1TB SSD for gaming and windows?

starmanwarz · 7 Oct 2019 at 11:27

Currently I have a 250GB Samsung 840 and I'm tired of uninstalling games due to lack of space so I'm thinking of getting a bigger SSD, 1TB will be enough probably as I never have more than 3-4 games installed.

I could also install windows 10 on in, or is it better if I keep my old SSD just for the windows installation and various programs?

Motherboard is a Gigabyte UD4H, kinda old now, might upgrade in the next year or so. Don't really care about benchmark speeds but I'd like it to be as fast as possible. I prefer Samsung too.

Which one would you recommend?

a66as · 7 Oct 2019 at 11:51

A 1TB Samsung 860 evo can be had for around £125 if you look around, i'd recommend that as an OS and gaming drive and you can carry it onto your new build when you upgrade

Energize · 7 Oct 2019 at 17:43

a66as said:
A 1TB Samsung 860 evo can be had for around £125 if you look around, i'd recommend that as an OS and gaming drive and you can carry it onto your new build when you upgrade

Even a little cheaper, I've seen it going for £120. It would definitely be my recommendation.

Since you're going to be using it as on OS drive and want fast performance I would avoid the cheaper QLC drives.

starmanwarz · 9 Oct 2019 at 15:30

Thanks guys, the 860 evo looks fine.

However, I will be upgrading to a Ryzen system a lot sooner than I thought (in a couple of weeks) should I get one of these new M2, nvme SSD's? Not sure if they have any benefits, are they just for benchmark scores?

Energize · 9 Oct 2019 at 21:32

starmanwarz said:
Thanks guys, the 860 evo looks fine.

However, I will be upgrading to a Ryzen system a lot sooner than I thought (in a couple of weeks) should I get one of these new M2, nvme SSD's? Not sure if they have any benefits, are they just for benchmark scores?

It depends on your use-case.

A lot of these M2 interface drives use QLC flash which has terrible sustained write performance, for example the Samsung QVO (QLC flash) has 80MB/s sustained write compared to the EVO (TLC flash) which is around 500MB/s. So you are not even reaching SATA III speeds.

You are unlikely to see any performance benefits using really high read speed M2 QLC drives, but will definitely see the penalty if you are writing a lot of data to the drive.

b00merang69 · 9 Oct 2019 at 23:00

Only if you saturate the cache which is 2-4GB on the larger SSD's, the write is the same 520MB/s

starmanwarz · 10 Oct 2019 at 15:53

Excellent, 860 Evo it is then

I just saw the RDR2 and Modern Warfare specs, 150GB and 175GB? 1 TB might not be enough

Gray2233 · 10 Oct 2019 at 16:14

If you google "Sabrent Rocket" you can get a high speed NvME drive for the same price as the SATA drives you're looking at, I'm not sure if your MOBO will support an m.2 drive but at worst you could probably get an adapter. While you might not get the full use out of it on an older system, you will once you move to Ryzen. Granted, gaming and general tasks wont see a hugely noticeable difference between a modern SATA and NvME drive unless you're looking at benchmarks, but if you can get the faster drive for the same price you might as well do so.

Devrij · 10 Oct 2019 at 16:18

I went for a 1tb m.2 for my OS drive, a 1tb sata ssd for my games, and a 2tb HDD for games that I may want to play without redownloading, but don't really benefit from ssd or that I'm not playing often. Then a 2tb hdd for data like music and films (not much use these days), and a 1tb hdd drive for backups of the OS drive. Works pretty well for my needs, but if you're on a budget then start with using the large drive for your OS and the small drive for your games, then expand your storage as needed. These days with steam and other game clients it's easy to install and move games to different drives, but it's hassle if your OS drive gets full and you have to start installing programs all over the place and then a drive dies. Best to keep all programs on one drive that you can backup and restore with your OS, and then movable data and game installs on clients like steam where you can just move the game install from one drive to another... Those can go on another drive.

NZXT30 · 11 Oct 2019 at 12:07

I would definitely go for 2tb as next gen games will be massive.

snips86x · 11 Oct 2019 at 12:13

Crucial 1tb M2 is just over £100...

sastusbulbas · 11 Oct 2019 at 20:06

I run a 960gb ssd just for games and a seperate ssd for Windows etc. My 960gb ssd is full, I am constantly juggling, but wont look at another drive until my new build next year.

My kids are on 240gb ssd's for operating drives with 960gb ssd for games and standard hdds for regular storage.

These days I would recommend 500gb for OS and programs an 2tb to 4tb for games.

keylion · 11 Oct 2019 at 20:49

I'd try and manage until you can stretch to a 2TB drive. It's supprising how quickly you can fill up a drive and I think SSD's don't work optimally when nearly full. Perhaps wait until black Friday to see if the 2TB's get well under the £200 mark.

Energize · 11 Oct 2019 at 22:28

snips86x said:
Crucial 1tb M2 is just over £100...

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.

b00merang69 · 11 Oct 2019 at 22:44

My game SSD is 1TB which is plenty, even large games+mods are going to be mostly under 100GB and I learned long ago if I install to many at the same time I never finish any as I mess about in them all.

I do not need my whole steam library installed at any one time.

Gray2233 · 11 Oct 2019 at 22:51

Energize said:
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.

Sabrent Rocket 1TB NvME can be had for £110 on a certain rainforest themed website, it uses Toshiba TLC flash memory.

Product description:

The Sabrent 1TB ROCKET NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-1TB) delivers all the advantages of flash disk technology with PCIe Gen3 x4 interface and it is fully compliant with the standard Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF), commonly known as M.2.

Based on Toshiba's BiCS 3D TLC NAND Flash memory, its performance speeds can reach up to 3450 MB/s (read) and 3000 MB/s (write). Power consumption is much lower than traditional hard drives, making it the best embedded solution for new systems.

The drives are extremely well received, there's zero need to go for a slower SATA drive over something like this when the pricing is so similar.

Energize · 11 Oct 2019 at 23:20

Gray2233 said:
Sabrent Rocket 1TB NvME can be had for £110 on a certain rainforest themed website, it uses Toshiba TLC flash memory.

Product description:

The drives are extremely well received, there's zero need to go for a slower SATA drive over something like this when the pricing is so similar.

That product is quite tempting actually as I need another 1TB of SSD storage, I could probably do with actually getting 2TB for my main drive and relegating my 1TB Samsung EVO RAID array to be my storage drive instead.

Considering that buying two of the 1TB Sabrents is a fair bit cheaper than the 2TB version it seems to make sense to do that and just RAID0 them like I did with my Samsung SSD's. My motherboard only has one M.2 slot however, do I require a PCI-e adaptor to connect 2 and RAID them?

Gray2233 · 11 Oct 2019 at 23:33

Energize said:
That product is quite tempting actually as I need another 1TB of SSD storage, I could probably do with actually getting 2TB for my main drive and relegating my 1TB Samsung EVO RAID array to be my storage drive instead.

Considering that buying two of the 1TB Sabrents is a fair bit cheaper than the 2TB version it seems to make sense to do that and just RAID0 them like I did with my Samsung SSD's. My motherboard only has one M.2 slot however, do I require a PCI-e adaptor to connect 2 and RAID them?

They're excellent bits of kit given the price.

I couldn't tell you what the requirements to run two of them in RAID 0 would be unfortunately, adapters don't seem to cost too much though.

Shame that the 2TB drive costs £40 + more than two 1TB's, I didn't expect the difference to be that much.

Energize · 12 Oct 2019 at 00:34

Gray2233 said:
They're excellent bits of kit given the price.

I couldn't tell you what the requirements to run two of them in RAID 0 would be unfortunately, adapters don't seem to cost too much though.

Shame that the 2TB drive costs £40 + more than two 1TB's, I didn't expect the difference to be that much.

Actually I've had another look on Amazon and considering the price of buying an adaptor it's only maybe a tenner difference so I think I might just bite the bullet and get the 2TB drive, got 90mins remaining for Saturday delivery so just going to do a little more research before buying.

I made the mistake of buying the dreadful 1TB Intel QLC drive and was astonished by how slow it was for sequential writes so I don't want to make another similar mistake lol, the price point of the QLC drives really needs to drop when TLC drives are this cheap.

Gray2233 · 12 Oct 2019 at 12:59

Energize said:
Actually I've had another look on Amazon and considering the price of buying an adaptor it's only maybe a tenner difference so I think I might just bite the bullet and get the 2TB drive, got 90mins remaining for Saturday delivery so just going to do a little more research before buying. I made the mistake of buying the dreadful 1TB Intel QLC drive and was astonished by how slow it was for sequential writes so I don't want to make another similar mistake lol, the price point of the QLC drives really needs to drop when TLC drives are this cheap.

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.