[ralph87]

The use case is benchmarks basically, and maybe faster cold boots. About the only place the typical heavy computer user is likely to notice major difference between SATA and NVME is probably running something like "find /", or some kind of full-disk search scenario.

Even in the latter, full text indexing which every platform has had for years now makes it much less likely that the full directory tree will even get walked, and differences even less likely to be noticed. As a side note, every desktop platform's full text search seems to suffer software performance problems that are largely independent of the underlying disk

Even in the full-tree enumeration case, since Spectre/Meltdown mitigations landed, system call overhead is so high now that even with a lightning fast disk, a large chunk of total time taken to walk the directory tree is lost basically twiddling the CPU mode securely. You can definitely still see the difference between SATA and NVMe, but you can also definitely measure the amount of time during the NVMe run that is spent in software -- incrementally faster NVMe will have quickly diminishing returns.

"What about databases!" This was my original interest in SSDs to begin with. It turns out, despite being a data monkey who loves large databases, since 2013 any time I've worked with a giant dataset like this, it is always in the form of large scans (usually from something like a CSV or XML file), where SSDs don't really have a mind-blowing advantage over magnetic (but of course they are still 5-10x faster a seq io, its just that data parsing and processing is typically the bottleneck now).