I have no idea what M2 drive to pick and I feel like I'm going to fall down a rabbit hole

Gibbo3771

Gibbo3771

Gibbo3771

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I am looking to for a 1TB between £100-£130 or so. That puts quite a lot of options in front of me and I don't know where to begin.

This will be replacing my nearly 6 year old Crucial MX500 as a OS/common game drive. I have a Strix B350-F which puts me firmly in Gen3 territory, although I guess it doesn't matter if I put a Gen4 drive in there?

Any recommendations are appreciated, I just want to buy something and not spend hours researching the nuance differences between all the drives at that price point.

The Crucial works fine but I play 2-3 games on rotation and that takes 3/4 of my drive up and trying to run software like Unreal or Blender off a HDD is painful.
 
Bouton Aide said:
What's your motherboard? Have you actually looked at the recommended tested compatible brands from the manual?

There's literally a tone of options available now.
Click to expand...

I have an Asus Strix B350-F. Manual only lists the slot specifications, not any recommended/test compatible brands:

Can't copy and paste from the damn PDF: Page 7
 
Former top model WD SN750 being discounted to same price as WD Blue SN570 1TB SSD NVME M.2 2280 PCIe Gen3 Solid State Drive (WDS100T3B0C) (SKU: HD-589-WD) budget SN570[/url] makes SN570 moot at the moment.
WD Black SN750 1TB SSD M.2 2280 NVME PCI-E Gen3 Solid State Drive (WDS100T3X0C) (SKU: HD-55V-WD) = £99.95

And don't see point in other PCIe v3 drives and after that next step would be very high write endurance Seagate Firecuda 520 with 5GB/s capability on PCIe v4 platform.
Seagate FireCuda 520 1TB SSD PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive (ZP1000GM3A002) (SKU: HD-3BW-SE) = £109.99
Crucial P5P would be next up with higher max sequential speed (with PCIe v4 platform) but at normal TBW.
Crucial P5P 1TB M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 x4 3D NAND NVMe Solid State Drive (SKU: HD-074-CR) = £112.99
 
Personally I'd buy a gen4 one, the price differences are so minimal now and they're backwards compatible with gen3. It will just be slower on sequential read/write (it will max out gen 3 basically), random seems the same at least in my case (got 1x gen 4 and 1x gen3 - both with gen4 drives) but in all honesty I doubt you'll notice the difference with the sata ssd in most cases.

In all honesty you'll likely see very little difference between most nvme ssd's if they're rated at the same speeds so my suggestion is pick a reputable brand which is the cheapest/on offer.

For reference I ended up with Seagate 530's due to getting 2TB ones at half price but I was originally looking at 1TB WD, Samsung and Seagate beforehand. Having said that, you seem to be similar to me in keeping things as long as possible so Seagate might be a better choice here due to the larger tbw.
 
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