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…
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.