Were you looking at the ratings on SATA SSDs? The WD SN850 NVMe flash drive does 7000mb/s reads. (Close to maxing out a PCIe 4.0 4x slot) That's 23 times faste

Were you looking at the ratings on SATA SSDs? The WD SN850 NVMe flash drive does 7000mb/s reads. (Close to maxing out a PCIe 4.0 4x slot) That's 23 times faster than the hard drive speed you quoted. SATA SSDs have been obsolete for a decade now. Edit: Just checked some prices on Newegg. Looks like the XPG GAMMIX S50 goes for $139, and does 3900 MB/s reads, while SAMSUNG 860 Pro does 560 MB/s reads... and costs $179. It is unfortunate that the invisible hand does not seem to care about drive speeds. Absent price signals, online retailers do not do a terribly good job signposting the enormous gulf in performance between SATA and PCIe. Newegg lists 999+ 2.5" SATA SSDs, and there is no reason at all to buy any of them when building a new computer.