4 ms·

It absolutely amazes me how many people spent good money on a 128 GB NVMe boot drive that speeds up their initial OS loading a tiny bit... which represents prob

It absolutely amazes me how many people spent good money on a 128 GB NVMe boot drive that speeds up their initial OS loading a tiny bit... which represents probably a fraction of a percent of the total time spent waiting for disk operations in total, and then spend the entire time working from a slow HDD instead. Like congrats for spending all your budget on your garage door instead of your car.

agumonkey 4y ago
doesn't surprise me much, boot/resume are part of context switching and it's psychologically very important; you often want the cost of getting in and out as cheap as possible
xigency 4y ago
I don’t know about you but when I switched over from HDD to SSD years back I did some crude measurements and found the time it took to boot into a usable environment went from >= 90 seconds to < 25 seconds. And it’s not just booting the system that was noticeable. Everything became more responsive. It was like night and day. I have no problem separating my OS drive from my games/photos/backups. It’s actually what I prefer to do. And I like to see that the operating system isn’t so bloated it can’t fit in 100 GB.
- TylerE 4y ago
  That's not what he's saying. He's saying that the difference between a bog standard SSD (like just a decent USB3 external or whatever vs NVME) is really not that noticeable.
  - wtallis 4y ago
    NVMe has been the predominant standard for SSDs for several years now. Even USB "portable SSDs" are almost exclusively using NVMe drives internally now rather than being built around SATA SSDs or SSD controllers that natively speak USB (which is the low-end solution used for thumb drives).
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
      This is something I keep meaning to investigate. If you take a top tier consumer SSD vs a bottom barrel brand, for typical usage patterns, is there any meaningful performance difference? Maybe boot is a few seconds faster? Caching is more intelligent so Chrome starts faster? I am sure there could be some measurable differences for prosumer users (compiling code, video editing, etc) but my suspicion is that any SSD is good enough for the majority of people.
      - wtallis 4y ago
        My expectation is that most desktop users will rarely or never experience a situation where there's a noticeable difference between a fast SSD and a cheap SSD. Storage benchmarks are a lot more sensitive than end-user perceptions of the overall system's responsiveness. Even power users will spend most of their time either not waiting on the storage, or waiting on a storage access pattern that is only moderately faster for a high-end drive. But the metrics that truly matter—responsiveness as perceived by the human user—are also the hardest to accurately measure. Today's entry-level SSDs are faster in pretty much every way than the top of the line from ten years ago. They're definitely "good enough" for most users.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  It really depends on the OS. On Windows everything becomes ridiculously faster. On macOS, it boots up much faster, and the machine is decidedly snappier. On Linux, it boots faster, but unless you are limited by memory (not swapping, but using getting disk cache misses) it’s not a huge deal. I was honestly underwhelmed when I upgraded a Linux box from HDD to SSD a couple years back. The best part was the silence as HDDs are loud.

agumonkey 4y ago

doesn't surprise me much, boot/resume are part of context switching and it's psychologically very important; you often want the cost of getting in and out as cheap as possible

xigency 4y ago

I don’t know about you but when I switched over from HDD to SSD years back I did some crude measurements and found the time it took to boot into a usable environment went from >= 90 seconds to < 25 seconds. And it’s not just booting the system that was noticeable. Everything became more responsive. It was like night and day. I have no problem separating my OS drive from my games/photos/backups. It’s actually what I prefer to do. And I like to see that the operating system isn’t so bloated it can’t fit in 100 GB.

TylerE 4y ago
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that the difference between a bog standard SSD (like just a decent USB3 external or whatever vs NVME) is really not that noticeable.
- wtallis 4y ago
  NVMe has been the predominant standard for SSDs for several years now. Even USB "portable SSDs" are almost exclusively using NVMe drives internally now rather than being built around SATA SSDs or SSD controllers that natively speak USB (which is the low-end solution used for thumb drives).
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    This is something I keep meaning to investigate. If you take a top tier consumer SSD vs a bottom barrel brand, for typical usage patterns, is there any meaningful performance difference? Maybe boot is a few seconds faster? Caching is more intelligent so Chrome starts faster? I am sure there could be some measurable differences for prosumer users (compiling code, video editing, etc) but my suspicion is that any SSD is good enough for the majority of people.
    - wtallis 4y ago
      My expectation is that most desktop users will rarely or never experience a situation where there's a noticeable difference between a fast SSD and a cheap SSD. Storage benchmarks are a lot more sensitive than end-user perceptions of the overall system's responsiveness. Even power users will spend most of their time either not waiting on the storage, or waiting on a storage access pattern that is only moderately faster for a high-end drive. But the metrics that truly matter—responsiveness as perceived by the human user—are also the hardest to accurately measure. Today's entry-level SSDs are faster in pretty much every way than the top of the line from ten years ago. They're definitely "good enough" for most users.
rbanffy 4y ago
It really depends on the OS. On Windows everything becomes ridiculously faster. On macOS, it boots up much faster, and the machine is decidedly snappier. On Linux, it boots faster, but unless you are limited by memory (not swapping, but using getting disk cache misses) it’s not a huge deal. I was honestly underwhelmed when I upgraded a Linux box from HDD to SSD a couple years back. The best part was the silence as HDDs are loud.