
models.) That may sound
astonishingly slow, but
compared to SATA HDDs,
the difference is still like
night and day—a 7,200
RPM hard-disk drive tops
out at around 160MB per second. Nearly
everyone notices a material difference
between an HDD and a SATA SSD during
basic tasks such as document editing or web
browsing.
So why choose an NVMe drive over
SATA? The advantage becomes tangibly cleartake such phrases at face value. Look instead at
technical specs to figure out the approximate
speed of a laptop or desktop PC’s storage drive.
Speed
NVMe drives are faster than SATA drives. (This
is true even if both SSDs are in an M.2 form
factor.) Transfer rates depend first
on which generation of PCIe
connector your NVMe drive uses,
then on the individual model.
Currently, the maximum speed
for an NVMe PCIe 3.0 (aka Gen 3)
SSD is up to 3,500MB per second,
while a NVMe PCIe 4.0 (aka Gen 4)
SSD can hit up to 7,500MB per
second. Manufacturers usually list
the theoretical speeds to expect
from a particular model, which you
can verify by checking out
independent benchmark results
This laptop features two M.2 slots with support for NVMe. You
can usually figure out your laptop’s specs by consulting the
service guide or looking up YouTube disassembly videos.NVMe drives, such as SK Hynix’s Gold P31, are faster than SATA drives.