I installed pop!_os as my daily driver some months ago (completely got rid of windows) and have thought it pretty good. But something about it seemed off - it would take programs just too long to open, it wasn’t snappy… Once I got into something it seemed to run fine (playing dota or something else was fine after initial quirks).
Well, today, figured it out…
When I did the first install, I was very nervous about deleting all of my existing data on my disks and so tried to manually partition everything so that I could get it right (I think I was also planning to dual-boot).
Fast forward to today, and I’m testing speeds on all the drives to see which one to pitch for a new one I acquired. I see the 3 HDDs, but where is the SSD… Oh god, I installed the boot partition and root and home all onto one of the ~12 year old HDDs and the SSD has been sitting idle.
Anyway, just about done with the new fresh install onto the SSD, hopefully it isn’t too hard to start port over the home directory from that HDD…
Does it really make that of a difference? Sure I use SSD’s for a long time now but haven’t seen that much of a speed improvement over HDD’s in games. Even with a m.2, haven’t seen any improvement.
However data transfer speed is another story !
Depends on the game you play. M.2 vs Sata SSD isn’t a huge deal for game, but either of those vs HDD on a game with actual loading times is a brutal difference.
Yeah maybe I got so used to SSD’s that I can’t remember the leap between SSD’s and HDD’s.
An as you said the difference between M.2 isn’t that much of a difference in game. There probably lies my bias.
Playing games was fine - it was loading things up that has sucked. I haven’t gotten dota up on the SSD yet, but on the HDD it was real clunky and would half-load the landing page and sit there for ~10 seconds.
The biggest difference, though, is that firefox now opens immediately instead of taking ~10 seconds after clicking the icon
I haven’t run an OS off a spinning disk for over a decade but I still remember how big the leap in general usability was when switching to SSD
Depends on how old the HDD is
The speed difference between my brand new 7200rpm 20TB HDD and a random ass sata SSD is still astounding. Sequentially the HDD is only half as slow. But booting an OS or loading files the HDD is maybe a 10th the speed. Small sequential files is where SSDs shine, especially when it comes to high end NVME drives. That’s why iops are always included in benchmarks.
Windows on an HDD takes like 1-2 minutes to boot. A sata SSD is closer to 30 seconds, and a high end NVME drive is like 10 seconds.
I always have a grin on my face when my laptop boots EndeavourOS in ~20 seconds.
Haven’t seen that since DOS
I never timed it up precisely, but on my desktop with an MSI board, it sometimes feels like I’m waiting longer for the board to get past the UEFI into the bootloader than for the whole OS to load off my m.2…
I love booting up servers. 95% of the boot process is spent on the ram check. 4% is spent on the actual bios things, and 1% is actually booting the OS.
Even on my home server (a desktop with 64 gigs of ram) the ram check takes longer than the OS.
I just remembered watching the RAM counter run up… in KB…
…then typing in duke3d…