On Tue, 2022-03-08 at 22:53 -0500, R. G. Newbury wrote:
From: Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan@gmail.com On Mon, 2022-03-07 at 23:35 -0500, R. G. Newbury wrote:
Has a 240G SSD for Fedora, and 2 500G nvme ssd's for storage (both in adapters as the MB has no M.2 slots).
Somewhat OT, but do you notice a difference between the SSD and the NVMe+adapter combos? I don't have M.2 slots either and wondered if it made sense for me (I have a good SATA3 SSD already). poc
I wondered the same thing. And also whether it made a difference which PCIE x16 slot contained which hardware (including the nvidia GT9700 video card. I ran a test transferring 3GB from RAM tmpfs to each drive *using rsync*. That was too small a test to show any substantive difference. Spurred by your request I ran it again writing 23GB to each storage unit. I used rsync on a folder containing many various size files as a real world test. Transfer 23G using rsync -a SSD Crucial (2012) Disk model: M4-CT256M4SSD2 Tue 08 Mar 2022 09:14:41 PM EST Tue 08 Mar 2022 09:19:38 PM EST Diff 4:57 NVME0 WD Black SN750 (2019) Disk model: WDS500G3X0C-00SJG0 Tue 08 Mar 2022 09:19:38 PM EST Tue 08 Mar 2022 09:22:45 PM EST Diff 3:07 HD WD Red (2012) Disk model: WDC WD10EFRX-68F Tue 08 Mar 2022 09:22:45 PM EST Tue 08 Mar 2022 09:28:56 PM EST Diff 6:11 NVME1 Tue 08 Mar 2022 09:28:56 PM EST Tue 08 Mar 2022 09:31:59 PM EST Disk model: Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB Diff 3:03
So yes the NVME drives were substantially faster than the (now-old) SSD transferring in 60% of the time of the SSD. I expected a greater difference between the 2 NVME drives given that the Samsung 970 touts a substantially higher write capability. NVME0 is mounted in a Startech adapter: cost$13.00 Cdn about a year ago. NVME1 is mounted in a axGear adapter, purchased through Best Buy for a staggering $10.99 Cdn on sale, with free shipping! So the M.2 plus adapter cost me $102 including tax. Very happy. Recommended.
Only caveat is that you need a free long PCIE x16 slot (although each adapter/M.2 only uses x4 for the 4 channels that each M.2 uses. So slot sharing is not actually a problem as between multiple adapters. I am going to swap the video card around to see if that might make a difference although I doubt it will.
Available here until March 10 at $10.99: https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/axgear-m-2-nvme-ssd-ngff-to-pci-e-adapt...
If you want more storage the Asus Ultra Quad at around $90 will handle 4 M.2 up to 2280 drives and will handle a RAID storage setup.
Thanks for the detailed info. My current SSD is a Samsung 860 EVO (2TB) so for comparison I did this:
$ time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1G count=23 of=Big 23+0 records in 23+0 records out 24696061952 bytes (25 GB, 23 GiB) copied, 14.9873 s, 1.6 GB/s
real 0m15.087s user 0m0.000s sys 0m14.640s
However that's clearly not a reflection of actual I/O speed as the writes will have been cached.
poc