Chosen Solution
@jamesmoore - Here’s a useful reference on Apples custom NVMe drives: The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs NVMe is a storage protocol designed specifically with SSDs in mind. With the elimination of the intermediating SATA HBA layer, NVMe allows SSDs to communicate directly with the CPU via the PCIe bus, opening channels for groundbreaking performance improvements. To put it into perspective, the performance limit of the SATA III bus is 6Gb/s, meaning a SATA SSD can offer a max of 550MB/s of throughput after overhead. A single PCIe 3.0 lane can offer 1GB/s (bidirectional) of throughput, so a PCIe 3x4 SSD can reach a throughput of up to 4GB/s read/write. That goes up to 8GB/s (bidirectional) for PCIe Gen 4X4 SSDs. The performance limitation here moves from the protocol to the NAND media, which has been undergoing tremendous development in recent years, allowing manufacturers to squeeze the highest density and performance into the smallest form factors. While a bit more expensive the performance is light years over SATA I/O! While you are more a dabbler I think you’ll find having a dual drive rig with two SSD’s will give you what this system is lacking. Using the NVMe drive for your boot, apps then leaving the rest free to give the OS and Apps elbow room for virtual RAM, caching & scratch space. Just going with a 500GB should be more than enough for your needs.
