Is the price increase in going from a SATA SSD to a M.2 PCIe SSD worth it?

I'm looking for at least a ~250GB, ideally ~500GB in the $100-200 price range. Lower price the better. The top of my list right now is the Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SATA SSD but I'm wondering if going to an M.2 is a significant upgrade. I could, for example, get the 250GB 960 EVO for roughly the same price, though I'd have to be more careful about what games I install.

Anything faster than a standard Samsung SSD, will really only be noticeable in boot times and game loading times.

The Samsung M.2 SSD is about 4-5x faster than the standard Samsung 850 SSD, but for a gaming comp you won't see much difference.

I do a reasonable amount of gaming but nothing intensive. I mostly use my PC as a software development machine and general web browsing.

The M.2 is superior for workstation tasks, if that's what you're after.

I don't do that much system intensive work, most intensive being maybe running like an Android emulator along with an IDE and web browser and Photoshop.

Would you say the speed difference would be significant enough to justify the roughly double cost (or half storage size)?

This post was edited by Voyaging on Dec 14 2017 12:44am

Personally I think the 850 EVO (standard) is fine.

Here's the various benchmarks...

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1986?vs=1977


/e For PS I would go with more RAM and a regular 850 EVO.

This post was edited by Ghot on Dec 14 2017 01:12am

Great, thanks for the advice.

Yeah I'm at 8GB now and find myself capping fairly regularly (I'm the kind of person who opens up like 300 Chrome tabs lol). Definitely plan on getting 8GB more in the near future.

Yeah, I look at porn too.

Yeah I definitely do that with porn but I do it with general browsing too.

make sure its matching