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Re:SSD Storage: 2018 in review by stephenr on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @07:18AM (#18910632)
> performance between different SSDs is basically unnoticeable

Spinning rust drives will likely give you up to ~110 MB/sec.

A SATA SSD will likely give you to up ~550 MB/sec, a 5x increase.

An NVMe SSD will double the write and quadruple the read speed of a SATA SSD, in 1/3 the size.

Yes, any SSD is likely good enough for your average user to feel like a computer is fast. If anything you do is even remotely heavy on I/O, more speed = better.

Re:SSD Storage: 2018 in review by lorenzhs on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @10:01AM (#18911535)
Modern HDDs easily go beyond 110MB/s, but nonetheless stay well below 200MB/s afaik. It'll probably be somewhere in between. Otherwise your figures are fairly correct, if not on the conservative side for NVMe drives (a Samsung 970 Pro will sustain sequential speeds above 3GB/s read and 2GB/s write).

But focusing on sequential read speed misses the main improvement that SSDs give you over HDDs: random reads and writes ("seek speed"). Reading or writing lots of small files from an HDD will ruin your transfer speeds unless they're written sequentially, whereas a SATA SSD will do quite well and an NVMe SSD will do really well. This is the cause of the noticeable speedup when you upgrade to an SSD.

Re:SSD Storage: 2018 in review by stephenr on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @09:17AM (#18911214)
Downvotes, for the speeds of various storage media?

Well done HN, just when I thought you couldn't get more ridiculous, you one upped yourself again.