If I were to use PCIE 4.0 NVME in a NUC/PC which still has only PCIE 3.0 (NUC10 and earlier or any PC that still uses PCIE 3.), would I gain random read and write speed, would I still gain that faster random read and write?
I notice that PCIE 3.0 NVMEs all have much higher random read and write, in addition to about double the maximum sequential read and write.
Or would the random read and write gains be limited due to being used in PCIE 3.0 infrastructure.
Please note that I am interested only in the random read and write and not the sequential which I know would be limited to about 3500MB/second for PCIE 3.0.
In other words, do the higher random read and write performance is due to the NVME itself, or is it due to the improvement in PCIE 4.0 infrastructure?
I.am curious to know if upgrading the NVME SSD PCIE 3.0 in my NUC10 (PCIE 3.0) with a newer and faster random read and write NVME SSD PCIE 4.0 would being snappier Roon experience.
You may gain a little but not, in my experience, a lot.
The inclease in transfer speed that is available with pcie4 applies to the command sequences as well as the block transfers so pcie4 will have half the command overhead compared to the same device in a pcie3 machine.
Case in point. Both my daughter and I have 2TByte Samsung 990 Pro SSDs in our desktop machines. However, my computer is a 10th generation i9 which only supports pcie3 whilst my daughters computer is a 13th generation i7-13700K which fully supports pcie4.
On my daughters computer the SSD really flies and she gets multi-GByte/s transfers rates on the 4k 64 thread tests. By contrast, on the same test, I get about 360MByte per second - which is only about 10 to 15% better than a 512GByte 950 pro (pcie3 only) that I had some time ago.
No. LevelDB writes tables to memory, (memtable) and only writes these out to disk when they reach a certain size (sequential i/o.) These files are immutable, i.e., they do no change, but may be deleted and replaced with another file.
Roon benefits from an SSD because these devices remove the latency associated with spinning disk. I don’t think you need to pursue this further.
You mentioned writing performance. But, how about reading the performance? Like reading the database and making queries or searches from the database? Would that go any faster with an SSD that has higher random read performance.and hence snappier experience?
LevelDB isn’t a conventional SQL database, so Roon will read an entire file into memory. But this is really beside the point. You aren’t going to see any improvements with a “faster” SSD since search also makes use of the cloud, even if you only have local music.