Hi, I've been itching to replace my SATA SSD boot drive with an NVMe one (plus PCI card, probably a cheapie). But I'm not sure if it's worth it.
How much faster would Mojave boot on NVMe at 1500MB/s or 3000MB/s compared to a SATA SSD? Did anyone happen to do a timed test?
Thanks!
Practically zero (if not slower).
The NVMe itself is faster.
If you go for the real high end NVMe, their 4k random speed can be quite a bit faster than a normal SATA SSD. Which may help to save few seconds loading time.
However, the extra time required to initialise the hardware may completely offset the time saved by fast loading. End up almost no difference.
Also, that 1500MB/s or 3000MB/s is the sequential performance. When talking about boot time, the main limiting factor is the 4K random read QD1 performance. Except the Optane NVMe, all others are not even over 100MB/s in real world test.
And here are some reference for you.
900P ~193MB/s
970Evo ~58MB/s
970 Pro ~53MB/s
860Evo ~37MB/s
As you can see, the 1st column (4k Read) is nowhere near 250MB/s for any SSD (including NVMe). That's the reason why we said the optical cage's SATA II connection is more than enough is you only want fast boot time.
And moving form SATA II to SATA III won't help.
For NVMe, the real high end one is definitely faster than SATA SSD now. However, the difference may be not as significant as you believe.
And for some "normal" NVMe, the performance may be even worse then SATA SSD in 4K read speed. e.g. KC1000
Therefore, if you upgrade to this kind of NVME. They may actually make you boot slower even no extra hardware initialisation time required.
If you only care about boot time. Go for 900P may save you few seconds (if you are lucky, and money is not a concern at all). But in general, stay at SATA SSD make more sense if you don't need any super fast SSD in your real workflow.
970 Evo etc should still make your system snappier. However, so far, only few reported that has noticeable difference in boot time and happy with it. Some others like theone29 reported no significant difference, and not worth to go NVME if you only care about boot time.
If there is very good return policy in your country, you may buy them and give it a try. However, if you are at somewhere like mine, basically no return policy exist, you better think twice before you go for this "upgrade".