My system is running out of space for the main drive (PCI-e) and I am thinking to either get the Crucial which is (~500MB/s) for $287 or I could get the Samsung 960 EVO (~2500MB/s) for $460.
But what on Earth would I need that incredible speed upgrade of the second one anyway? If I use any games they’d be installed in the HDD anyway. I do machine learning but reading from the drive is not a bottleneck. Why would anyone get the faster drive?
Servers/sans with dozens or thousands of users will notice the diff.
The answer to basically every “who would need…” question for computer speed is: high end simulations, large-scale AI, server DBs, and video editing. Maybe software developers, since a lot of IDEs are weirdly disk-bound (Visual Studio, I’m looking at you).
Not that those numbers mean anything in the real world, anyway. Given the numerous potential bottlenecks, marketing enthusiasm, and caching mechanisms, I’d be very surprised if the Samsung were 5x the Crucial in measurable speed, or if either of them came within 50% of the numbers they were claiming in most systems.
I once worked on a stunningly disk-bound “money is literally no object” system (rasterization), and we couldn’t ever put together a box where the SSDs would get anywhere near their listed speeds for any sort of sustained I/O, no matter what driver boards, connectors, and other hardware we used – we even had some custom designed.