I've built a Xeon workstation, and had a lot of issues with the NVMe drive not being found by the BIOS. It would take roughly 3 reboots, before the WD SN550 would be found.
I've replaced that drive with a Crucial NVMe drive, and since I did that, the boot issue went away. Unfortunately, the Amazon return period has passed, so now I am test-driving the suspect WD SN550 drive as a secondary drive in a PCIe extension card.
With two drives in my system, I can do some comparative performance tests.
I will report back with an assessment of reliability as a non-boot drive, for the SN 550. It's read-performance does seem better than the Crucial drive. As I am using the Crucial as boot and root disk, I have not been able to compare the write performance between then. The Crucial does indeed feel slower.
UPDATE 1: The SN 550 is reliably detected as a 2nd drive by linux.
Compared to a rotating drive, IronWolf NAS TTB (HDD):
Compared to PNY XLR8 CS3030 1TB:
IronWolf 6TB (HDD):
WD Black SN750 with heatsink:
Seagate Barracuda 510:
Samsung 970 EVO Plus:
WD Caviar Blue (HDD):
Crucial P1 on an old Haswell system:
SSD EVO 860:
OCX VERTEX3 has a slow seek:
Kingston SH103S3120G:
