Art, The relevant consideration for SSDs is the data bus / interface. Currently USB, SATA, or PCI. SCSI and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) are more relevant for enterprise level hardware. USB 1.0, 2.0, or SATA 1.0 (up to 3.0 gigabytes per second or GBps) would slow things to much to see a performance benefit, but would offer a data reliability benefit over spinning media. USB 3.0 or SATA 2.0 would offer a good speed increase (usually 6 GBps). SATA 3.0 or PCI NVMe would offer the highest performance (12GBps and up). For the data import discussion of this topic; my system is configured with an NVMe PCI M.2 SSD for OS and software. The temp / scratch folder is on a 980Gb Toshiba SSD connected via a SATA 2.0/6 GBps data bus. The source .pbf file and the output .map file are on the same Toshiba drive as well. In that SSD storage is getting cheaper and more dense, I expect my next hardware upgrade to support an NVMe PCI SSD that has sufficient storage to allow me to use it for data imports as well as software and OS. In addition to the cost per core value of AMD processors, AMD ThreadRipper CPUs support more PCI lanes than comparable Intel CPUs allowing more PCI NVMe drives, GPU cards, etc.
|