iMac 2019 SSD v NVME speed (practical difference)

[jurajb]

So last week I've finally managed to upgrade my iMac when I realised that the 'fusion' portion is actually a normal M.2 drive at the back of the motherboard! I managed to document it below

But my main question now is - is the difference between SSD (SATA) and NVME (PCI-E) practically so huge to warrant another upgrade?

I mean the difference from 8GB ram to 24GB was huge - I was watching beach ball all the time
The difference from fusion drive to 1TB SSD is huge - occasional beach ball with HDD

What will be the difference (practical) going from SSD to NVME now? The drive is 5x faster but I doubt it will translate into 5x in the real use - maybe 5-10%? Will the programs really open that much faster?

As Austin would say: "Is it worth it?"

thanks all

 

[mikehalloran]

Yes it will be faster and no one is going to know how much. It depends on the apps you run and how you use your Mac. You’ve not given any clue in that regard.

 

[alaman64]

Yes it will be faster and no one is going to know how much. It depends on the apps you run and how you use your Mac. You’ve not given any clue in that regard.

The read on my T5 ssd was about 500 or so while the NVME was 2200 MB/s about 4 times faster. As far as loading programs like adobe premiere, I could see big difference. 14 seconds for the NVME vs 17 seconds SSD. When I tried to duplicate a 4gb file by clicking file duplicate; the nvme took 11 seconds while the ssd took 31 seconds. So unless you are working with very large files, I do not think you will see a day to day difference.

 

[Khaleal]

SSD manufacturers like to use sequential read/write speeds for marketing. So you might find NVMe drives with like 3500MB/s for read/write, and while these numbers look impressive, they might mean nothing when your use case is taken into consideration.

What really matters is the 4K random read/write speeds, which really affects everyday performance for the average user, and unless your use case involves constantly copying large files, sequential speeds would make very little difference if at all.

 

[xgman]

I think the cost difference is still disproportionate

 

[wardie]

SSD manufacturers like to use sequential read/write speeds for marketing. So you might find NVMe drives with like 3500MB/s for read/write, and while these numbers look impressive, they might mean nothing when your use case is taken into consideration.

What really matters is the 4K random read/write speeds, which really affects everyday performance for the average user, and unless your use case involves constantly copying large files, sequential speeds would make very little difference if at all.

You may find this comparison I’ve just done interesting. Using benchmark that has 4K random tests in it too.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2017-imac-t3-drives-tekq-rapide-vs-internal-vs-t5.2187902/

 

[nemoryoliver]

SSD manufacturers like to use sequential read/write speeds for marketing. So you might find NVMe drives with like 3500MB/s for read/write, and while these numbers look impressive, they might mean nothing when your use case is taken into consideration.

What really matters is the 4K random read/write speeds, which really affects everyday performance for the average user, and unless your use case involves constantly copying large files, sequential speeds would make very little difference if at all.

So speed of opening/closing and running apps would be almost the same on an NVMe and SATA SSD? I'm a software developer and don't do video editing. Do you think I will need the speed of NVMe SSD?