3 ms·
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 t
by 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 agoThis 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 agoMy 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.