Let’s say you have an old, but decent SSD. But now you want to try out that SSD M.2.
Do you really notice big of a difference, performance wise, in wow? Is it worth putting in that extra buck to buy one?
Well it depends on your old SSD, if its a quality one like Samsung then you won’t notice any difference to an M.2.
When i switched to M.2 on my latest build the loading times were maybe 1sec faster if at all.
In game it won’t have any effect if you are already on a SSD, not like switching from a mechanical HDD were the characters pop in one after another in Valdrakken for example 
Tldr; no difference for WoW 
You will notice a difference for some newer titles with direct storage support though and also the biggest benefit is always windows being more responsive.
Thanks for the info
Between ssd and an nvme you probably wont notice difference unless they add directstorage which benefits a lot from nvme
Problem with current non directstorage games is they are bottlenecked by the cpu, while directstorage bypasses the cpu.
Sata SSD is limited to SATA controller so 600MB/sec for SATA-III. But no SATA SSD can get to 600MB/sec as that’s theoretical. So 550MB/Sec being maximum even for the best drives there.
An NVME drive is way faster.
Gen 3 goes up to 3,400MB/sec read, 3,000MB/sec write. So this would be a huge improvement over 2.5 inch SSD’s
Gen 4 goes up to 5,000MB/sec read, 4,400MB/sec write
And unless you have the latest cpu/motherboard…
Gen 5 just pushes that up to 7,500MB/sec read, 7,000MB Write.
But Gen 5 needs some serious cooling to keep it at those speeds so heatsink and in some cases a fan and/or watercooling on said NVME drive itself.
For WoW, you see assets being loaded in faster, quicker OS load up and other programs once Windows has cached properly. So there is benefits over SATA SSD’s as that’s slow now. Gen 3 is enough if on a budget but even putting in a Gen 4 or 5 into a Gen 3 or 4 slot is backwards compatible, just means it runs slower at those bus speeds but it be a big improvement over SSD drives from 10 years ago.
The biggest improvement will be a snappier OS with NVME over SSD though as Windows 10 and 11 do take advantage of that. As with other latest games that do take advantage. Faster your CPU and GPU can load stuff up, the faster it can get through said instruction. Most CPU, GPU’s are starved while in wait state for data to come in.
Your storage drive mostly affects how fast textures are loaded, so mostly loading times, if you want to improve performance you’re better upgrading your CPU, GPU and/or RAM.
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