I installed pop!_os as my daily driver some months ago (completely got rid of windows) and have thought it pretty good. But something about it seemed off - it would take programs just too long to open, it wasn't snappy... Once I got into something it seemed to run fine (playing dota or something else was fine after initial quirks).
Well, today, figured it out...
When I did the first install, I was very nervous about deleting all of my existing data on my disks and so tried to manually partition everything so that I could get it right (I think I was also planning to dual-boot).
Fast forward to today, and I'm testing speeds on all the drives to see which one to pitch for a new one I acquired. I see the 3 HDDs, but where is the SSD... Oh god, I installed the boot partition and root and home all onto one of the ~12 year old HDDs and the SSD has been sitting idle.
Anyway, just about done with the new fresh install onto the SSD, hopefully it isn't too hard to start port over the home directory from that HDD...
If you're not yet confident in your Linux skills, a good idea would be to disconnect all drives except the one you want to install on, during installation... especially if you have multiple drives of the same size
NVM
It's a great idea and works perfectly in this case. Unfortunately, it's pretty challenging to disconnect an NVMe drive when it's blocked by the CPU cooler or other components. In my case, I always recheck multiple times before making any partitions changes.
Does it really make that of a difference? Sure I use SSD's for a long time now but haven't seen that much of a speed improvement over HDD's in games. Even with a m.2, haven't seen any improvement.
However data transfer speed is another story !
Depends on the game you play. M.2 vs Sata SSD isn't a huge deal for game, but either of those vs HDD on a game with actual loading times is a brutal difference.
Yeah maybe I got so used to SSD's that I can't remember the leap between SSD's and HDD's.
An as you said the difference between M.2 isn't that much of a difference in game. There probably lies my bias.
I haven't run an OS off a spinning disk for over a decade but I still remember how big the leap in general usability was when switching to SSD
Playing games was fine - it was loading things up that has sucked. I haven't gotten dota up on the SSD yet, but on the HDD it was real clunky and would half-load the landing page and sit there for ~10 seconds.
The biggest difference, though, is that firefox now opens immediately instead of taking ~10 seconds after clicking the icon