[Darryl Ramm]

Is your SATA Evo 850 running via a SATA III adapter? The native mobo SATA II throws away some decent sequential drive performance.

Enable Trim. It’s natively supported on Mojave for third party SSD drives and has been for several recent macOS releases. Trim works with SATA, and PCIe AHCI and PCIe NVMe SSDs (interval and via Thunderbolt), the issue is USB drives that will likely not pass through Trim commands.... but turning on Trim even then should not hurt anything. How much Trim is important depends on what you are going. It makes no difference to read-mostly sample drives for example.

NVMe is way faster than poor old tired ancient SATA stuff. Several times faster for many things.... how important those are to you/if the cost is worth it is a value call. But especially with NVMe SSD Cost heading to SATA SSD price points I know where I want to spend my money.

I have mentioned boot time issues in other threads and provided links before some of the best online resources on this. You can find them, or when I am not typing on an iPhone I’ll find them and link here. You should be aware of those and if needed configure your system to minimize those times. If they are even important for you.

If you have PCIe slot/lane capacity in a Cheesegrater I would be trying to use a switched M.2 adapter card to get 4xPCIe 3 performance out of the PCIe2 slots.

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And to be very clear.. I have no current *experience shared* in cheese graters. I would love to have one now especially given all the upgrade options... including NVNe. I am running on the latest 8 core MacBook Pro with internal 2TB NVMe SSD and an external 2TB Samsung X5 NVMe SSD. And several Samsung T5 transfer disks/infrequently used samples, etc. and HDD for backup/archive. My understanding of SSDs comes from other places, including helping invest in and work with some of the companies that developed pioneering stuff in this space. ... so I would especially love to see others here that are actually running NVNe on cheese graters let us know what is working best for them. Right now I just dream of owning a new Cheesegrater...