I ended up buying a 500GB 960 Evo for UE development and even though I could not find a proper benchmark I went with ‘the best one on paper should be the best one with UE’ approach.
I’ve been keeping on eye on the Task Manager’s ‘performance’ tab while working with UE. The only times I’m getting crazy high read speeds is when running a ‘Reconcile Offline Work’ in P4V (450MB/s+ read speed). Getting 60MB+ bursts when loading the editor, something a normal SSD could easily handle. Interestingly enough running ‘find all’ blueprint searches does not tax the 960 a lot (if at all), as it seems most BPs are pre-loaded in memory (using 32 GB) Also nice to see these high-speed write bursts when UE libs are compiled. Overall UEEditor start times were cut from 9 mins (HDD) to a more manageable 2 mins on the new 960.
I guess the best thing with PCIe SSDs is that response times are super low and that mixed read/write performance is superior to regular SATA SSDs. That should make a more comfortable UE development environment.
I also re-installed Windows on a separate, old 250 GB 850 Evo SSD I had lying around in order not to waste too much space on that precious, pricey 960. Most programs are pre-fetched into memory at boot time anyway so there is no need for a crazy fast system drive. I did however moved the page file to the 960 for better performance (32GB is barely enough to hold our project’s assets, but DRAM prices are insane at the moment, so paging is needed to compensate)