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> I did a min-cycle upgrade to a good nvme drive (samsung 860) and a GTX 1080 when that video card came out, which was a pretty big bump on the old box. In you

by nickjj 7y ago

> I did a min-cycle upgrade to a good nvme drive (samsung 860) and a GTX 1080 when that video card came out, which was a pretty big bump on the old box. In your day to day, how big of a difference is that drive vs a SATA SSD you might have bought 5-6 years ago? I know going from a HDD to an SSD was a mind blowing experience but now things open so fast even on an old SATA SSD that I find it hard to imagine things can feel that much faster.

tracker1 7y ago
For day to day, I really don't notice the difference much... building node/web projects it's as big a night/day difference as going from HDD to SSD was... Say a web project takes 3+ minutes on HDD, then 30 seconds on SSD, think <5 seconds on NVME. The load times are slightly better, from noticeable to blink of an eye for most apps. Not too much difference for most tasks, but man if you're doing a lot of work in node (or anything else touching lots of files) it's pretty significant. But ymmv on this. Database work is significantly faster as well.
gameswithgo 7y ago
There is very little practical difference going from a slow SATA ssd to a fast top of the line nvme ssd. If you are doing huge sequential reads and writes as part of some workflow, then the difference will be big, but boot times, game load times, compile times, are not much different. Like maybe you boot in 29 seconds instead of 30. So don't spend too much! Just get something known to be reliable with a decent cache on it. the claims in a sibling thread about a given web build being 30 seconds on a sata SSD -> 5 seconds NVME are not likely true, I think that poster may be assuming the differences would be that large.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Not an assumption... literally that (large web/node projects) and database work (crunching long data files) are the only two places I really notice the difference. The project in particular, I had to build on an old office machine (hdd) was over 3 minutes... at home before on ssd was around 30 seconds, and under 5 seconds on the nvme.
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
Unless the parent made a typo, the Samsung 860 is a SATA over m.2 drive, so it's nowhere near as fast as a PCI NVME drive. I have a Samsung 970 EVO and I spend most of my time compiling with g++. Copying large files is nice but overall I find the disk cache in Linux mostly makes the drive performance irrelevant for compiling if you have enough RAM. Also be aware that if you have an older motherboard with PCI-E 2.0, you'll be limited to 1GB/sec transfer rates anyways.
- vetinari 7y ago
  860 comes in both SATA and M.2 form factors. I also have 960 and 970 evos, they are mostly fine, but there's a fall in speed during writes, when the slc cache becomes full. The 960 is also starting to have longer trim times than it used to.
  - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
    The m.2 form factor 860 uses the SATA protocol and has SATA performance characteristics. Not all m.2 drives are NVME and different m.2 keys mean not all m.2 slots support both SATA and NVME.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      I meant 960.
- tracker1 7y ago
  960, my bad.

by nickjj 7y ago

tracker1 7y ago

For day to day, I really don't notice the difference much... building node/web projects it's as big a night/day difference as going from HDD to SSD was... Say a web project takes 3+ minutes on HDD, then 30 seconds on SSD, think <5 seconds on NVME. The load times are slightly better, from noticeable to blink of an eye for most apps. Not too much difference for most tasks, but man if you're doing a lot of work in node (or anything else touching lots of files) it's pretty significant. But ymmv on this. Database work is significantly faster as well.

gameswithgo 7y ago

There is very little practical difference going from a slow SATA ssd to a fast top of the line nvme ssd. If you are doing huge sequential reads and writes as part of some workflow, then the difference will be big, but boot times, game load times, compile times, are not much different. Like maybe you boot in 29 seconds instead of 30. So don't spend too much! Just get something known to be reliable with a decent cache on it. the claims in a sibling thread about a given web build being 30 seconds on a sata SSD -> 5 seconds NVME are not likely true, I think that poster may be assuming the differences would be that large.

tracker1 7y ago
Not an assumption... literally that (large web/node projects) and database work (crunching long data files) are the only two places I really notice the difference. The project in particular, I had to build on an old office machine (hdd) was over 3 minutes... at home before on ssd was around 30 seconds, and under 5 seconds on the nvme.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago

Unless the parent made a typo, the Samsung 860 is a SATA over m.2 drive, so it's nowhere near as fast as a PCI NVME drive. I have a Samsung 970 EVO and I spend most of my time compiling with g++. Copying large files is nice but overall I find the disk cache in Linux mostly makes the drive performance irrelevant for compiling if you have enough RAM. Also be aware that if you have an older motherboard with PCI-E 2.0, you'll be limited to 1GB/sec transfer rates anyways.

vetinari 7y ago
860 comes in both SATA and M.2 form factors. I also have 960 and 970 evos, they are mostly fine, but there's a fall in speed during writes, when the slc cache becomes full. The 960 is also starting to have longer trim times than it used to.
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  The m.2 form factor 860 uses the SATA protocol and has SATA performance characteristics. Not all m.2 drives are NVME and different m.2 keys mean not all m.2 slots support both SATA and NVME.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    I meant 960.
tracker1 7y ago
960, my bad.