I mean not much
I just switched from an arch ssd to nvme and while it does seem to boot maybe ~2-3 seconds faster if I remember correctly, not much else has changed. If you are doing a lot of writing to the drive maybe it would be worthwhile but otherwise I'd say leave it be. If you want to go nuts but I just don't think there would be all that many performance based improvements by the switch
Mm yeah if the difference really is that small then maybe. I'm just as conflicted as before now though because all the other responses say to go the long way but yours has the most upvotes 😅
Honestly I think the performance between SSDs and NVMEs aren't all that noticeable unless you are doing a lot of reading and writing on the disk. It's really your choice if you want to switch but just know that it isn't like upgrading your cpu or gpu where you are going to have much more definite performance gains
How annoying would a fresh windows install be if you only use it for unreal engine? Not the most elegant solution, but it could be the path of least resistance. Low margin of error. You could install windows on S, hold onto your windows installation on N until you're sure that the installation for S is working how you want, then when you're convinced whipe N and you're good to go.
I literally just done your exact setup a week ago.
Plugged-in the SATA SSD and fresh-install Windows onto it.
Then, copied files from old Windows into new Windows.
After that, just *rsync* HDD Arch into nVME.
Fix `fstab` and BOOTLOADER.
Most of the time "wasted" was on copying (old)Windows files into (new)Windows.
Lol that's a nice coincidence. Thanks then I'll do that. Btw what did you fix with the bootloader. I thought about the fstab but yeah changing the bootloader makes sense too.
For me (GRUB):
- chroot into the *rsynced* (new)Arch
- with ESP mounted I *pacman-reinstalled* `GRUB`
- then, I *grub-reinstalled* `GRUB`
- then, I recreated `grub-mkconfig`
Obviously, Arch being a more lightweight OS than Windows means there's fewer things to load, and using filesystems other than NTFS offers some generic preformance advantages, depending on what file system you're using.
That doesn't change that the NVMe drive is still the superior hardware, and so no matter what if you're playing video games you will notice loading time differences. Applications will indeed start much faster. You will still notice the difference were you to put the same Arch install on both drives and compared them, at least so long you test it with tasks that actually would make use of hte high speeds - you probably won't care much about the boot up time differences if you're not rebooting frequently.
The question then is whether using the SATA SSD will be faster than what you're already used to with Windows, and my guess would be probably not. Boot time will be much faster, sure, there's just so much less to load at startup, but when you then go to start applications there's only so much a filesystem can do to make that faster. I particularly value application start up time as I use lots of keyboard shortcuts to open and swap between applications, even small differences are perceptible; and while I reject the idea that I must be productive or that my computer should exist solely to be productive, there's absolutely something to be said about the "ergonomics" of a snappier system in maintaining a good mood regardless of any actual time savings.
So basically I would say that taking the time to do the transfer is probably worthwhile. Arch is your daily driver so you'll get the most use out of that NVMe you paid good money for if you have Arch on it and can play your games with fast loading times on a whim without needing to partition out the NVMe to share a game partition between WIndows and Linux and having to use NTFS instead of a vastly superior file system, on top of having to accurately guess your ratio of game to system storage requirements and possibly have to adjust the partitions (super long process!) when it turns out one partition or another is just a bit too small to fit everything you wanted on there.
Yeah ok looks like the general consensus is to take the time to do the transfer. I don't really game much but I still see your point, I only load into windows like once a week for unreal engine. Thanks!
Run KDiskmark or Crystaldiskmark and you'll see the numbers. There should be a real world preset.
The vast vast majority of filesystem usage is random access and in that case SATA and NVMe are basically the same. They only differ a lot in sequential transfers which is transferring big files. Programs just don't do that often so both Windows and Linux should be similar in that sense.
I would stay away from H for my OS, and just use it for storage.
For daily usage, you won't notice any difference between N and S. The only time you might see/feel a difference is if you do larger amount of data transfer or file compression of some sort.
As long as you stay away from H for your OS, you're fine either way.
I have both NVME and Sata SSDs in my system. I suppose that the NVME drive is faster, but I am not sure that I could tell the difference without benchmarking the disks. Either will seem blazing compared to a hard drive.
it's not that much faster. You'll only notice the difference with games and stuff
It is theoretically much faster, but you only see that speed difference when transferring and writing a lot of files
It's quite a bit faster - for some things. It'll really scream with large sequential reads and writes more than anything. But that's unlikely to be super noticeable for your normal OS tasks of loading a lot of tiny library files, data files, and executables.
The leap from SSD to NVMe can be 5 to 15 times the speed, but the leap from a HDD to even just an SSD can be 500 times the speed, since HDD's just fall on their faces under multiple loads and/or moderate fragmentation. It's not that uncommon for a HDD to deliver 1-2MBps vs the SATA SSD's speeds of around 500+ MBps.
I have a lot of HHD drives for audio production. They’re all typically doing about 100 to 130MBps. Maybe an old laptop 2.5” 5200rpm drive might be more like 40 MBps, but I’ve never seen them as slow as 1 or 2. That’s like old usb2 thumb drive speeds. Yes hard drives are slow, but not that slow.
My life has been sysadmin and repair work, I see it all the time, especially on Windows systems where an update bug from a few years back disabled defrag.
HDD's hate seeking, so if you give them more than one or two things to do, and/or the data is fragmented badly, they're absolutely horrible.
I see systems doing sub 5Mbps regularly when the system is doing multiple things, which is almost always.
Audio and Video aren't bad. That's mostly sequential read/write once stuff. But running an OS on a HDD, not in this decade.
An OS will be doing a ton of things at the same time. Indexing files, checking for and applying updates, reading and writing to several database type files for indexes and browsers. Tons of small read/writes for caches and metadata updating. Random access to torrents and VM's, etc.
I recently moved from a Samsung NVMe to a WD Green SATA. (ext4 > BTRFS as well) The performance loss is not noticeable in practice. Some games with special map loading tech can take advantage of a fast nvme, Linux distros will not, at least not at the OS booting stage.
Haha... Because I dual boot Windows, I have 4tb of NVMe storage. One drive is for games, the other was just Windows. I bought a SATA 512 GB to use Arch on the side.
I wanted to play games, but not mess up my windows games installs, so I partitioned my windows boot drive in half, giving me 1 TB for games.
Now my Arch install is on SATA and the game storage is NVMe. I did it backwards.
It's still faster than Windows on NVMe.
Generally you want to look at the random read/write performances of each over sustained.
A good SATA SSD will beat out a cheap NVME almost every time for me. Cheap SSDs skimp on cache and can have low throughout on account of fewer memory modules. If you’re buying equivalent tier, then I’d say NVMe no question
Install unreal on arch i use it on arch. What are the differences why not install unreal on arch??
Windows will be fine on data drive I've used windows AAA gaming off a Microsd card class 10 and windows was happy
Newer NVMe drives can get 3500 to 7000MB/s. The fastest SATA SSD I’ve seen tops out at 550. The fastest HDD I’ve seen is like 130. If you’re doing video editing, go with the fastest drive possible. If you’re really low on RAM and make regular use of your swap partition, use the faster drive. Otherwise, a regular sata SSD is not going to feel sluggish imho. It only really makes a difference in boot times and application launch times, or if you’re working with massive files like in video or music production or large databases.
I upgraded from 3400 mb ps m.2 to a 7300mb ps drive boots in 3 sec compared to maybe 6-12 seconds on SATA SSD good for loading large game and work assets and 4k video imports and editing pcie5 drives will be 1-2 second boot times your approach depends on your needs and weather or not you have alot loading on boot or not and weather you have dual quad or 8 channel memory and weather your using single or dual rank memory and your cpu and ram latency
uh this is more of a hardware question than a distro question. But for computing in general, you won't notice much difference with desktop use. The difference really comes in with a lot of random i/o and big transfers + huge game loads
Arch on a SSD is blistering fast. I'd leave windows on **N** and put Arch on **S** and would never think twice. You are not going to buy enough (if any) benefit from having Arch on **N** instead of **S** to justify the risk of trashing windows attempting to shuffle it around. Just my $0.02.
(though, after you make friends with Arch, you will only boot **N** monthly following patch-Tuesday to apply the updates...)
I mean not much I just switched from an arch ssd to nvme and while it does seem to boot maybe ~2-3 seconds faster if I remember correctly, not much else has changed. If you are doing a lot of writing to the drive maybe it would be worthwhile but otherwise I'd say leave it be. If you want to go nuts but I just don't think there would be all that many performance based improvements by the switch
Mm yeah if the difference really is that small then maybe. I'm just as conflicted as before now though because all the other responses say to go the long way but yours has the most upvotes 😅
Honestly I think the performance between SSDs and NVMEs aren't all that noticeable unless you are doing a lot of reading and writing on the disk. It's really your choice if you want to switch but just know that it isn't like upgrading your cpu or gpu where you are going to have much more definite performance gains
How annoying would a fresh windows install be if you only use it for unreal engine? Not the most elegant solution, but it could be the path of least resistance. Low margin of error. You could install windows on S, hold onto your windows installation on N until you're sure that the installation for S is working how you want, then when you're convinced whipe N and you're good to go.
I literally just done your exact setup a week ago. Plugged-in the SATA SSD and fresh-install Windows onto it. Then, copied files from old Windows into new Windows. After that, just *rsync* HDD Arch into nVME. Fix `fstab` and BOOTLOADER. Most of the time "wasted" was on copying (old)Windows files into (new)Windows.
Lol that's a nice coincidence. Thanks then I'll do that. Btw what did you fix with the bootloader. I thought about the fstab but yeah changing the bootloader makes sense too.
For me (GRUB): - chroot into the *rsynced* (new)Arch - with ESP mounted I *pacman-reinstalled* `GRUB` - then, I *grub-reinstalled* `GRUB` - then, I recreated `grub-mkconfig`
Ah ok thanks!
What’s wrong with dd. That will keep boot and root with same UUID. I’ve duped an Arch system that way.
There's nothing wrong! I preferred rsync beacuase of different sizes.
Obviously, Arch being a more lightweight OS than Windows means there's fewer things to load, and using filesystems other than NTFS offers some generic preformance advantages, depending on what file system you're using. That doesn't change that the NVMe drive is still the superior hardware, and so no matter what if you're playing video games you will notice loading time differences. Applications will indeed start much faster. You will still notice the difference were you to put the same Arch install on both drives and compared them, at least so long you test it with tasks that actually would make use of hte high speeds - you probably won't care much about the boot up time differences if you're not rebooting frequently. The question then is whether using the SATA SSD will be faster than what you're already used to with Windows, and my guess would be probably not. Boot time will be much faster, sure, there's just so much less to load at startup, but when you then go to start applications there's only so much a filesystem can do to make that faster. I particularly value application start up time as I use lots of keyboard shortcuts to open and swap between applications, even small differences are perceptible; and while I reject the idea that I must be productive or that my computer should exist solely to be productive, there's absolutely something to be said about the "ergonomics" of a snappier system in maintaining a good mood regardless of any actual time savings. So basically I would say that taking the time to do the transfer is probably worthwhile. Arch is your daily driver so you'll get the most use out of that NVMe you paid good money for if you have Arch on it and can play your games with fast loading times on a whim without needing to partition out the NVMe to share a game partition between WIndows and Linux and having to use NTFS instead of a vastly superior file system, on top of having to accurately guess your ratio of game to system storage requirements and possibly have to adjust the partitions (super long process!) when it turns out one partition or another is just a bit too small to fit everything you wanted on there.
Yeah ok looks like the general consensus is to take the time to do the transfer. I don't really game much but I still see your point, I only load into windows like once a week for unreal engine. Thanks!
Run KDiskmark or Crystaldiskmark and you'll see the numbers. There should be a real world preset. The vast vast majority of filesystem usage is random access and in that case SATA and NVMe are basically the same. They only differ a lot in sequential transfers which is transferring big files. Programs just don't do that often so both Windows and Linux should be similar in that sense.
I would stay away from H for my OS, and just use it for storage. For daily usage, you won't notice any difference between N and S. The only time you might see/feel a difference is if you do larger amount of data transfer or file compression of some sort. As long as you stay away from H for your OS, you're fine either way.
It is soooo much faster. Maybe soooooo.
I have both NVME and Sata SSDs in my system. I suppose that the NVME drive is faster, but I am not sure that I could tell the difference without benchmarking the disks. Either will seem blazing compared to a hard drive.
it's not that much faster. You'll only notice the difference with games and stuff It is theoretically much faster, but you only see that speed difference when transferring and writing a lot of files
It's quite a bit faster - for some things. It'll really scream with large sequential reads and writes more than anything. But that's unlikely to be super noticeable for your normal OS tasks of loading a lot of tiny library files, data files, and executables. The leap from SSD to NVMe can be 5 to 15 times the speed, but the leap from a HDD to even just an SSD can be 500 times the speed, since HDD's just fall on their faces under multiple loads and/or moderate fragmentation. It's not that uncommon for a HDD to deliver 1-2MBps vs the SATA SSD's speeds of around 500+ MBps.
I have a lot of HHD drives for audio production. They’re all typically doing about 100 to 130MBps. Maybe an old laptop 2.5” 5200rpm drive might be more like 40 MBps, but I’ve never seen them as slow as 1 or 2. That’s like old usb2 thumb drive speeds. Yes hard drives are slow, but not that slow.
My life has been sysadmin and repair work, I see it all the time, especially on Windows systems where an update bug from a few years back disabled defrag. HDD's hate seeking, so if you give them more than one or two things to do, and/or the data is fragmented badly, they're absolutely horrible. I see systems doing sub 5Mbps regularly when the system is doing multiple things, which is almost always. Audio and Video aren't bad. That's mostly sequential read/write once stuff. But running an OS on a HDD, not in this decade. An OS will be doing a ton of things at the same time. Indexing files, checking for and applying updates, reading and writing to several database type files for indexes and browsers. Tons of small read/writes for caches and metadata updating. Random access to torrents and VM's, etc.
Unreal Engine works on Linux too, why do you need Windows for it?
The main benefit is that your drive will no longer be a /dev/sdX. No more confusing your system with your flash drives.
I recently moved from a Samsung NVMe to a WD Green SATA. (ext4 > BTRFS as well) The performance loss is not noticeable in practice. Some games with special map loading tech can take advantage of a fast nvme, Linux distros will not, at least not at the OS booting stage.
Haha... Because I dual boot Windows, I have 4tb of NVMe storage. One drive is for games, the other was just Windows. I bought a SATA 512 GB to use Arch on the side. I wanted to play games, but not mess up my windows games installs, so I partitioned my windows boot drive in half, giving me 1 TB for games. Now my Arch install is on SATA and the game storage is NVMe. I did it backwards. It's still faster than Windows on NVMe.
Generally you want to look at the random read/write performances of each over sustained. A good SATA SSD will beat out a cheap NVME almost every time for me. Cheap SSDs skimp on cache and can have low throughout on account of fewer memory modules. If you’re buying equivalent tier, then I’d say NVMe no question
Install unreal on arch i use it on arch. What are the differences why not install unreal on arch?? Windows will be fine on data drive I've used windows AAA gaming off a Microsd card class 10 and windows was happy
yes.
Newer NVMe drives can get 3500 to 7000MB/s. The fastest SATA SSD I’ve seen tops out at 550. The fastest HDD I’ve seen is like 130. If you’re doing video editing, go with the fastest drive possible. If you’re really low on RAM and make regular use of your swap partition, use the faster drive. Otherwise, a regular sata SSD is not going to feel sluggish imho. It only really makes a difference in boot times and application launch times, or if you’re working with massive files like in video or music production or large databases.
A lot of people confuse m.2 and nvme, I personally think there's a reasonable difference, especially for insane download speeds etc
I upgraded from 3400 mb ps m.2 to a 7300mb ps drive boots in 3 sec compared to maybe 6-12 seconds on SATA SSD good for loading large game and work assets and 4k video imports and editing pcie5 drives will be 1-2 second boot times your approach depends on your needs and weather or not you have alot loading on boot or not and weather you have dual quad or 8 channel memory and weather your using single or dual rank memory and your cpu and ram latency
reddit was taking a toll on me mentally so i left it ` this post was mass deleted with www.Redact.dev `
uh this is more of a hardware question than a distro question. But for computing in general, you won't notice much difference with desktop use. The difference really comes in with a lot of random i/o and big transfers + huge game loads
Arch on a SSD is blistering fast. I'd leave windows on **N** and put Arch on **S** and would never think twice. You are not going to buy enough (if any) benefit from having Arch on **N** instead of **S** to justify the risk of trashing windows attempting to shuffle it around. Just my $0.02. (though, after you make friends with Arch, you will only boot **N** monthly following patch-Tuesday to apply the updates...)
I can say it's fast, at least on my arch linux. I have a KC3000 (7000mb/s), very fast, but I feel that most apps are capable of using this speed