Basically want something with decent performance and durability. Cost matters, but I’m not trying to hit rock bottom. I’m particularly wondering, is an HMB-type PCIe SSD ok combined with a SATA adapter? I think HMB is supported if your machine can use a PCIe or NVMe disk directly, but I’d be using an older Thinkpad with a 2.5" SATA slot at least for now. So I’m wondering if I’d lose a lot of performance if the SSD combo doesn’t have its own RAM buffer.

I see good deals by today’s standards for PCIe SSD’s at of all places, Office Depot.

Thanks.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Is a SSD’s cache even about wear? I mean wear only happens on write operations. And I would expect a SSD to apply the writes as fast as possible. Since piling up work (a filled write cache) means additional latency and less performance on the next, larger write operation. Along with a few minor issues like possible data loss on (power) failure.
    And on read, a cache on the wrong side of the bottleneck doesn’t do that much. A SSD has pretty much random access to all the memory, it’s not like it has to wait for a mechanical head to move into position on the platter for data to become available?!

    But I haven’t looked this up. I might be wrong. What I usually do is make sure a computer has enough RAM and it is used properly. That will also cache data and avoid unneccessary transfers. And RAM is orders of magnitude faster, you can get gigabytes worth of it for a few tens of dollars… Though adding RAM might not be easily done on the more recent Thinkpads… I’ve noticed they come with a maximum of one RAM slot for some years already, sometimes none and it’s soldered.