I’m planning on giving an older machine a small upgrade with an SSD, but since that machine does not have an m.2 port, I was thinking about buying the cheapest PCIe adapter I could find. Besides the obvious stuff like ports, PCIe gen and lane count, is there anything I should look out for? Specifically regarding Linux?

  • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    41·
    1 year ago

    Not gonna lie, unless you have some specific workloads that require faster storage access you are not going to see much improvement by swapping in nvme ssd over sata ssd…

    Since your board doesn’t have m.2 slot, I assume it’s rather old system and would probably get best performance boost by swapping CPU to faster one on same socket. You can probably find a 2nd hand fitting i7 for the same price you’d pay for the pcie card for m.2 slot. Also ram upgrade to 16gb or more (if not kitted already) could be beneficial

    • AnticorpEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      That isn’t accurate. I used a PCIe adapter for an m.2 HDD on my wife’s computer and she’s getting 400% faster write speeds.

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        OP was speaking about “a small upgrade”, most probably in general performance. 400 MB/s write speed won’t make the OS itself any faster than with a normal SATA SSD.

        • AnticorpEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I said 400%, not 400MB/s. 4x faster is definitely a noticeable upgrade.