SATA vs NVMe - $40 Budget SSD Comparison - Which Should You Buy

**Benchmarking SSDs: A Comparative Analysis**

In this article, we'll delve into the world of solid-state drives (SSDs) and explore their performance characteristics, particularly when it comes to launching games like GTA 5. We'll be comparing two specific SSD models: the Samsung 970 EVO Plus (SX 6000) and the WD Black SN750 (SU 800). Our testing rig is equipped with a powerful machine that should provide us with accurate results.

**Testing Environment**

Our test environment consists of a Risin 720, which is an overkill for these drives. However, it takes away as much of the CPU limitation as is reasonable to my standard SSD test bench. We're using 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM and 200 megahertz Ram. Windows 10 was not installed on either of these drives, GTA 5 was installed on the Crucial MX 500, which serves as the actual boot drive on that machine.

**Launching Games**

When launching games like GTA 5, we can see that there's very little difference between launching the game directly and launching into story mode. This is because some of this is CPU and memory bound - it's building the world, loading all assets, not necessarily the transfer rate of the drive that limits performance. Our test results show that the read performance in terms of loading games and whatnot is almost identical.

**The Crystal Disk Mark**

However, when we look at the random write performance in the real world, regardless of effect, there's a significant difference between the two drives. According to the Crystal Disk Mark, the Samsung 970 EVO Plus (SX 6000) has superior random read performance, especially in heavy workloads. However, this may not be entirely accurate, as we're not going to be using these drives in that environment.

**The Real-World Test**

We also ran a real-world test to see how the two drives perform in everyday usage. We found that the WD Black SN750 (SU 800) has better endurance for writing sustained writes, which is essential when running Windows Update or dealing with heavy data transfer. The Samsung 970 EVO Plus (SX 6000) 128 gig size, on the other hand, was found to be terrible in terms of performance.

**The Verdict**

In conclusion, when it comes to launching games like GTA 5, there's very little difference between using an SSD with a small capacity and one with a larger capacity. However, when it comes to everyday usage, such as writing sustained writes or dealing with heavy data transfer, the WD Black SN750 (SU 800) is the clear winner.

**Recommendation**

Based on our testing results, we recommend spending $20 more for the 256 gig drive, which will last you much longer. If budget is a concern, and you're only looking at the 128 gig size, we would still advise against it. The Samsung 970 EVO Plus (SX 6000) 128 gig size is simply not good enough in terms of performance.

**Disclaimer**

We'd like to note that Data sent us both drives with different results. Data did send me smaller drives but they were not suitable for this test. We purchased these drives ourselves and wanted to see how well the 128 gig size worked compared to the ones they actually like to send out.

**Final Thoughts**

In conclusion, our testing has shown that SSDs can provide significant performance improvements over traditional hard drives. However, it's essential to choose the right drive for your specific needs and budget. If you're looking for a high-performance drive for gaming or other demanding applications, look no further than the WD Black SN750 (SU 800).

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome to tech deals budget SSD comparison SATA versus and via me which should you buy 128 gigabyte Drive sizes are very reasonably priced these days under $40 in many cases and we're looking at two very popular drives the a data su 800 SATA drive versus the a data SX 6000 and vm e drive these are both MDOT two drives right here but they are not alike the su 800 is a SATA or serial ata drive so it's no faster than the two and a half inch version you can also buy for a similar price point about thirty five dollars when I recorded this video on the other hand the SX 6000 is purely an nvme drive only available in the m2 format advertised as up to about a thousand megabytes per second or twice as fast as this $40.00 when I recorded this video only five dollars more than the su 800 should be fairly clear-cut double the performance five dollars more why watch the video go buy that drive right not so fast if it were that easy I'd have said that already now linked down in the description below will be links to both of these drives as well as these drives we'll talk about those in a minute - both Amazon and Newegg compare prices because everything I'm about to say depends upon the price of these drives if it changes in the future when you watch this video then the conclusions will adjust a little bit but for now thirty-five dollars versus forty dollars SATA versus nvme at the same size before we get to that I want to talk to you briefly about floatplane floatplane is the monthly subscription only service hosted by linus media group for $3.00 per month you get ad free viewing downloadable videos early access videos many of these videos you're looking at right here are not yet on YouTube they will be but they're not yet you get both of the tech deals channels tech deals and tech deals gaming and exclusive videos visit to the Microsoft Store or visit to the Tesla Model X that's my daughter sitting right there those are not main channel videos but those will never be on YouTube and then course a bunch of benchmarks and some other things that you otherwise would not see now there are other content creators there each one is three dollars a month and it directly supports the creator so if you want add free access if you want early access downloadable videos and if you want to know that you're supporting tech deals please consider signing up using the link down in the video description below a quick note on drive sizes before we get to the actual benchmark results a hundred and twenty eight gigabytes is pretty small these days it used to be quite generous but these days Windows 10 a few Windows updates patches a few downloaded applications a word processor or office suite is gonna take up more than 50% of the drive space very very quickly leaving you with comparatively little room to actually install any games or anything else on the drive now many people buying a drive in this size are gonna say well I'm gonna buy one of these and then maybe a two terabyte hard drive which are now about 50 to 60 dollars and that'll be my great game drive fair enough I understand that many pre-built scum that way many pre-built swill come with a 120 gig SSD and then a one or two terabyte hard drive to give you enough space for all of that the thing is pre-built companies realize that the average person buying a prebuilt isn't checking benchmarks they aren't looking at the brain to the drive they may not even know the brand of the drive it just has an SSD they just know they should have one and so that's good enough but in this case if your custom build a go machine you care about such things my advice to you don't buy this size buy the 256 gigabyte size instead for example the SX 6000 it's $40 for the 128 it's $60 for the 256 for 50% more money you get 100% more space but it's better than that once Windows is installed on both of these drives you actually have two and a half times as much space on the 256 actually free once everything's on there then you do the 128 so two and a half times the free space for $20 you have to be pretty budget strapped for that $20 to make a difference in my opinion these are almost a non-starter in that regarde but i understand you're on a really tight budget you want an SSD but maybe you're putting together a rise in 320 200g a pentium g 5400 and you just need a Windows boot drive you don't care about the extra space you I can install a lot of programs it's just a basic machine fair enough that's what this video is for if you have decided that no matter what you are going to get a 128 gig drive let me show you the differences between a SATA drive and an nvme drive at this price point the first benchmark I want to show you is crystal disk mark this is the standard test that I run on all of my storage reviews here we have the su 800 and here we have the SX 6000 in all the tests except for one the SX 6000 is the clear winner some points buy quite a substantial margin the random write speeds especially on the lower half of that chart are dramatically faster than the random write speeds of the su 800 the random raid speed is faster the sequential read speed is faster clearly it's the better drive case closed well hang on a second take a look at the sequential write speed now I reran this test multiple times I tried different sizes I tried different durations I rebooted the computer that number is way way low I did make triple sure that that number is correct it is much much slower for sequential write speeds then the su 800 is and then I found out why I did some further testing and it did some real-world testing I copied GTA 5 to both of these drives now that's not actually a very realistic option if these are boot drives because GTA 5 is 80 gigabytes in size if you install windows on these drives GTA 5 would not fit but these are test drives they're blank Windows is installed on a different Drive on my test bench so I copied GTA 5 over and let me show you those results now this is part way through the final copy you'll notice that the first part of a copy is very very quick you can see the very tall green bars on the su 800 right here they extend for about half way across the actual data about 40 gigabytes worth of the data give or take take a look at how far across the copy the green bar stays high on the SX 6000 much much less both drives slowed down dramatically sometimes below 30 megabytes per second in write speed as it gets further along in the right but the SX 6000 falls apart much sooner than the su 800 does the su 800 can take tens of gigabytes of data at full speed right versus the SX 6000 this demonstrates the challenge of using benchmarks to demonstrate strives true performance and on larger drives this is less of an issue on the 256 gig version of the su 800 and the 256 gig version of the SX 6000 both drives would maintain green green bars across either all or most of that and most of the real-world performance deficiencies of these drives are eliminated in the 256 gig version now this kind of brings me back to the why you shouldn't buy either one of these you should buy the 256 version and the simple fact of the matter is there aren't enough NAND memory chips on these to give any parallel operation or to be able to absorb lots of writes and lots of operations weeds are okay in fact reads on the SX 6000 are just fine but there aren't enough nand chips to absorb rights as drives have gotten larger and remember these are now the smallest drives on the market there used to be 60 gig in even 30 gig drives but those are all gone the nand chips are too big as the NAND memory chips have gotten bigger they put fewer and fewer on each Drive meaning this fewer parallel operations the 256 drives in some respects will be double the performance of these drives and the 512 gig in many respects be again maybe not double the speed of the 256 but faster again still it falls off above that once you pass the 500 gig size there's very little additional performance outside of extreme cases what's interesting is if you go a few years back a 120 gig drive from a couple of years ago will actually do that Grand Theft Auto 5 copy better than either of these will because then and chips had fewer bits on them so they had more memory chips in them I for example have an Intel 330 series 120 gig drive here now this was not 35 or $40 when it was brand new so in fairness to this this was a mid-range performance option back then it has more memory chips on it but this will handle sustain drive rights in ways that these won't because these are now the budget drive and this was not a budget drive when it came out so as NAND memory chips have gotten larger you want the larger drive because the 256 gig drives literally have twice as many chips on them as these do now that's GTA 5 file copy speed that's copying GTA 5 over to both of these drives I then ran GTA 5 off of them now I am going to split screen here on the bottom of the screen put up the game load performance this is real time by the way this is not cut or edited and then I'm gonna put the load to actual playable from the start button clicking on story mode now the only trim in these two particular replays is going to be in my mouse motion and delay in clicking on the story button icon because the amount of time I took to actually click on story mode is slightly different so I will trim those to match from the click but what you're gonna see here essentially is that there is very little difference between either launching GTA 5 or launching into the story mode and have it launched now one reason for this is because some of this is CPU and memory bound it's building the world that's loading all the assets it's not necessarily the transfer rate of the drive that limits the performance now this test was done on a risin 720 700 x which is overkill for these drives you should have a better drive for that machine but it takes away as much of the CPU limitation as is reasonable to my standard SSD test bench 16 gigs of DDR 430 200 megahertz Ram it's a very very nice machine Windows 10 is not installed on either of these drives GTA 5 wouldn't fit it was installed on the crucial MX 500 that the actual boot drive on that machine but as you can see it's there's really not much difference in terms of read performance in terms of loading games and whatnot there's not gonna be a lot of difference between these drives here's the thing that may surprise many of you because of the terrible right performance in the real world regardless of effect I'll put the two charts back up here again the crystal disk mark says that the random right performance of the SX 6000 is superior especially in heavy cue depths but it really isn't because you're not going to be using this drive in that environment because of its actual real dreadful write performance and how little SLC cache it has before the performance falls straight to the floor at the price these drives are currently at 35 dollars and forty dollars I would actually buy the SU 800 over the SX 6000 at the 128 sighs now my advice changes at the 256 sighs currently it's about 56 dollars for the 256 su 800 versus $59 for the 256 gig SX 6000 now I don't have benchmark results for those here for you now because they were previously tested at those sides I do have those drives well I did have this one it was in the giveaway machine from a few months ago so don't have it anymore I did benchmark it but that was on a different platform and I cannot compare those benchmark results to this drive because the machines they were tested on are different so it's not a fair comparison the 256 gig su 800 I actually do still have that that's on a test bench downstairs but it's got data on it and it's also got several terabytes of dead or written to it where it is this is a clean fresh drive so again I can't compare that fairly which is why I'm not showing you those results but I do have the drives and I have used them and so when I tell you that they are much much better well I speak from experience so with the 256 gig size by the SX 6000 at the 128 gig size I would buy the su 800 it has better endurance for writing sustained writes running Windows Update there's a lot of data going in and out you're gonna fill up the SLC cache on the SX 6000 128 awfully quick I like the su 800 for this size especially it's five dollars cheaper if you're on just much of a budget every five dollars may make a difference either way they're fine but you are compromising at this size spend twenty dollars more by 256 gig drive it will last you much much longer like this video if you liked it share it with your friends if you loved it remember to subscribe to my channel with a big huge red button directly below questions and comments in the comment section links in the video description will take you to all these drives and everything I've mentioned in both sizes to both Amazon and Newegg check current prices if the prices have dramatically changed if this becomes cheaper or more expensive and this is cheaper then that changes it a little bit the other note that I'd like to make a data sent me the bigger drives a data did not send me either one of these drives it did is good to me and sends me a lot of stuff but they didn't send these to me for a reason because the 128 gig size is frankly it's terrible in terms of performance but that's true of most 128 these days I'm not just picking on a data but I did buy these drives with my own money and I wanted to see how well this size worked versus the ones they actually like to send to me in any case thank you very much for watching this video I will see all of you next timehello and welcome to tech deals budget SSD comparison SATA versus and via me which should you buy 128 gigabyte Drive sizes are very reasonably priced these days under $40 in many cases and we're looking at two very popular drives the a data su 800 SATA drive versus the a data SX 6000 and vm e drive these are both MDOT two drives right here but they are not alike the su 800 is a SATA or serial ata drive so it's no faster than the two and a half inch version you can also buy for a similar price point about thirty five dollars when I recorded this video on the other hand the SX 6000 is purely an nvme drive only available in the m2 format advertised as up to about a thousand megabytes per second or twice as fast as this $40.00 when I recorded this video only five dollars more than the su 800 should be fairly clear-cut double the performance five dollars more why watch the video go buy that drive right not so fast if it were that easy I'd have said that already now linked down in the description below will be links to both of these drives as well as these drives we'll talk about those in a minute - both Amazon and Newegg compare prices because everything I'm about to say depends upon the price of these drives if it changes in the future when you watch this video then the conclusions will adjust a little bit but for now thirty-five dollars versus forty dollars SATA versus nvme at the same size before we get to that I want to talk to you briefly about floatplane floatplane is the monthly subscription only service hosted by linus media group for $3.00 per month you get ad free viewing downloadable videos early access videos many of these videos you're looking at right here are not yet on YouTube they will be but they're not yet you get both of the tech deals channels tech deals and tech deals gaming and exclusive videos visit to the Microsoft Store or visit to the Tesla Model X that's my daughter sitting right there those are not main channel videos but those will never be on YouTube and then course a bunch of benchmarks and some other things that you otherwise would not see now there are other content creators there each one is three dollars a month and it directly supports the creator so if you want add free access if you want early access downloadable videos and if you want to know that you're supporting tech deals please consider signing up using the link down in the video description below a quick note on drive sizes before we get to the actual benchmark results a hundred and twenty eight gigabytes is pretty small these days it used to be quite generous but these days Windows 10 a few Windows updates patches a few downloaded applications a word processor or office suite is gonna take up more than 50% of the drive space very very quickly leaving you with comparatively little room to actually install any games or anything else on the drive now many people buying a drive in this size are gonna say well I'm gonna buy one of these and then maybe a two terabyte hard drive which are now about 50 to 60 dollars and that'll be my great game drive fair enough I understand that many pre-built scum that way many pre-built swill come with a 120 gig SSD and then a one or two terabyte hard drive to give you enough space for all of that the thing is pre-built companies realize that the average person buying a prebuilt isn't checking benchmarks they aren't looking at the brain to the drive they may not even know the brand of the drive it just has an SSD they just know they should have one and so that's good enough but in this case if your custom build a go machine you care about such things my advice to you don't buy this size buy the 256 gigabyte size instead for example the SX 6000 it's $40 for the 128 it's $60 for the 256 for 50% more money you get 100% more space but it's better than that once Windows is installed on both of these drives you actually have two and a half times as much space on the 256 actually free once everything's on there then you do the 128 so two and a half times the free space for $20 you have to be pretty budget strapped for that $20 to make a difference in my opinion these are almost a non-starter in that regarde but i understand you're on a really tight budget you want an SSD but maybe you're putting together a rise in 320 200g a pentium g 5400 and you just need a Windows boot drive you don't care about the extra space you I can install a lot of programs it's just a basic machine fair enough that's what this video is for if you have decided that no matter what you are going to get a 128 gig drive let me show you the differences between a SATA drive and an nvme drive at this price point the first benchmark I want to show you is crystal disk mark this is the standard test that I run on all of my storage reviews here we have the su 800 and here we have the SX 6000 in all the tests except for one the SX 6000 is the clear winner some points buy quite a substantial margin the random write speeds especially on the lower half of that chart are dramatically faster than the random write speeds of the su 800 the random raid speed is faster the sequential read speed is faster clearly it's the better drive case closed well hang on a second take a look at the sequential write speed now I reran this test multiple times I tried different sizes I tried different durations I rebooted the computer that number is way way low I did make triple sure that that number is correct it is much much slower for sequential write speeds then the su 800 is and then I found out why I did some further testing and it did some real-world testing I copied GTA 5 to both of these drives now that's not actually a very realistic option if these are boot drives because GTA 5 is 80 gigabytes in size if you install windows on these drives GTA 5 would not fit but these are test drives they're blank Windows is installed on a different Drive on my test bench so I copied GTA 5 over and let me show you those results now this is part way through the final copy you'll notice that the first part of a copy is very very quick you can see the very tall green bars on the su 800 right here they extend for about half way across the actual data about 40 gigabytes worth of the data give or take take a look at how far across the copy the green bar stays high on the SX 6000 much much less both drives slowed down dramatically sometimes below 30 megabytes per second in write speed as it gets further along in the right but the SX 6000 falls apart much sooner than the su 800 does the su 800 can take tens of gigabytes of data at full speed right versus the SX 6000 this demonstrates the challenge of using benchmarks to demonstrate strives true performance and on larger drives this is less of an issue on the 256 gig version of the su 800 and the 256 gig version of the SX 6000 both drives would maintain green green bars across either all or most of that and most of the real-world performance deficiencies of these drives are eliminated in the 256 gig version now this kind of brings me back to the why you shouldn't buy either one of these you should buy the 256 version and the simple fact of the matter is there aren't enough NAND memory chips on these to give any parallel operation or to be able to absorb lots of writes and lots of operations weeds are okay in fact reads on the SX 6000 are just fine but there aren't enough nand chips to absorb rights as drives have gotten larger and remember these are now the smallest drives on the market there used to be 60 gig in even 30 gig drives but those are all gone the nand chips are too big as the NAND memory chips have gotten bigger they put fewer and fewer on each Drive meaning this fewer parallel operations the 256 drives in some respects will be double the performance of these drives and the 512 gig in many respects be again maybe not double the speed of the 256 but faster again still it falls off above that once you pass the 500 gig size there's very little additional performance outside of extreme cases what's interesting is if you go a few years back a 120 gig drive from a couple of years ago will actually do that Grand Theft Auto 5 copy better than either of these will because then and chips had fewer bits on them so they had more memory chips in them I for example have an Intel 330 series 120 gig drive here now this was not 35 or $40 when it was brand new so in fairness to this this was a mid-range performance option back then it has more memory chips on it but this will handle sustain drive rights in ways that these won't because these are now the budget drive and this was not a budget drive when it came out so as NAND memory chips have gotten larger you want the larger drive because the 256 gig drives literally have twice as many chips on them as these do now that's GTA 5 file copy speed that's copying GTA 5 over to both of these drives I then ran GTA 5 off of them now I am going to split screen here on the bottom of the screen put up the game load performance this is real time by the way this is not cut or edited and then I'm gonna put the load to actual playable from the start button clicking on story mode now the only trim in these two particular replays is going to be in my mouse motion and delay in clicking on the story button icon because the amount of time I took to actually click on story mode is slightly different so I will trim those to match from the click but what you're gonna see here essentially is that there is very little difference between either launching GTA 5 or launching into the story mode and have it launched now one reason for this is because some of this is CPU and memory bound it's building the world that's loading all the assets it's not necessarily the transfer rate of the drive that limits the performance now this test was done on a risin 720 700 x which is overkill for these drives you should have a better drive for that machine but it takes away as much of the CPU limitation as is reasonable to my standard SSD test bench 16 gigs of DDR 430 200 megahertz Ram it's a very very nice machine Windows 10 is not installed on either of these drives GTA 5 wouldn't fit it was installed on the crucial MX 500 that the actual boot drive on that machine but as you can see it's there's really not much difference in terms of read performance in terms of loading games and whatnot there's not gonna be a lot of difference between these drives here's the thing that may surprise many of you because of the terrible right performance in the real world regardless of effect I'll put the two charts back up here again the crystal disk mark says that the random right performance of the SX 6000 is superior especially in heavy cue depths but it really isn't because you're not going to be using this drive in that environment because of its actual real dreadful write performance and how little SLC cache it has before the performance falls straight to the floor at the price these drives are currently at 35 dollars and forty dollars I would actually buy the SU 800 over the SX 6000 at the 128 sighs now my advice changes at the 256 sighs currently it's about 56 dollars for the 256 su 800 versus $59 for the 256 gig SX 6000 now I don't have benchmark results for those here for you now because they were previously tested at those sides I do have those drives well I did have this one it was in the giveaway machine from a few months ago so don't have it anymore I did benchmark it but that was on a different platform and I cannot compare those benchmark results to this drive because the machines they were tested on are different so it's not a fair comparison the 256 gig su 800 I actually do still have that that's on a test bench downstairs but it's got data on it and it's also got several terabytes of dead or written to it where it is this is a clean fresh drive so again I can't compare that fairly which is why I'm not showing you those results but I do have the drives and I have used them and so when I tell you that they are much much better well I speak from experience so with the 256 gig size by the SX 6000 at the 128 gig size I would buy the su 800 it has better endurance for writing sustained writes running Windows Update there's a lot of data going in and out you're gonna fill up the SLC cache on the SX 6000 128 awfully quick I like the su 800 for this size especially it's five dollars cheaper if you're on just much of a budget every five dollars may make a difference either way they're fine but you are compromising at this size spend twenty dollars more by 256 gig drive it will last you much much longer like this video if you liked it share it with your friends if you loved it remember to subscribe to my channel with a big huge red button directly below questions and comments in the comment section links in the video description will take you to all these drives and everything I've mentioned in both sizes to both Amazon and Newegg check current prices if the prices have dramatically changed if this becomes cheaper or more expensive and this is cheaper then that changes it a little bit the other note that I'd like to make a data sent me the bigger drives a data did not send me either one of these drives it did is good to me and sends me a lot of stuff but they didn't send these to me for a reason because the 128 gig size is frankly it's terrible in terms of performance but that's true of most 128 these days I'm not just picking on a data but I did buy these drives with my own money and I wanted to see how well this size worked versus the ones they actually like to send to me in any case thank you very much for watching this video I will see all of you next time\n"