NVMe vs SATA
SATA is an older interface capped around 550MB/s. NVMe runs over PCIe and reaches several thousand MB/s. Both are far faster than a mechanical hard drive.
SATA was designed in the era of spinning hard drives. Its third revision tops out near 550MB/s in practice, and no SATA SSD can exceed that regardless of the flash inside it — the interface is the bottleneck.
NVMe drives connect through PCIe lanes instead, removing that ceiling entirely. A PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive can be rated beyond 7,000MB/s sequential read, more than ten times the SATA limit.
In real game loading, the gap is smaller than those numbers suggest, because loading involves many small reads and CPU work rather than one long sequential transfer. The dramatic difference is between any SSD and a mechanical hard drive.
Where this decision gets made
SSDs / Storage buying guide →
Turn it into a real number
Game Storage Space Calculator →