M.2 SSD’s vs Mechanical Hard drives

Soldato
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Ok guys it’s been about 10 years since I built my own rig and it seems M.2 drives have come a long way and are at a great price point .

Im in the throws of building a new rig and need to know are we at the stage of now being able totally replace Mechanical hard drives with these M.2 drives . The motherboards I’m looking at have upto 4 M.2 Gen 4 slots .

thx
 
1tb especially in m2 are at a great price point
2tb a little expensive
Anything over that I would prefer a 2.5 sata ssd
Mechanical drives unless you have an awful lot
Of data to store
Totally wouldn't recommend one
Even a 2.5 Sata ssd is sooooooo much faster
Than a mechanical drive
You'll never want to use mechanical again
I have 5 x m2
And 5 x 2.5 Sata ssds
So yes for some people we are at the stage
Of Totally replacing mechanical drives
 
I've been using Samsung SSD drives as my OS and programs drive for some time now. Even second hand ones have yet to fail on me. The only time I was caught out was due to a firmware bug on a Samsung 840 Evo.

Storage of documents, pictures, etc, I still keep on a hard drive. To me there's no point in wasting fast storage space on your OS drive, when a hard drive is perfectly adequate. That said, I am looking to replace my storage hard drive with an SSD purely to get rid of the humming from spinning rust. But my OS and programs will still remain on separate SSD drive.
 
need to know are we at the stage of now being able totally replace Mechanical hard drives with these M.2 drives

SSDs are ideal when you need to read a lot of stuff, very quickly, so they're good for games (loading times) and Windows.

For infrequently accessed files, there's not much benefit to SSDs, except when you need to make large backups.

SATA SSDs are annoying (cable clutter) and no longer cheaper than M.2/NVME.

For a boot / OS drive, I'd still buy a drive with DRAM and TLC, but for games you can buy QLC if it is a decent discount (and one of the better drives). I wouldn't recommend QLC for cold storage.

Storage I'd pick for a high-end/midrange PC:

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £314.92 (includes delivery: £7.99)​

Lower-end:

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £91.93 (includes delivery: £7.99)​
 
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Yes true there are some cheap 2tb m2
Then you get into the tlc and qlc thing

One big advantage of 2.5 sata ssds
For me anyway
Is they're hot swappable
M2 drives are a PITA to install/remove
Especially if you have a full custom loop in the way
Roll on the first manufacturers with
Hot swap m2 bays is all I can say lol
 
Nas is the only place I use HDDs now, 2x 8Tb at the minute.
Even in my NAS I have a 500gb SSD though for Volume 1. So slowly changing everything over to solid state.
 
Aside from speed, I don't like the noise & reverbaration from spin drives.

I wouldn't use spin drives outside of a NAS or backup box of some description, personally.
 
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The only time you should use HDD is if you need more storage than 8Tb. I'm surprised 16Tb SSD's haven't come out yet, I'm practically waiting for them to come out so I can replace my two 12Tb HDD's for faster and quite operation
 
The only time you should use HDD is if you need more storage than 8Tb. I'm surprised 16Tb SSD's haven't come out yet, I'm practically waiting for them to come out so I can replace my two 12Tb HDD's for faster and quite operation
i was looking into one of these for storage needs https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=80 for replacing my old hp microserver, still just a bit too expensive still
 
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