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When I moved from a hard drive to an SSD, almost everything felt instantly better. Boot times dropped, apps opened faster, and Windows felt much more responsive overall. But once you’re already using a SATA SSD, the improvements get much smaller. That includes things like WIndows boot times too, which often improve less dramatically than the benchmark numbers would suggest. A lot of everyday tasks like opening Chrome, launching Spotify, signing in to Windows, or browsing files are already fast enough that moving from SATA to NVMe often doesn’t feel dramatic. Part of the reason is that not ever

PCIe is backward-compatible, which means even a Gen 5 M.2 slot can use Gen 3 drives, and vice versa. But like, upgrading to a PCIe 5.0 SSD isn't necessarily worth it if you're just upgrading your motherboard. It's a trap that I've fallen into with every platform upgrade, and really, the only reason you need to upgrade for everyday tasks is if you're running out of storage space. The jump from SATA to PCIe NVMe was a much more meaningful improvement on daily responsiveness, and honestly, even SATA SSDs are fine for daily use. Several of my systems still have SATA SSDs, although I've moved all m