SSD reviews don't include a lot of application benchmarks and for good reason ... they don't show any "productivity" increases. A good analogy is a commercial during the football game... there you are, sipping beers with ya friends ... and then there's a commerical ... does it matter if it's 30, 45, 60 seconds ? In either case, you ran to the head or to the kitchen to get another beer and the commercial ended before ya got back. That's pretty much the way SSDs work .....
a) When a legal secretary finished editing the contract her boss gave her, she prints a PDF or paper copy for boss to review ... then looks at the next contract she has to edit. She loads the file for the next contract, and then starts reading thru the 15 page document to see where the changes are, making sure she can read the boss's handwriting and she's still reading long after the file is loaded.
b) Same as above for the AutoCAD guy
c) Windows loading time ? ... what do you do after starting up your PC ? On ou test box I tried loading clones off the OS ..
1) Samsung Pro SSD - 15.6 secs
2) Seagate 7200 rpm SSHD - 16.5
3) Old 7200 rpm 2 TB HD - 21.6 (its used for offside backups)
At work, does the extra 0.9 seconds is improve your productivity ? In gaming, will you make it to a further way point because your game loaded faster ? Or are you like most users, when ya start ya PC, you grab a coffee, check phone messages, wipe the cookie crumbs off mpuse pad .... when starting gane, do ya stare at screen take ya headset off charging stand, load discord, load web based web sites related to game.
I am not arguing against SSDs ... we have put in ab SSD and SSHD in every build (2 of each more often as not) going back almost a decade .... but don't sweat it. We test RAID on both SSDs and SSHDs about every 3 years ... never been able to show even an inkling of an improvement, in last effort RAID 0 was teeny bit slower ... in things we actually do on the PC (don't care about benchmaks and bragging rights). But I also have access to 2 test beds (office w/ 5 employees and home with 5 PCs) ... we keep a clone of the OS on the SSDs on the SSHDs. And when I switched the boot order from SSD .... no one noticed. Now if I said "I changed something ... see if ta notice anything", Im sure that folks would discover my subterfuge .... but when unawares, when ya let folks do their daily routine, the small delays go unobserved .... things like booting, file and game loading nget lost as people are multitaskers. Put coffee in the microwave, no on stands there and looks ... they head to the bathroom or accomplish some other task because that's how we are wired.
I don't know about most people but no matter what I'm occupied with, I am going to notice whether it's night and day. But no, I don't think me or anyone else is going to notice the difference between the ....
17.6 seconds boot time of the 970 Evo M.2 versus the 18.3 seconds of the 850 Evo
4.4 seconds Photoshop Startup Time 970 Evo M.2 versus the 4.3 seconds of the 850 Evo
16.8 seconds Battlefield 1 Level Loading Time on the 970 Evo M.2 versus the 17.5 seconds of the 850 Evo
45.8 seconds Watchdogs 2 level Loading Time on the 970 Evo M.2 versus the 45.9 seconds of the 850 Evo
... that's 2 generations behind, not the one you are considering .... how are any of these differences (0.7 ... 0.1 ... 0.7 ... 0.1), "night and day" ?
Not there aren't not instances where this is significant ... as if you do video editing, animation or even photo editing on a production level charging $150/hr. But on 98% of the PCs out there ... if I was dog sitting at ya house , if I sneakily swapped ya SSDs, you would never notice.
That being said, on every PC build we do for ourselves or any of our users, we go looking for the fastest devices in every component space that we can afford. That's not about productivity or thinking we will save time ... it's because we're nerds.
