upgrading from samsung 850 evo to 960 evo

Hi,
I currently own a Samsung 256gb 850 evo ssd and I'm thinking about upgrading it to the 512gb 960 evo because it is much faster and I need more capacity.
I just have one question - how much will I benefit from the speed upgrade..

I have a older I7 first gen that has a Samsung 850 Pro. I recently built a sixth gen I7-6700K that has a Samsung 960 Pro. I rarely use the old
machine now. The difference spec wise between the 850 evo and a 960 evo is considerable. The PCI bus that the 960 runs off of is considerably
(5 or 6 times) faster than a SATA 3 interface. Not knowing what SATA interface you currently are using makes it difficult to say exactly what you will experience, but you should be pleased if you are looking for speed.

Hope this helps,

110yd

850 and 960 use the same generation of Samsung VNAND, 48 layers. In the case of Evo, they are 3 bit per cell. By doubling the capacity, you double the flash parallelism. Your sequential write will be at most 2x faster, given the interface is not bottle necking, which is true in the case of 960.

What you will benefit from is random read, write and sequential read. This is usually limited by interface. So going from SATA3 to PCIe will improve these aspects substantially. Having that said, how much will you notice the differences really depends on your workload. I will say this, if you need the capacity, then upgrading to a larger drive with modern interface is the way to go. If you don't need the capacity, I will wait until you need it. Going from SATA3 to PCIe SSD, the return is diminishing at this point.

The disk is faster. The real question to ask is "will this let me get my work done faster". The answer to that depends on your applications, your workflow, and what you do. The answer is most likely "a little bit faster".

What do you use your computer for? What is the current bottleneck?

I have been using SSD's since early 2011 and have drives that represent each boost in performance. My oldest drives are limited to Sata II, also have Sata III drives(Samsung, Sandisk, Patriot), M.2 PCIe(HyperX Predator 240GB) and M.2 PCIe NVMe(960 Evo 500GB). There is a huge performance boost going from any HDD to a SSD, easily seen in boot times, file transfers and most software loading times. Moving to faster drives within the SSD world just does not give the performance boost in real world everyday use that the spec sheets would suggest. If you spend a lot of time transferring large files from one NVMe drive to another you will see blistering read/writes, other than that the difference is not that great. My Z97/4790K with 850 Evo cold boots within a second of my Z170/6700K with 960 Evo, if you watch them boot side by side the difference is minimal and either can reach the desktop first depending on what is happening in the background as Windows loads. I use both for photo editing with Lr, Ps and DPP4 and honestly can not see much difference.

If you need a larger capacity SSD and have a motherboard with a M.2 PCIe 3.0 4x NVMe slot open and can afford the price premium there is no reason not to use it, if you need to save some money and go with a cheaper Sata III drive you will be fine.