I replaced my i7 4790k with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 two weeks ago and am extremely happy with it so far. It was only $195!
Aside: I did a min-cycle upgrade to a good nvme drive (samsung 860) and a GTX 1080 when that video card came out, which was a pretty big bump on the old box.
In your day to day, how big of a difference is that drive vs a SATA SSD you might have bought 5-6 years ago?
I know going from a HDD to an SSD was a mind blowing experience but now things open so fast even on an old SATA SSD that I find it hard to imagine things can feel that much faster.
I have a Samsung 970 EVO and I spend most of my time compiling with g++. Copying large files is nice but overall I find the disk cache in Linux mostly makes the drive performance irrelevant for compiling if you have enough RAM.
Also be aware that if you have an older motherboard with PCI-E 2.0, you'll be limited to 1GB/sec transfer rates anyways.
I also have 960 and 970 evos, they are mostly fine, but there's a fall in speed during writes, when the slc cache becomes full. The 960 is also starting to have longer trim times than it used to.
So don't spend too much! Just get something known to be reliable with a decent cache on it.
the claims in a sibling thread about a given web build being 30 seconds on a sata SSD -> 5 seconds NVME are not likely true, I think that poster may be assuming the differences would be that large.
Not too much difference for most tasks, but man if you're doing a lot of work in node (or anything else touching lots of files) it's pretty significant. But ymmv on this.
Database work is significantly faster as well.
But now considering upgrading that server to a r5-3600 anyway, as I've been using VS code's remote feature for development on the train, and that would still benefit for faster compiles.