3 ms·

I've heard that SATA and NVME SSDs have similar performance for use cases such as lightweight app usage and loading games. Does anyone know what the typical use

by dc3 6y ago

I've heard that SATA and NVME SSDs have similar performance for use cases such as lightweight app usage and loading games. Does anyone know what the typical use cases are for these high performance drives?

harrygeez 6y ago
The reason is it takes time to reach those top speeds for each individual file. So if you're dealing with many small files it's difficult to reach and sustain the max speed. If you're working with big files like editing 4k or 8k video footage that's when you really get the full benefits
- MayeulC 6y ago
  It really depends on your filesystem for this. However, the latency should be comparable across technologies, proportionately taking a bigger chunk of transfer times for small files.
ralph87 6y ago
The use case is benchmarks basically, and maybe faster cold boots. About the only place the typical heavy computer user is likely to notice major difference between SATA and NVME is probably running something like "find /", or some kind of full-disk search scenario. Even in the latter, full text indexing which every platform has had for years now makes it much less likely that the full directory tree will even get walked, and differences even less likely to be noticed. As a side note, every desktop platform's full text search seems to suffer software performance problems that are largely independent of the underlying disk Even in the full-tree enumeration case, since Spectre/Meltdown mitigations landed, system call overhead is so high now that even with a lightning fast disk, a large chunk of total time taken to walk the directory tree is lost basically twiddling the CPU mode securely. You can definitely still see the difference between SATA and NVMe, but you can also definitely measure the amount of time during the NVMe run that is spent in software -- incrementally faster NVMe will have quickly diminishing returns. "What about databases!" This was my original interest in SSDs to begin with. It turns out, despite being a data monkey who loves large databases, since 2013 any time I've worked with a giant dataset like this, it is always in the form of large scans (usually from something like a CSV or XML file), where SSDs don't really have a mind-blowing advantage over magnetic (but of course they are still 5-10x faster a seq io, its just that data parsing and processing is typically the bottleneck now).
sliken 6y ago
I find the worst case scenarios come up pretty frequently. Even novice users can have a ton of photos, browser tabs, thumbnails, music, email, icons, full text search, etc. Once you get used to a system that has great I/O it's hard to go back. Sure large games often have difficult I/O patterns, but it's far from the only used case.

by dc3 6y ago

harrygeez 6y ago

The reason is it takes time to reach those top speeds for each individual file. So if you're dealing with many small files it's difficult to reach and sustain the max speed. If you're working with big files like editing 4k or 8k video footage that's when you really get the full benefits

MayeulC 6y ago
It really depends on your filesystem for this. However, the latency should be comparable across technologies, proportionately taking a bigger chunk of transfer times for small files.

ralph87 6y ago

The use case is benchmarks basically, and maybe faster cold boots. About the only place the typical heavy computer user is likely to notice major difference between SATA and NVME is probably running something like "find /", or some kind of full-disk search scenario. Even in the latter, full text indexing which every platform has had for years now makes it much less likely that the full directory tree will even get walked, and differences even less likely to be noticed. As a side note, every desktop platform's full text search seems to suffer software performance problems that are largely independent of the underlying disk Even in the full-tree enumeration case, since Spectre/Meltdown mitigations landed, system call overhead is so high now that even with a lightning fast disk, a large chunk of total time taken to walk the directory tree is lost basically twiddling the CPU mode securely. You can definitely still see the difference between SATA and NVMe, but you can also definitely measure the amount of time during the NVMe run that is spent in software -- incrementally faster NVMe will have quickly diminishing returns. "What about databases!" This was my original interest in SSDs to begin with. It turns out, despite being a data monkey who loves large databases, since 2013 any time I've worked with a giant dataset like this, it is always in the form of large scans (usually from something like a CSV or XML file), where SSDs don't really have a mind-blowing advantage over magnetic (but of course they are still 5-10x faster a seq io, its just that data parsing and processing is typically the bottleneck now).

sliken 6y ago

I find the worst case scenarios come up pretty frequently. Even novice users can have a ton of photos, browser tabs, thumbnails, music, email, icons, full text search, etc. Once you get used to a system that has great I/O it's hard to go back. Sure large games often have difficult I/O patterns, but it's far from the only used case.