Should I place my SSD into a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot (500MB/s) as oppose to using the SATA II interface (300 MB/s)?

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Surban

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Is the speed difference I will notice worth the hassle of using an adapter to plug into a pcie and booting using Clover (since my BIOS doesn't support UEFI)?

Would I notice a performance difference between a SATA II SSD (300MB/s) and using the gen 2 x1 PCIe slot (500 MB/s)?
 
I'm assuming that we're talking about two different SSDs here and a fairly old system.

Unless you are planning to buy a NVMe SSD to move into a new system after retiring this current one, I'd keep it simple and just get an inexpensive SATA SSD.

In everyday usage, the perceived benefits of SSDs come not from the overall throughput of the drive, but in the reduced latency (how fast the drive can find and start moving a given piece of data) compared to HDDs. And in this respect even the latest/fastest NVMe SSDs are not that much quicker than SATA units.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
I'm assuming that we're talking about two different SSDs here and a fairly old system.

Unless you are planning to buy a NVMe SSD to move into a new system after retiring this current one, I'd keep it simple and just get an inexpensive SATA SSD.

In everyday usage, the perceived benefits of SSDs come not from the overall throughput of the drive, but in the reduced latency (how fast the drive can find and start moving a given piece of data) compared to HDDs. And in this respect even the latest/fastest NVMe SSDs are not that much quicker than SATA units.
Click to expand...

Yeah the system is from 2010.
Just one SSD, replacing my 13 year old HDD. Just going to copy everything over.
I was thinking of going with price as well but it seems like NVMe and SATA 2TB were both about $100 during black Friday, missed all those sales. So yeah which ever comes on sale next I'll go with that.
Trying to keep total spend under $200 as you said, don't want to invest too much into this in case it dies one day.

Thanks for that bit of info about the perceived benefits! That helps.
 
Hmmm...

I was expecting something like a 256 or maybe 512 GB-class SSD, where the cost differences between SATA and NVMe are much more pronounced. At 2 TB, where a good NVMe unit costs about the same as a SATA one, it may be a different story.

Any idea on the how your storage is being used? Would it be sufficient to get a smaller SSD for the OS/apps and use the existing HDD for bulk/media storage?
 
Good question. My current HDD is 1TB and it's about 80% full. The reason I was thinking about a 2TB SSD is because I heard SSDs slow down drastically once 80% full.
I'm afraid my HDD might crap out soon after over a decade of use so wanted to just move everything over to a SSD and leave the HDD as a backup storage!
Or am I too paranoid and my HDD will be fine? I heard they last much longer than SSDs. Figured 13 years has been a long time without every loosing data (knock on wood).
 
I'm just mulling over ways to get you onto a SSD without spending more than necessary on an older system, and/or making things more complicated with alternate bootloaders (I'm not personally familiar with Clover) or BIOS/UEFI hacks. I don't see a clear answer. If you know that the new drive will never leave this system, just go with a SATA unit. If you believe that you may move the drive to a new system and are confortable with the work going into getting it to function as a boot device in your current system, go NVMe.

SSD writes can slow down once they start to get full, due ot the way most utilize the available space as cache. Reads are generally unaffected by this, however.

Your plan to move everything to a SSD (whether you decide to go NVMe or SATA) and relegate the HDD to backup duty seems sound to me, so long as you periodically verify your backups are working and can be restored.

Yeah, concern about that HDD's life isn't unwarranted. Generally, SSDs are more reliable than HDDs. The caveat, however, is that unlike a HDD a SSD will often give no warning that it's about to die.
 
If you use a PCIe adaptor for an NVME SSD, will the system be able to boot from it is what I would look into first.
What you could do is get a 500GB to 1TB Sata SSD and use that as a boot drive and then an NVME on a PCIe adaptor for mass storage, or just get a 2TB Sata SSD and call it a day.
 
Thank you everyone for the advice!
Will think it all over and probably the next good sale might decide my direction.
 
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