I’m seeking advice/comments on an upgrade to an SSD for use in a darktable environment.
The drive in my Win10 install of dt, which holds the ‘master’ copy of my raw and XML files, is getting full; it is also a (relatively) slow 2.5” SATA III SSD. I’m planning to replace it with a much larger NVME M.2 SSD which should give me another 5 years of capacity at my current average rate of adding images. (The system drive – where the dt config data is held in a Windows install - is already NVME but limited on this motherboard to SATA III speeds I believe).
Browsing the available options without brand constraints, I’m left with questions about which characteristics of an NVME SSD are most relevant to my intended use. I can see the performance for sequential read and write, but I don’t think I do much of that when editing an image – do I? Especially as most of the read and write is to relatively tiny xml files, most of which will be in cache anyway– correct? Or are the updates to data.db (large) and library.db (largish) quite frequent during editing? I see a parameter called Endurance, which differs by a factor 3 in the Crucial product range,(P3 Plus to P5 Plus) for example. But given that I write the raw file a very small number of times, compared to the associated tiny xml file, I can’t see that Endurance will be an issue either.
Are there any other factors (other then price), such as the various thumbnail caches, that I should be taking into consideration?
There are various connection types, and you have to make sure you get a type that will work with your PC hardware. E.g., a PCIe connection requires an available PCIe connector on the motherboard. There may be even newer types than that - it’s hard to keep up.
Also, some NVME drives have heatsinks, and sometimes they are difficult or impossible to physically fit into the PC.
Thanks for the reminder - I chose the motherboard some years ago to have PCI connections in an M.s form factor capable to accommodating most of th e main stream M.2 SSDs fitted with heatsinks.
Yes, I think so. The most important characteristic for you is random access read/write, but most drives on the market now are pretty decent. And a lot will depend on your filesystem (I am not sure what the options are in Windows).
I would pick something mid-level from a major manufacturer (Samsung, Crucial, Kingston, in no particular order). Spending extra on high-performance “gaming” models is unlikely to make a noticeable difference for your use case. Similarly, degradation will not be a practical concern, so “endurance” is irrelevant IMO.
Great, thanks for this; I was tending in exactly this direction (something mid-level) in my thinking but was overly-concerned about endurance. I can now make my choice of upgrade.
I have been using the Samsung Pro and Evo editions für years and I am really happy with them - never had an issue, and from what I gather, their lifetime is much longer than initially stated.
I do not really feel a difference between Pro and Evo, at least not with a bit of photo-editing and starting applications.
I do not do many massive multi-file operations, though (where caches and controllers play a bigger role than pure r/w speed).
Apart from that, I would back what @Tamas_Papp is saying - mid-level Crucial and Kingston will probably be just as good.
I also use Samsung NVMEs (PCI connection) for years and am quite happy. However, even if these drives are in theory and benchmarks much faster than my SCSI SSDs, in general I do not see much speed difference. I think, the bottlenecks are not the drives but other components.
No, I haven’t - because of my own ignorance. The term intrigues me: how can one have a NVME device (which, I think, implies a PCIE interface to the processor) that is external (which I take to mean ‘outside the case’)? I’ll have to read up about it. What advantages does such a device have over and internal NVME SSD ?
A motherboard can handle a finite number of M.2 and SATA gadgets.
If you need more, one solution is to buy some external enclosure(s),
which connect to your computer using USB (3.2, or 3.1, or slower).
The thing to the left is intended for an M.2 stick, and has a dual interface so that it can handle SATA as well as NVMe. The thing to the right can house a 2.5" SATA HDD/SSD unit. Both connect to the motherboard using USB.
