NVMe

I've built a Xeon workstation, and had a lot of issues with the NVMe drive not being found by the BIOS. It would take roughly 3 reboots, before the WD SN550 would be found.

I've replaced that drive with a Crucial NVMe drive, and since I did that, the boot issue went away. Unfortunately, the Amazon return period has passed, so now I am test-driving the suspect WD SN550 drive as a secondary drive in a PCIe extension card.

With two drives in my system, I can do some comparative performance tests.

The Crucial P1 M2 2280 1000GB:

The Western Digital SN 550:

I will report back with an assessment of reliability as a non-boot drive, for the SN 550. It's read-performance does seem better than the Crucial drive. As I am using the Crucial as boot and root disk, I have not been able to compare the write performance between then. The Crucial does indeed feel slower.

UPDATE 1: The SN 550 is reliably detected as a 2nd drive by linux.

Compared to a rotating drive, IronWolf NAS TTB (HDD):

Compared to PNY XLR8 CS3030 1TB:

IronWolf 6TB (HDD):

WD Black SN750 with heatsink:

Seagate Barracuda 510:

Samsung 970 EVO Plus:

WD Caviar Blue (HDD):

Crucial P1 on an old Haswell system:

SSD EVO 860:

OCX VERTEX3 has a slow seek:

Kingston SH103S3120G: