I should sit down and benchmark those one of these days.
The jump from USB2 to USB3, either with or without UAS (it's nice, but doesn't lead to a huge jump in benchmarks) gets you a ton of disk performance, and my gut feeling is that while you could certainly measure the performance delta from USB3 to NVMe, it wouldn't lead to a practical increase in speed for typical desktop use. Going from glacial SD cards even to USB2 SSDs is a huge jump, but USB3 to NVMe seems like it would be going from "Fast enough that it's no longer a bottleneck" to "Even faster."
Though for reasons I don't understand fully, all the ARM boards I've tested have very poor USB3 performance compared to Intel. Same SSD, same USB adapter, and the Intel systems absolutely crush the ARM systems (Pi4 and Jetson Nano) in small sector IO performance.
The main problem with NVMe is that the various carriers that support it aren't cheap, and often (at least in the past 6-8 months) aren't really available. You can get a USB3 adapter and used SSD for $30, reliably, any time you want.
The jump from USB2 to USB3, either with or without UAS (it's nice, but doesn't lead to a huge jump in benchmarks) gets you a ton of disk performance, and my gut feeling is that while you could certainly measure the performance delta from USB3 to NVMe, it wouldn't lead to a practical increase in speed for typical desktop use. Going from glacial SD cards even to USB2 SSDs is a huge jump, but USB3 to NVMe seems like it would be going from "Fast enough that it's no longer a bottleneck" to "Even faster."
Though for reasons I don't understand fully, all the ARM boards I've tested have very poor USB3 performance compared to Intel. Same SSD, same USB adapter, and the Intel systems absolutely crush the ARM systems (Pi4 and Jetson Nano) in small sector IO performance.
The main problem with NVMe is that the various carriers that support it aren't cheap, and often (at least in the past 6-8 months) aren't really available. You can get a USB3 adapter and used SSD for $30, reliably, any time you want.