I just upgraded my main boot drive on my Linux desktop, from a 120 GB SATA SSD drive to a 500 GB NVMe SSD drive. Whilst it is true the Crucial CT120BX100SSD1 SSD was not the fastest SSD around, it shows a rating of max of 6Gb/s through the SATA interface. I’d expect many users also have slightly older SSD boot drives as well. Even though they are faster than spinning hard drives, the NVMe interface blows the socks off the SATA interface.
The NVMe drive that I just fitted is a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB drive. It’s not the world’s fastest drive either, but sitting on the NVMe interface it is clocking a bit over 7x faster than the older SSD drive on the SATA interface.
The NVMe drive is showing a sequential read speed of 3,523 MB/s compared to 464 MB/s for the SATA drive. Sequential write speeds are 3,124 MB/s compared to 180 MB/s. Both tests were run using KDiskMark.
And just for context, here is also a speed test done on one of my spinning hard drives, a 2 TB WDC WD20EZRZ-00Z, on a SATA interface.
Interestingly, the 4 TB spinning drive, a WDC WD40EZAZ-00S, is a bit faster.
That all said, there are some things to keep in mind. On my motherboard, a NVMe interface will mean having two unused SATA ports, in my case SATA ports 5 and 6. I’d imagine newer boards would have more NVMe interfaces, but mine has 2 so that would mean losing 4 SATA ports if I mounted two NVMe drives.
The other thing is NVMe drives seem to run a bit hotter. Mine is showing around 43 to 45 deg C, whereas my SATA SSD is showing 29 deg C. This is something I’ll need to keep an eye on as it throttles from 70 C I think.
And lastly, make sure you have a NVMe mounting screw. The sockets on my board are about 1 mm (if that) and there were no screws included with my drive, nor with the motherboard. Two of my local computer shops had none of these screws. Luckily, I found one on an old laptop that I could use.
The whole point I am making is that the NVMe interfaces are really fast!