Every time maximum and faster models of solid state drives appear, however, we find that the applications do not show that difference in speed. Why the speed from one generation to another is not as great as you would expect. Which brings us to the situation in which between PCIe SSDs 3 and 4 for practical purposes there is not that much difference . What are the limiting factors of this?
In stores we can find a large number of PCIe 3 and 4 SSD drives for PCs that share the space in the inventory, whether we are talking about an online store or a physical store. Everyone knows that in the specifications some double the bandwidth of the others, however, the reality when interacting with the PC is different and for the moment this advantage is totally non-existent.
There are no “palpable” differences between PCIe 3 and 4 SSDs, for the moment
The first thing we have to learn regarding the practical differences between a PCIe 3 and 4 SSD is that despite the fact that some can go twice as fast as the others, the great reality of all this is none other than the software, that is, , the programs, those that control the flow of data from the storage unit to the RAM memory, as well as any corresponding data movement.
In other words, it is a technology that is there, waiting to be used, but that nobody is using at any time. The reason for this is that games are still being made with the hard drive in mind. And it is that the size of the data that is transferred from the storage unit, be it hard disk or SSD, is explicit in the game code, nobody can make a game designed to transmit a few tens of megabytes per second suddenly Increase your transfer capacity by 10 to 100 times more automatically.
A small proof of what we say can be seen in the loading screens of the games, if the transfer speed really adapted in all cases we would not see the loading screens or the logos at the beginning. The fact that we continue to see them indicates that many times not even 5% of the transfer speed is used and the higher it is, the lower the percentage of the bandwidth that is used.
Not only do these units live by games
So we are currently in a situation in which the applications that run under our PC if they benefit from the SSD is not because of transfer speed, that is, bandwidth. But rather the ability to transmit various data in parallel and the lowest data access latency. What’s more, although it is said that games will end up standardizing the use of SSDs, many of these systems are used as portable workstations for certain applications. In particular, those that make use of very large files, such as video editors or graphic design programs, will benefit from the use of this technology, since they will only need to load into memory the part visible by the user in every moment.
Unfortunately, the main operating system is still intended for use with a hard drive, so it doesn’t have the ability to take advantage of hard drives, and generally while you’re using the system you won’t notice the difference between use a PCIe 3 or 4 SSD. That is, on platforms such as Apple‘s Macintosh hard drives have not been used for a long time and this is something that graphic design and multimedia editing programs take advantage of very well for their performance.
