On Thu, Dec 05, 2024 at 09:42:08AM -0500, e...@gmx.us wrote:
Is it different when you boot from an nvme drive? I have what I was told was one and it appears as /dev/sdb or /dev/sda depending how the OS feels that day. I didn't buy it new, it was given to me, so I may have been misinformed. It's a thing that looks like a SIMM, and when it's plugged in the motherboard disables one of the SATA ports, which is unfortunate.
That is a SATA SSD, not an NVMe. The same physical form factor (M.2) supports either, but a particular drive will be one or the other. The SATA drive letters can change based on things like which drive starts up faster or what removeable devices are plugged in, which is why using UUIDs or somesuch is preferred over using the device name.
(SATA and NVMe are both SSDs, but one accesses the storage via a SATA controller and the other appears directly on a PCIe bus. They're functionally equivalent in a consumer context, but SATA reached the end of the road performance-wise in 2009 while PCIe continues to scale up; SATA maxes out at 600MB/s, while PCIe is currently at 4000MB/s per lane, with NVMe drives typically using as many as 4 lanes [16000MB/s]. Latency is also significantly lower for PCIe. For many [most?] consumer applications the differences will not be noticable.)
