1TB SSD for gaming and windows?

Caporegime
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Understandable, it's always best to spend some time researching that sort of thing when you can. Mind you, all I've heard about the Sabrent stuff is very positive so I've a feeling it'll suit your needs if you're after an SSD upgrade.

So embarrassingly I actually found out that there was a 2nd M.2 connector that was hidden by the massive cpu heatsink, so I now have 2x1TB Sabrents running in RAID0. :D
 
Soldato
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Upgrade your memory to 16GB, then use a 7200rpm drive as your games drive, you will have a better experience then 8GB + second SSD.

The reason 16GB + HDD is better then 8GB + SSD, is say your playing a Battlefield type game. The initial load will be longer, however due to extra memory game data gets cached into windows, so when you re-spawn the game/maps will load faster then 8GB + SSD.

Games are mainly sequential data reading (that HDD's are still good at) and the increase in RAM will give more storage for file and super fetch caching.
 
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Upgrade your memory to 16GB, then use a 7200rpm drive as your games drive, you will have a better experience then 8GB + second SSD.

Games are mainly sequential data reading (that HDD's are still good at) and the increase in RAM will give more storage for file and super fetch caching.

I'm building a new system with 16GB of RAM, 3700X, 5700 XT, MSI Tomahawk Max.
 
Caporegime
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Be aware that these cheaper M.2 drives being suggested use inferior QLC flash whereas the Samsung EVO SATA drive mentioned uses TLC flash. There is a massive difference in sustained write performance between the two with the M.2 QLC drives coming in at 80MB/s and the SATA TLC drives managing 500MB/s, if you are installing large games over 100GB+ say you will exhaust the drives cache and hit this performance barrier which is something to think about. The M.2 interface allows much higher speeds than SATA but only if the drive is upto the task.

You probably wouldn't exhaust the SLC cache even in that situation. An empty drive 1TB drive has 140GB SLC cache, a half full drive will be 75 ish. You'd have to have really fast internet to be able to download 100GB quicker than the drive empties it's SLC cache. Even at 100MB/s when the drive has run out of cache you'd be beyond most people's internet.
 
Man of Honour
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Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe here for the OS and the 3 games I'm actively playing. I'll just download what I need now. External HDD for the occasional file that I wish to store. The whole PC experience is transformed with this setup, everything is so quick.
 
Soldato
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So embarrassingly I actually found out that there was a 2nd M.2 connector that was hidden by the massive cpu heatsink, so I now have 2x1TB Sabrents running in RAID0. :D

Haha, that's a nice surprise for you!

Fantastic upgrade for the price, you must get silly benchmark results. lol
 
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Well since I'm building a new system I might as well spend the 50 more and get the 970 Evo instead of the 860 Evo... It's probably not worth it but having less cables is nice I guess..

I'm between 2 motherboards at the moment (B450 Tomahawk Max and X570 Aorus Pro) still haven't decided on the chipset but they both have M.2 connections, the Gigabyte even has cooling for it! Is the 970 going to run faster on the X570 chipset or it doesn't matter?
 
Soldato
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Well since I'm building a new system I might as well spend the 50 more and get the 970 Evo instead of the 860 Evo... It's probably not worth it but having less cables is nice I guess..

I'm between 2 motherboards at the moment (B450 Tomahawk Max and X570 Aorus Pro) still haven't decided on the chipset but they both have M.2 connections, the Gigabyte even has cooling for it! Is the 970 going to run faster on the X570 chipset or it doesn't matter?

Why?

There's a huge chunk of this thread discussing Sabrent Rocket and the fact it's just as fast for half the price.
 
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Why?

There's a huge chunk of this thread discussing Sabrent Rocket and the fact it's just as fast for half the price.
Never heard of the brand before, plus it's not available in my country, I'd have to buy from Amazon. Price is 120+10 shipping, while the 970 is 180 euros. Is it really that good?
 
Soldato
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It's a US company/brand with solid customer support and a five year warranty, I'd absolutely save 50 bucks on one over a 970 Evo personally.

snip~

Edit: I misread your post there, I should probably have finished my coffee before responding! Deleted the irrelevant bit.
 
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Soldato
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I got the 1tb silicon power p34a80 for around £100 to go with the tomahawk max, been very pleased with it so far.

I was originally looking at Sata hdd but when I see what these m.2 nvmes could be had for it was a no brainer.
 
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Soldato
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You probably wouldn't exhaust the SLC cache even in that situation. An empty drive 1TB drive has 140GB SLC cache, a half full drive will be 75 ish. You'd have to have really fast internet to be able to download 100GB quicker than the drive empties it's SLC cache. Even at 100MB/s when the drive has run out of cache you'd be beyond most people's internet.

Don’t try and explain logically that he’s wrong - several of us have already tried that. His opinion is based on claiming to be aware of QLC’s limitations, yet triggering a full drive write to use software encryption and because the speed dropped when the cache was full and returning the drive because it was ‘slow’, things got progressively worse from then on :D
 
Associate
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I myself have an 960 evo SSD and it works like a charm, loading up windows is super fast, also have a generic 2TB HDD for general documents, downloads etc... as I have read that storing and deleting stuff from an SSD could potentially damage it. is this true?
 
Caporegime
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I myself have an 960 evo SSD and it works like a charm, loading up windows is super fast, also have a generic 2TB HDD for general documents, downloads etc... as I have read that storing and deleting stuff from an SSD could potentially damage it. is this true?

SSDs will all eventually die if you write to them enough. Nearly all will take longer to die than their useful lifespan however, even with heavy use. Unless you're regularly writing massive amounts to them its not a real worry.
 
Caporegime
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You probably wouldn't exhaust the SLC cache even in that situation. An empty drive 1TB drive has 140GB SLC cache, a half full drive will be 75 ish. You'd have to have really fast internet to be able to download 100GB quicker than the drive empties it's SLC cache. Even at 100MB/s when the drive has run out of cache you'd be beyond most people's internet.

Games are generally fully downloaded before installation so internet connection speed doesn't come into it.

Haha, that's a nice surprise for you!

Fantastic upgrade for the price, you must get silly benchmark results. lol

Yeah, it's not as much as the typical doubling in throughput from RAID you get with SATA drives but that's because of the limitations of the flash I expect.
 
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Caporegime
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I don't think that's how steam works. Not sure about other digital stores however.

Must have changed since I used it yesterday after installing my new Sabrent drives then!

Though admittedly I already have most of my games on my external hdd's so I don't have to wait 2 weeks downloading them again.
 
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Associate
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SSDs will all eventually die if you write to them enough. Nearly all will take longer to die than their useful lifespan however, even with heavy use. Unless you're regularly writing massive amounts to them its not a real worry.
Correct. My 4 years old SSD, which was the primary drive for SO and games for over 2 years, and now is files/download storage, shows as 98% life left. Pretty good, if true.
 
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