is it worth the cost?
much difference speed wise between them?
There are distinctions to be made first.
M.2 is just a form factor, M.2 drives can communicate with the system via SATA, or via PCIe.
The former are M.2 SATA drives and offer no performance benefit over any other SATA SSD.
The latter are M.2 NVMe drives, and use PCIe lanes to transfer data. These have more bandwidth available and can offer a considerable performance increase when compared to SATA drives. For example, SATA maxes out at 600mb/s, but NVMe drives can transfer via the PCIe lanes at over 3,000mb/s* (3gb/s), 5x the speed of the SATA drives.
*Not all NVMe drives are created equal, they can have vastly different max transfer speeds (1-3.5 gb/s).
Now getting to the question is it worth it, that is more difficult to answer. For just gaming, probably not. You're shaving seconds off of load times that are already pretty quick via SATA SSD. Are those seconds worth the cost to you? Only you can answer that. I think most would not notice much of a difference, and would be better off saving their pennies and sticking with the SATA SSD until the whole system needs an upgrade. The NVMe drives put out good numbers, but unless you're actually moving huge amounts of data about every minute (which gaming does not do), the real world performance increase is minimal, compared to the older SATA SSDs.
Thx chaos for that concise and explains a lot thx.
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Bought my first NVMe drive a couple of years ago, now using a Samsung one and Intel one in different builds. can't really say I notice much of a difference over a decent SSD. Especially as I only use them for gaming. No video editing/opening or moving around of huuuge files. I'd recommend just sticking with a decent SSD and save some pennies, unless you've found a great deal.
m.2 in terms of form factor is great though, the drive just disappears on your motherboard.