Linustechtrip forums and a great deep dive resource. Search for SSD / HDD on there to find out the latest tech. Linus Tech Tips on YouTube is an excellent resource. I’m a software developer and run a 256MB NVMe and 4TB HDD which is enough for me (just). If you’ve a large database workload eg 8TB of data, then it is cost prohibitive to put that all on M.2 NVMe (and gets into the questions of enough PCI Express Lanes). Here is the latest Crucial SSD release giving an idea of where we are today Workload Wow - this is insanely fast compared to my SATA SSD So this seems like a better option than using a SATA SSD (I could be wrong here but worth experimenting with - See this PCWorld Article for more detail). Glotrends PCIE NVMe Adapter Card PCIE GEN3 Full Speed for PC Desktop The motherboard didn’t support x3 lanes, but even so with x2 lanes he was getting an impressive 1600 MB/s If you’ve an old desktop, even a 14 year old motherboard (as my good friend has done) you can put in an M.2 NVMe drive using a PCI Express adapter. Notice it is 5 times the speed of the best HDD’s I have! PCI Express to M.2 NVMe This is interesting - the perf of a relatively new HDD hasn’t improved a lot. HDD - 8 years oldĬame with my XPS17 laptop (had dual ones of this drive) HDD - 5 years oldĤTB Western Digital inside a fast desktop. Good article on Amazon about disks HDD - 10 years oldįrom around the 2010 era of an Apple MacBook Pro. M.2 - wafer thin using a speed up technique called NVMe.SATA Usually 2.5 inch same size as Laptop HDD.

Laptops use 2.5” and full size are 3.5”.Reviewers on Amazon commonly use this tool HDD / SSD / M.2 NVMe This got me curious as to performance differences between modern day drives and older drives.ĬrystalDiskInfo is good for the information, and CrystalDiskMark - scroll down page gives a good idea of benchmark speed. It took all day to install Windows 10 and updates (compared to an hour or so I’d expect) I needed to reinstall Win10 on my spare laptop that I’d stolen the SSD out of and had a 10 year old hard disk sitting around.

Crystal disk mark test