Cr00zng said:
The storage size of the drive does impact the performance to a certain extent, at least in the case of Samsung EVOs. The 250GBs EVO has a write speed of 1,500 MB/s, while the larger EVOs do 1,900 MB/s. All EVOs have the read speed 3,200 MB/s.

For backup and restore purposes, I like to separate the OS/programs from the data. It's easier to manage and marginally faster in the case of the ~20GBs database. Hence the two separate 250 GBs EVO drives. Cost wise, it's a wash when compared to a single 500 GBs EVO that provide an increase in write speed.

I am not even convinced that overall performance wise the system is much better than my SSD based system. Yes with PCIe 3.0 x4 drives Windows boots in a jiffy, large programs start faster, loads up large databases faster, etc., with Samsung EVO/PRO drives. but beyond that in everyday use of the system, the performance increase isn't as noticeable. Certainly, there is a performance increase, but it's nowhere close to moving from the HDD to SSD drives, despite the six fold increase in read speed. My guess is that accessing small, around couple of MB or so programs/files with the PCIe drives isn't that much different from doing the same with an SSD drive...

Your 2 TBs PCIe 3.0 x4 drive is probably a Samsung Pro that has a nominal read speed of 3,500 MB/s and write speed of 2,100 MB/s. Your benchmark results are right around that.

I've looked at the Samsung Pro, but for less than the 2 TBs Pro cost nowadays, I've built the whole system and glad I did. It's doubtful, if the performance of this system would be better with a single, large PCIe drive...
I use the M.2 SSD for OS and Progams, I keep my DATA on a 2.5 SSD and any thing that I don't use regulrly on a WD Passport 4TB USB3.0.

I do think the extra speed comes in when working with larger files Video editing, Auto Cad or any drawing program Regen are really faster. File transfers are limited to the slowest device and method. USB 3.0 is only so fast. 7200 hard drives are only so fast even SATA SSD is only so fast so it hard for ordinary people to see the difference. the jump from SATA 3 hard drives to SATA SSD was indeed monumental. So If you using any hard drive intense software the jump to M.2 PCIe NVME is substantial. And the size of them I mean a 2TB M.2 SSD with the heat sink is still way smaller than any 2.5 SSD or HD. So that will allow us to build much smaller computers hard drive bays not needed!!