NVMe vs SATA SSD What is worth buying?

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When choosing a new SSD, be it for the system or for storage, we might oftentimes wonder whether it is better to invest in an SSD with a high-end, high-capacity SATA 3 interface or a low-end NVMe SSD, which even having a lower capacity will deliver a superior performance. The battle NVMe vs SATA SSD is always determined by a lot of factors, being the 2 most relevant the price and performance.



The market is currently overfilled by SSDs of all capacities and formats, but there are two types that clearly differ, they are the SATA and 2.5-inch format and the NVMe, with the M.2 format. The first were the ones that initially hit the market, and today we find them at much cheaper prices than NVMe. On the contrary, the performance of SATA SSDs is stagnant while that of NVMe is constantly increasing, and is currently up to 10 times higher.

NVMe vs SATA SSD, when to invest in one or the other?

Let’s start from the assumption that you have a limited budget, let’s say around $100 USD. With that money, you can go perfectly for a premium 1TB SATA 3 SSD, or a low-end, low-capacity NVMe. The reality is that even the cheapest NVMe PCIe SSD is going to deliver more than twice the performance of the best SATA 3 SSD, but this extra performance will actually make or not a big difference in terms of user experience depending on for what to use. For example, an NVMe SSD with 3,500 MB/s of read speed did not provide much difference for gaming compared to a SATA SSD of 560 MB/s of speed.

There is no doubt that if we were to do a performance test on a NVMe vs SATA SSD, the NVMe SSD would be the clear winner, since SATA 3 SSDs have long since reached the performance limit offered by the SATA interface 3. That being said, today we can buy SSDs with this interface with capacities of 1 and 2 TB at relatively affordable prices, while the very fast NVMe SSDs are still quite expensive, and at the same price we will have to sacrifice capacity.

Obviously an NVMe SSD provides lower load times, a faster boot and in general a better performance of the entire system, but the counterpart is that for the same price it offers us a much lower capacity, and in most cases (remember that we compare a high-end SSD with a low-end one) also a lower life time. However, when we talk about copying files or working with very large files, this is where an NVMe SSD really makes the difference and can save us a lot of time in terms of file management (we talk about audio and video editing tasks, for example).

Ultimately, the choice will depend on what you are going to use the device for; In general, it is more convenient to buy a high-end SATA 3 SSD because it will provide better capacity, more durability and more options such as encryption, garbage collection etc., in exchange for not having as good performance as that provided by an NVMe lower end. On the contrary, if you intend to perform tasks with large files or are looking to rush until the last second of performance, then even the lowest-end NVMe will give you better results than a SATA SSD, but be aware of the disadvantages that this has ( less capacity, less durability, etc.).

What can we find on a high-end SATA SSD?

In any product category, there are high-end tiers not simply because it provides the best performance (which is usually the case, even a high-end SATA 3 SSD pushes the interface to the limit), also because the combination of all its features is the what places it at the top of all the rankings. The low-end range, on the other hand, tends to present “cheap” devices, with poor quality, concise features and in general terms, products that you later regret having bought.

In the electronics market, it is usually always more affordable to acquire the high-end of previous generations than the low-end of current generations, because you get a better and more durable product at a better price, despite perhaps not having the latest technology. That gives you access to the best performance, and that is exactly what happens when comparing SATA SSDs vs NVMe PCIe.

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