Whatever PC computing you do, irrespective of how powerful your PC’s motherboard or CPU is, it depends on how fast external data can be read to or from your secondary storage devices, eg internal hard disks, SSD drives, M.2 drives , SD cards etc.
Below is a basic comparative test l ran against several storage devices available to me on my main workstation. Motherboard: MSI 570 Creative – running the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor, using CrystalDiskMark free software – x64 – click here to download it.
To save space on this due to some large video/photo, 3D rendering/ processing l do – once l am done working on a project with data files on this very fast drive, l move/archive the files l dont need from this prime drive to other much slower drives.
Tests were done on drives l own, just 2 test iterations, 1Gb test setting – the same test on each drive to keep things simple – as shown in screenshots.
M.2 Rocket 1tb Sabrent NVMe 4.0 Gen4 drive – my current main OS and applications drive [the difference/reason is clear]
M.2 Rocket 512Gb Sabrient drive [first Sabrient M2 l got]
Samsung Evo 1Tb SSD
WD Blue Portable Drive – 500Gb
Western Digital Black – 1Tb – Performance HDD
MicroSD 64Gb Samsung Evo
MicroSD 64Gb Sandisk Extreme PLUS
Hope this helps! – Comments, questions, email me.