I don´t know anything about Pc building, and want to buy one. This is a question that came to my mind when doing my research. I think ultimately this comes down to how storage media/storagedevice(s) searches for information on itself. If it´s more of a archiv where everything is labeled and easy to find, or if there are many (example: a hundret) drawers and they are opened till the information is found.
Example:
* 1TB Western Digital WD Blue SN580 M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVME (L 4150MB/s ; S 4150MB/s) ( 34849 )
* 2TB WD Blue SN580 M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVME (L 4150MB/s ; S 4150MB/s) ( 34850 )
In: Technology
It depends…
In theory 2 SSD disks of the same brand and model # but different sizes will have the same read and write performance.
However there are so many on the market that it’s very easy to end up looking at 2 disks of different sizes that are actually totally different spec or brands. Therefore with totally different read and write speeds.
What you have to do is lookup the manufacturers specifications for that specific model # on their website and compare the two.
There are also other bottlenecks to consider. Depending on factors like your motherboard, internet speed (if you are downloading something to the disk), and CPU you may not be able to get anywhere close to the theoretical throughput of the disk you buy making this exercise irrelevant.
But in short… Yes
In your example with 2x SN580s the speeds of the two drives should be the same regardless of the fact that they have different capacities.
Also nickle-and-diming performance to this degree for a home PC probably isn’t worth your effort. So long as you are using a good quality NVME SSD you’ll be getting more than enough performance and a few extra MB/s either way won’t be noticeable.
So spending 8 hours looking at specs to ensure you have absolutely the fastest drive on the market is a waste of time.
OP it’s an SSD drive, not a memory card those are SD cards and are used for stuff like cameras.
You will only get the max read/write speed when moving large files. That’s not typical for regular people. Instead you are usually accessing fairly small files or many small files. These will be read/written slower.
Also the speeds of modern SSDs are insane. Getting a modern SSD from a reputable brand is really all you need to think about. Look for deals vs the absolute fastest one. You will be paying a premium for a spec you can’t utilize.
If their specs are the same, then they should be largely the same.
There are nuances around being able to achieve the same performance for the spec sheet, but that’s for the manufacturer to figure out.
> If it´s more of a archiv where everything is labeled and easy to find, or if there are many (example: a hundret) drawers and they are opened till the information is found.
Basically any modern file system will be like the first one. The challenge usually isn’t finding the file, it’s actually getting to it. With a hard drive, you have to wait for the reading arm to get to the right place and for the disk to spin to the right orientation. It figures out where to go very quickly. But it’s slow actually getting there.
SSDs don’t have moving parts, so they don’t have this issue. It’s as if you could teleport to the exact drawer you need. Any SSD is crazy fast compared to a hard drive.
But SSDs have other challenges. A single SSD can have multiple storage chips on it, so the workload can be divided. If one chip is busy, you can still do stuff with the other chips. (This is all managed by the SSD itself.) But if an SSD has only a single chip, you can get bottlenecked if it gets really busy.
So for SSDs, it’s the smaller ones that are sometimes slower because you can more easily achieve the capacity with less chips ([Apple did this a couple years ago](https://youtu.be/w6GTf6ATlho?si=ZgM1noefpSe3EADR&t=264))
It depends a lot on the exact architecture of everything. These chips have a controller that manages the storage, and speed can be bottlenecked at the controller regardless of how much storage is behind it.
I can give an example of where twice the capacity helps. In the M2 MacBooks, getting 256 GB storage meant you got one 256 GB chip connected to one controller. The 512 GB option had two 256 GB chips each hooked up to one controller, so storage speeds went way up.
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