Would a new NVMe OS drive improve my performance much?

I saw that the 256GB Samsung SM961 VNME SSD is available for $40 right now and was considering picking it up. Even at that cheap price, I'm not certain I'll get much benefit from it. I currently have a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO-Series as my OS drive and I have my games and apps installed on it. I'm starting to feel a little claustrophobic. If I get the new drive, I'd use it as my main OS/app drive, and use the 850 EVO for my games.

So, keeping that in mind how I would use the drive, and that I would keep my games on the 850 EVO, would I see much of a benefit other than my system booting in ten seconds instead of 30? If not, it doesn't seem like it would be worth it, as I leave my system on for days on end and don't boot or reboot all that often. Would I see much improvement in normal, daily use?

It's 6 times faster so lots of normal operation will be quicker you could using for disk intensive games

I guess that's true. I don't seem to have a lot of disk intensive games though. Still, it would boot faster and I guess I'd see a little day-to-day improvement. It's only $40, but I'd be losing SATA ports to turn on X4 on my mobo, so I'd have to spend $25 on a PCIe SATA card to add more ports, so I might as well say $70 with tax. I guess that's still not too bad though.

I'll ponder for a bit. I don't wait too long though. I have no idea how long this deal, or their stock will last.

bfollowell said:

would I see much of a benefit other than my system booting in ten seconds instead of 30?

Don't think you'd see that much improvement.

It looks to be 2-4x faster for sequential but if you look at 4k there is hardly any difference at all and OS is lots of small files. That plus boot time not being dependent solely on disk speed means I can't see your boot being more than a little faster - not 1/3 of the time.

After your PC is running for a while the most used will be cached in RAM anyway (assuming you aren't short).

UserBenchmark: Samsung 850 Evo vs PM961 NVMe PCIe M.2

lx07 said:

Don't think you'd see that much improvement.
It looks to be 2-4x faster for sequential but if you look at 4k there is hardly any difference at all and OS is lots of small files. That plus boot time not being dependent solely on disk speed means I can't see your boot being more than a little faster - not 1/3 of the time.
After your PC is running for a while the most used will be cached in RAM anyway (assuming you aren't short).
UserBenchmark: Samsung 850 Evo vs PM961 NVMe PCIe M.2

I have a SM951 – 128GB M.2 AHCI PCIe SSD and a 850 Pro.
Despite the SM951 being more than 3 times faster (read), I can only see the difference on the bench mark test.

I have 16GB of RAM currently.