[Discuss] SanDisk Extreme SSDs keep abruptly failing—firmware fix for only some promised | Ars Technica

[Bill Bogstad]

On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 3:39 PM Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 25 May 2023 15:15:39 -0400
> Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> > If I still had anything that had a rust based internal boot drive, it
> > might be interesting to see if booting from the external SSD would be
> > faster.
>
> IME it's actually not that substantial a difference since much of the
> startup process is spent waiting for devices to plumb and confirm ready
> before dependencies can proceed.

I decided to do a quick 'dd test' of my home-made USB attached m.2
NVME drive and with a 1MB block size
was able to get over 800MB/sec sequential read performance from the
/dev/sda device.
That is substantially faster than a SATA III interface can even
theoretically provide plus essentially zero
seek times compared to rust.  Even an internal SATA based SSD would
seem to be at a disadvantage.
While I was playing with it, I went ahead and installed VenToy on it
and tried booting a few Linux ISOs.
It certainly felt plenty fast on the Core i5 6200U based laptop I was
using for testing.

Bill Bogstad