Is NVME suited for system use (a rhetorical question)

[bgoodwin91006]

Hi All,
I bought a 250G nvme because of the reputed speed and installed a fresh copy of Linux Mint on it. After reading how large numbers of small writes can rapidly age an nvme I decided to create a /var directory (where system logs are kept) on my home directory which is on a disk drive and use a symbolic link instead of writing logging events on the nvme. In time, I realized that /tmp could also be a problem and linked it too. Then came the next upgrade of Mint.

Not only does an upgrade from an iso write all new system data (tons of small files) but it's usually outdated and immediately has to be updated. I was not too concerned, after all, the installation in total used only 7% of my nvme. Then came the glitch which resulted in rebuilding my system files from backup using Timeshift. Then another glitch, Timeshift, and a third glitch all correctly resolved by Timeshift but with major writing of tons of small files. Then came another upgrade.

Then came the brilliant idea to install Mint LMDE as a dual boot since I wanted to try that out. After all, I had plenty of room on my nvme. That went horribly wrong (I think it was due to a twitchy mouse button) After a long session of writing new files I ended up unable to boot either system. This time I installed Mint on /dev/sda1, a 1TB partition on a disk drive and used Timeshift to restore all my previous set-ups, plugins, configs, etc.

I now use the nvme to store game files which, once stored, don't ever change. Game 'saves' go to a subdirectory in my home directory. My Oblivion game alone uses over 21GB due to the extensive use of mods. Games run a lot smoother and I really can't tell if loading bash is any slower from a disk drive.
Best regards,
Bob G.

[rene]

Ever since effective wear-levelling in SSDs this ageing thing has become a ghost of SSDs past. Yes, flash wears out and e.g. QLC faster than TLC faster than MLC faster than SLC --- but if you with e.g. smartctl -A check blocks/bytes written, compare it against the warranted TBW for your drive and then additionally take into account that early tests showed most SSDs to in fact outlive said warranted TBW by up to 10 times you will know you have on a desktop system nothing to worry about; not currently near a useful system to check but when I last did and applied the TBW factor to the years the drive was already in use I found to maybe have a problem in 40 years or so,

[bgoodwin91006]

Ever since effective wear-levelling in SSDs this ageing thing has become a ghost of SSDs past. Yes, flash wears out and e.g. QLC faster than TLC faster than MLC faster than SLC --- but if you with e.g. smartctl -A check blocks/bytes written, compare it against the warranted TBW for your drive and then additionally take into account that early tests showed most SSDs to in fact outlive said warranted TBW by up to 10 times you will know you have on a desktop system nothing to worry about; not currently near a useful system to check but when I last did and applied the TBW factor to the years the drive was already in use I found to maybe have a problem in 40 years or so,

Thanks for that insight. I was just going by articles and videos I found online, some of which seemed rather alarming. Still, I think this is working out pretty well as game storage and it really does speed up and smooth games like my heavily modded wine-Oblivion.
Best regards,
Bob G.

[Petermint]

Anything on SSDs that was written last week, is already out of date and just clickbait. Well, anything older than a few months is obsolete. The more you pay, the bigger the warranty in terms of SSD life. Only the cheap/unbranded stuff have those old problems.

Wear relates only to writes. Most of the gains you get are from fabulously fast reads and they never wear out an SSD. Reads wear out magnetic disks. Just spinning around waiting for a read wears out magnetic disks. SSDs have incredible low power options when waiting, so long as the Linux kernel understands the various idle levels and uses them, making SSDs the obvious choice for battery powered devices.

Writes are preceded by an erase cycle which is the big killer. A good SSD will have lots of spare space to let erases work in the background and to replace failed blocks. Lower cost SSDs have less spare space for erasing, which makes them slower, and have fewer replacement blocks, producing the shorter warranty.

NVMe? NVMe gives you reads and the occasional write many times faster than SATA, mSATA, USB 2, USB 3 gen 1, SD, or microSD. Continuous writes, like backups and big video copies, might be faster when you buy top SSDs or might slow down to worse than magnetic disks when the device temperature reaches 70 or 80 degrees. Outside of big writes, NVMe completes everything faster which lets the device return to idle faster which keeps them cooler.

Heat is the one problem as NVMe drives let you write many times faster, generating far more heat. If a system file has enough writes to heat up an SSD, you have an error in the software that needs fixing.

[Grayfox]

NVMe doesn't really have that much of a benefit over a SATA based SSD for general use.

A video of a SATA HDD, SATA SSD and NVMe SSD loading into Windows and Games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3AMz-xZ2VM

Most of the time the SSD is only 1 second slower than the NVMe drive.
But if you want a cleaner system with less cables the NVMe based drive may be better

[Petermint]

The NVMe speed depends on the motherboard chipset and the CPU as they have to supply several PCIe lanes at the highest speed. My new notebook gets NVMe speeds about three times faster than the maximum speed of SATA. The previous gen intel notebook chipsets had the slower PCIe lane speed and not enough lanes for NVMe plus GPU and everything else. My ancient desktop can run NVMe faster than SATA because the chipset has so many lanes.

I have not found anything that reports the chipset in use. You have to get the motherboard model then look up the chipset used.

[acerimusdux]

I'd think not only suited, but highly recommended.

[rene]

NVMe not having much benefit in some workloads and for now specifically in desktop/gaming workloads is simply a matter of said workloads not being very sensitive to storage speed --- as in, "duh". Otherwise NVMe's simply both as to latency and throughput (generally) much, much faster. This currently shows up when shuffling about large amounts of data; in future workloads it'll show in no fundamentally other way than any improvement does --- and with "DirectStorage" that future is very near for gaming.