On Tue, 20 Nov 2018 00:14:11 -0500, Larc wrote:

On Mon, 19 Nov 2018 22:31:35 -0600, Char Jackson wrote:

| In my experience, an SSD isn't automatically amazingly faster than a
| HDD. SSDs, before the m.2 form factor came along, had the advantage of
| nearly zero seek time, which is nice, but by itself isn't
| groundbreaking.

I moved from SATA 3 HDDS for the system drive to SATA 3 SSD's on 3 desktops and a
laptop,

SATA 3 to SATA 3 = no real difference.

and an M.2 on my main desktop.

m.2 is only a form factor so it doesn't tell us anything about its
speed. If it was SATA 3, then it's in the same boat as above. If it was
NVMe and the system fully supported it, then I'd agree that it's faster
than SATA 3.

All are noticeably much faster than the HDDS,
especially when booting and shutting down.

Technically, any improvement you see by going from SATA 3 HDD to SATA 3
SSD is probably due to the lower seek time and the elimination of head
position contention. Both are SATA 3.