NVMe vs SATA for blender or 3d in general

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hello! so i was wondering about this for a while now but can’t seem to find any information on it.

i see NVMe drives are a lot faster than SATA ones, but i’m not sure that difference affects the workflow at all, does anyone have experience with both types of drives? if so, do you notice a significant difference? for now i only have a mechanical drive, and it is slow loading everything in the system.

when i am baking smoke simulations or fluid simulations, i see the CPU use goes up to 100 for a while, then the hard disk goes to 100% and the CPU goes to 5% or something, and goes back to 100% once the hard disk is done and this repeats itself until the baking is complete, so i figure faster disks would make that baking faster?

i am considering getting the samsung 970 evo 250GB but i see i can get a 500GB SATA drive for about the same price.

i use other 3d software besides blender, Fusion 360 and Inventor. and i notice them also being slow when opening files with lots of parts.

my pc has an AMD 1600 CPU and an AMD rx 560 graphics card and 8GB of ram. i know getting more ram would help me too but for now i can only buy ram or an ssd and i am going for ssd at the moment and plan on getting another 8GB of ram by the end of the year.

what would you recommend?

thank you!

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for a cache drive(for say simulations) the nvme ssd would be a lot more performant. For data storage it would be fast too, however if you have a lot of data to store then inevitably spinning rust is still going to be the most cost effective solution. What you can afford however is ultimately up to you to figure out for yourself.

edit: ok, read the entire post rather than thread title. If going for a sim cache drive definitely go with nvme. As for sata ssd’s - for data storage they can be fine but the ssd’s are actually faster than the sata interface so there is going to be an obvious bottleneck there.

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hi! thank you, i ended up buying the NVMe one, i kept searching and while i couldn’t find anything super concrete, i decided for it as i still have 2TB of spinny space for storage, i’ll use the ssd for simulation cache and to have the main programs i use on it.

thank you!

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how has the NVMe worked for you these years? did improve simulations in a considerable way?

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