 On this episode of Manufacturer's Say, we're gonna show one way or the other if we've already reached the point where a gamer or a video editor simply won't be able to tell the difference between a slow SSD and a fast one. The title of this video does have some truth in it. When we went from hard drives to SSDs, there was a period where the single most noticeable upgrade you could make to an aging system was a storage upgrade. But like CPUs, RAM, or anything else, there is a point of seriously diminishing returns. And honestly, I take issue with manufacturers telling consumers that they need to upgrade their system because our new product does 4,000 megabytes per second instead of 3,000. Whoa, what was that? Editor, can you back that thing up a second? Yeah, yeah, that one right there. Can you zoom in on that? Wow, if you look really closely, you can see our sponsor. Instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with Glassware. Use software code Linus to get 25% off at the link below. ["Skyrim 2.0 Remake"] ["Skyrim 2.0 Remake"] Both manufacturers and my fellow media alike have been found suggesting that gamers or content creators like video editors might benefit in some way from the super fast PCIe Gen 4 SSDs that are making their way onto the market. And guys, I love fast computers as much as the next person. But when it comes to this, I feel a little bit like the kid who finally calls out that the emperor's new clothes are a lie and he's just naked. Because it has been a long time since an SSD upgrade has wowed me. That is aside from blazing fast benchmark numbers. So to see if I'm the only one, we've built up a fun little side by side by side test here. These three systems are nearly identical. They've all got Ryzen 9, 3900X processors, RTX 2070 graphics cards, and 32 gigs of DDR4 memory. But one of them has a bog standard SATA SSD. Another has a last generation NVMe SSD that does around 1500 megabytes a second. And finally, we've got a PCIe Gen 4 SSD tearing up our lanes at a blistering 4950 megabytes a second. It should be noted that that last one did need a motherboard upgrade to give us PCIe Gen 4 compatibility, but we've adjusted the performance parameters to ensure that it has no other advantage. So let's start then by asking our test subjects where they are expecting to notice the difference between the systems. The only difference I would expect is in loading the games initially, or like a map, changing maps. But in actual gameplay, I really don't expect anything. In Adobe Premiere, I really think the bottleneck will actually be the software. I don't think I'll be able to tell the difference in games or in most applications, but in something that's very heavy in like big files, maybe like video editing or like transferring, you might be able to feel it a little bit more. My expectation with game loading times that unless I'm running the game side by side, the loading time difference is gonna be so small that I'd have a hard time remembering which one is which. Really? From 600 megabytes a second to nine times that speed? We'll see. I'll probably be able to tell the difference in load up times and just snapping this to the system. Start with this one, system number one. The point of this is just to find out, well, you know, is it obvious? If we wanted to know, you know, which one's faster, we would use benchmarks. Yeah, that's fast. Cause there's often hangups there for the loading. Oh wow, I haven't played this game in a little bit though. 14, 15, 16, 16 seconds. 16 seconds for Mirage. Now that's something we're not allowing people to do is just copy files from folder to folder on the drive because yeah, there'll be a big difference there. But is that really representative of day-to-day use or is gaming and video editing? It's not bad. It's better than playing off the network for sure. I can't really imagine this getting all that much faster. It felt noticeably quicker than I expect and I expect pretty fast, so. Okay, good. System number two. I really think that counting is kind of akin to benchmarking and so nine, three, 11, six, one. It is a bit slower. Wow, yeah, this is not as responsive. The other time I was able to drag it, it was all immediate. I seem like there was a bit of a delay when it was loading. Stop counting. You have to do it by feel. Yeah, I'm not gonna be able to tell the difference between them unless my counting was actually pretty consistent. But you won't know if your counting was consistent. No, I'm just gonna assume. And then I'm gonna make my guesses based on that counting and then I'll know whether or not it was consistent based on the result and whether or not I was correct, right? Okay, yeah, I actually don't find this that much worse. It felt like it took a little bit longer to get going. Are we at a point of diminishing returns? Oh, absolutely, come on. That's the question we're asking. System two is definitely overall slower. I was surprised to find that in every game across the board, it took just another second, another two seconds to load. It's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's definitely noticeable when you're looking for the details. Okay, system three. System three, let's go. Well, this one also loaded pretty quick, but I have to check the first one again. Very, very choppy, just trying to play this at full res. Slower, slower, this is the slowest one. Okay, let's see. I'm not high. I could be high. Okay, so I just loaded up Doom and that was pretty slow too. You know, there's all the marketing. Yeah. Around, oh, gen two, gen three, gen four. Yeah. And it's like, well, hold on a second. Where is that point of diminishing returns, right? I suspect we're past it. PC three is definitely slower than the other two. That last 25% in Doom took a lot longer than it did on the other stations. In Premiere, I saw the loading bar on this one. I don't even remember seeing the loading bars on the other ones. System three felt kind of like a mixed bag. It was snappy in some places, but it felt a little less responsive in others. That being said, at some points, it was like kind of the fastest system, but other things that loaded the slowest. So I'm kind of confused about this one the most. I was pretty sure about the first two, but the third one's throwing me for a bit of a loop. System number three, I noticed was a little bit slower. It got hung up in Doom at the 75% loading mark, a little bit longer than the other systems. But once Premiere was in there and I hit full res and play, it just died. It was really stuttery. Wait, you can't benchmark them head to head. You can go back and try them. Geez. You didn't tell me that. It's not a drag race. I mean, it is. No. It's a blind taste test. It is not a drag race. They are very different concepts, very different. Oh, nope, I'm high. I'm high. I take back everything I said. You got to declare it. Okay. Call it, call your shot. I think this is SATA, NVMe Gen 4. Are you ready to declare your answers? I think so. Okay. I can say pretty definitively that the second one is SATA. Okay. It felt across the board the slowest. Okay. I have a harder time telling between these two. This one felt slower than this one. This one felt consistently the fastest. So my immediate guess would be that this is the Gen 4 and that's the NVMe. But maybe it's reversed and maybe Gen 4 is just so new that it's not consistent. For sure that's the SATA. I'm pretty sure Gen 3 is number two. Gen 4 is number one. Okay. This one is the fastest, but only because. LTTstore.com. That's what makes it fat. Don't worry. I'm just kidding. I'll tell you the real answers. We're going to have sticker packs soon. You know, LTTstore.com. Anyway. Okay. So I want to know the answer too. So I'm just going to hang around. I'm not going to try. Okay. You said this one was NVMe? No, SATA. SATA? That's wrong. That's NVMe. No. You said this one was? NVMe. That's Gen 4. Oh, okay. Fine. Whatever. I'm crazy. That is Gen 3 NVMe. Okay. Yeah. Okay. You're right. You're one for one. That is PCIe Gen 4. No, it's not. That's not possible. And that's SATA. Really? This was PCIe Gen 4. That was Gen 4. Okay. Okay. And this was PCIe Gen 3. Really? What? Oh my God. Are you surprised? I'm not surprised that I was wrong, honestly. Am I disappointed that I was wrong? Yes. So when I used the first system, I had no point of reference. And so maybe it felt so fast. And then I started comparing the other ones and I could kind of feel the pause longer. So I'm, yeah, I don't know. I'm speechless. Do you think you'd have any hope of telling the difference between them if you weren't sitting in front of all three of them at once? Not even a little bit of a chance. Not even the slightest chance at all. What's interesting to me though, is that to a man, everyone who took the test picked the SATA system as the fastest one. So what that indicates to me then is that the differences that we perceive, once you're running an SSD, are pretty much gonna come down to psychological ones. Like maybe just from looking at this one first, that makes a bigger difference. We actually had a conclusion written up for this by Colin that goes, so here you have it. The results show that there is a noticeable difference between SATA and NVMe drives, which is expected, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I actually didn't necessarily think that that was gonna be the case. I really wish I had been able to stay blind so that I could have taken the challenge myself, but I was not expecting anyone to be able to tell the difference. Now, with that said, that's not to say that there's no reason to consider a high quality SSD. There's higher quality flash, which will be rated for more programming race cycles, giving it better longevity. There's firmware and controller quality, which can affect the behavior of the drive when it's near max capacity and things like that. There's DRAM cache, which is absolutely necessary. A DRAM-less SSD will actually perform like a hard drive in many situations. And then of course, there is applications beyond just your typical gaming or video editing. And that's where I think a lot of the FUD comes in, is convincing people that for gaming or for simple video editing that you need this high performance storage. Because the cold hard truth is that even 8K red footage, it maxes out at 280 megabytes a second. That is comfortably well within the realm of what SATA can handle. Speaking of limits, there's no limit to how bad my segways can get. Manegear's Vector gaming laptop is available at 25 Micro Center locations, as well as on Amazon. It's a thousand dollars at Micro Center and 1199.99 on their Amazon listing. It features an Intel Core i7-9750H at 2.6 gigahertz base, a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6 gig card, 16 gigs of DDR4 2666 memory, a 512 gig NVMe solid state drive, woo! A 15.6 inch 144 Hertz display. Now that's something that really will make a difference to your gaming. And you can check out it and other Micro Center specials at the links in the video description. So thanks for watching guys. If you enjoyed this kind of, you know, side by side taste test challenge, maybe check out, oh, we did a video recently checking out a key switches. Either that or it's coming soon. So make sure you're subscribed or go look for it. One way or another, we're working on it.