Solid State Drive

[CoM_Solaufein]

What is a good solid state drive that is equal to or greater than 1TB? I plan on installing Windows 10 on this particular drive and use this solely as my gaming drive. 

[Gorgon]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html

 

Something like this ?

 

I have the 512 gb Samsung 960 Pro which I free up for installations, scratch disk and so on.  Win 10 is installed on an older non nand m.2. If you just want the performance boost from m.2 nand you could easily make do with less and combine with whatever old HDD you have lying around. I mean it's quite a lot for storage. On the other hand you can stick your M.2 in your laptop, which is more versatile after all.  

[Humanoid]

I'm not really a believer in the high-end SSDs which cost upwards of 50% more per GB than mainstream drives given that actual gains won't really be seen in day to day use. You'd only really see the difference when transferring large amounts of data (like migrating the contents of the entire drive) or in benchmarks, unless you're doing crazy disk-crunching operations like Bokishi.

 

These days you'd be hard-pressed to find an outright "bad" product, so in general my policy would be that a bigger SSD beats out a faster SSD when it comes to purchasing decisions. Bigger SSDs tend to operate faster than their smaller counterparts anyway due to the parallel nature of their operation.

 

Looking at this price comparison, a Crucial MX300 1050GB is $244. Sandisk's budget Ultra II is only a couple bucks cheaper but is only 960GB, and their equivalent model X400 is $259. Samsung's often-recommended mainstream drive, the 850 EVO, is $315. I don't know where you are, but realistically I'd just pick the cheapest model (per GB) out of the ones mentioned above.

 

If you have your heart set on the best available then it depends on what your motherboard supports. In terms of standard 2.5" SATA SSDs, you have the Sandisk Extreme Pro at $380 there, and the Samsung 850 Pro is getting crazy at $426, dangerously close to the cost of two MX300s. Beyond that you have SSDs on the PCIe bus, which can run to $1000+.

 

Note that when I say PCIe bus, this can come either in the form of an actual PCIe card, or an M.2 drive. M.2 is simply a standard of connector, which the motherboard may connect internally to either the SATA bus or the PCIe bus, depending on what it supports and what type of SSD it is. Most modern boards should support both modes.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Humanoid

[Bartimaeus]

Agreed with Humanoid: size (and reliability) > than outright speed. Samsung Pros are not really worth the extra cash, while a better argument could be made for the Samsung EVOs...particularly if you get them at a sale price. In reality, though, there's a lot of good options...and a few bad ones with controversies: simply try to avoid the latter category while making the best business decision for the former. Also, fortunately, we've moved away from a lot of the crappier controllers like SandForce over the past few years, so things, in that regard, look better than ever.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Bartimaeus

[Gorgon]

They are still pricey at 1 tb nomatter what you chose. I can tell the difference using my samsung pro in photoshop but only in specific instances when I am using near all my ram. So is it worth it to load a game level a few seconds faster or getting a few miliseconds more of general windows performance. probably not.

 

A lot of people are still advocating an SSD HDD combo. 

[mkreku]

Yeah, I bought the 256 GB Samsung 850 Pro for my OS and most commonly used applications. I use a 4 TB expensive Hitachi (tired of HD's crashing on me) for my storage needs. I have not yet filled even 1 TB of that though..

 

The Pro was only $20-30 more than the Evo and I felt like getting the best of the best (at the time), but I would also recommend the Evo nowadays. There's almost no difference between them in reality.

[Bokishi]

Yeah I literally run everything off of SSD now. No moving parts noise, and everything loads fast. Great for OS and scratch disks 

[CoM_Solaufein]

Thanks for the information. I'll keep this in mind when the time comes that I get this done, probably early next year.

[Ganrich]

Yeah, I will say that if you are going to use photoshop, music recording/creation software, video editing, or another form of content creation then the faster drives make sense. If you are not, and are just gaming/web surfing/streaming/etc then the middle of the road SSDs are fine. Reliability should be your first concern. Although, the technology has become much more reliable in the past few years it is still what I would worry about. Reliability>Size>Price>Speed is how I would go about it, but if you need speed for power use then I would go Reliability>Speed>Size>Speed.

[CoM_Solaufein]

Perhaps I could buy a smaller drive and just install all of my games on a different drive. That won't effect the speed too much?

[Humanoid]

If you're on a tight budget that's the way to get started. Of course, the lure of quick loading times means there'll always be the temptation to go full SSD later...

 

You can use a utility like Steam Mover to shuffle games across to the SSD to get the speed benefit if you're only actively playing one or two games at any given time.

[Bartimaeus]

or just do it manually by just moving the relevant game folder in the steamapps/common directory in addition to its appmanifest...with figuring out which appmanifest is the correct one to move (hint: go to the game's store page and figure out the gameid by looking at the URL) being the most difficult part

[Humanoid]

Amazon's Deal of the Day is $100 for a 750GB MX300, get on it.

 

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B01DUNLMUU

[Bokishi]

^Haha grab that thing

[CoM_Solaufein]

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I ended up going to the local Best Buy today and got a 500GB Samsung 850 evo for nearly half off its original price. I was originally going to get the 1TB variation but there wasn't much off its original price.

[CoM_Solaufein]

I don't know if its the SSD drive or Windows 10 or both, but it starts fast and shuts down fast. It buries my Windows 8.1 SATA hard drive in speed.

[CoM_Solaufein]

Well I see Windows 10 and 8.1 can't live in harmony with each other. Each OS is on a different physical drive. Some where down the line the Win 10 OS did a scan of my Win 8.1 drive and made a "fix" to it. It fixed it alrght, it did something to the boot sector of that drive so I can't boot up and running repair gets no results nor does a system restore. It nuked the OS on that drive basically. I can access everything on that drive still, so the drive itself is functional. My main concern is all of my bookmarks/passwords on that drive, I need to get access to them.

[Bartimaeus]

What's your browser?

[CoM_Solaufein]

Firefox

[Humanoid]

I'm successfully multibooting Windows 10 and Windows 7 on a spare PC, but both were clean installs and I installed Win10 first.

[Bartimaeus]

Firefox

 

C:\Users\(Username)\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\(Random String.default)\

 

This is where Firefox's user profile data is stored in Windows 7. I don't remember exactly how transplanting the data into a new install works because it's been a while since I've done it myself, but I would imagine copying+overwriting the contents of the profile directory into whatever your new profile directory is in Windows 10 would work (this would also overwrite anything you have in your current Firefox profile, though, so back up anything you have there if necessary). Close Firefox before doing it, obviously: let me know how that goes if you try.

Edited December 8, 2016 by Bartimaeus

[CoM_Solaufein]

Did something like that. Made a new profile, copied everything over and it works. Everything is now on my laptop.