emmc vs NVMe real-world performances

[slyecho]

I have an NVMe drive but I'm not entirely convinced that it is ideal, there are a number of problems:

1. The drive uses some power, and even though I selected the drive with very low wattage and good power control options, it's taken maybe 2 hours off the battery capacity.
   
2. Getting the OS to boot from the drive can be a nightmare and you can get an unbootable system after an update etc. depending on your setup. Order the serial cable as well when you order the adapter.
   
3. If I limit the power to something that doesn't eat the battery immediately, the performance is not orders of magnitude faster.
   

There are of course benefits:

1. Can be much faster in sequential read and random read.
   
2. Can be very much larger than the eMMC
   
3. Since the drive is big you can use a real swap partition.
   
4. Compilation can really use a faster drive, too, it is after all loading a lot of small files and some programs (especially C++) need a lot of RAM to compile which means swap may be necessary.
   

Anyway, I'm using the WD Blue SN550 250GB and so far I'm quite happy with it, the power management is quite good on it. I have it set on power level 2 at boot.