My experience upgrading my M.2 and Windows 11

robgmun

robgmun

robgmun

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Hi Guys. I was previously rocking a WD SN750 Gen 3 2Tb drive and it was rock solid and it had a decent snappy feeling in Windows 10. Unfortunately, I had to upgrade because I needed a local 4Tb drive for video editing, etc. Now the motherboard is only Gen 3 there's not a great deal in the way of 4Tb Gen 3's

I went for a Crucial P3 Plus CT4000P3PSSD8 4TB, I actually thought it was a Gen 3 drive because it was so cheap. And as I was changing drives I decided to give Windows 11 a go. I'm only running a i7-6700 so I had to install a version that bypasses all the TPM checks etc. Now I'm not sure if it's Windows 11 or the new drive but I don't feel the snappiness that I had with Windows 10. I was wondering if a WD Black SN850X WDS400T2X0E 4TB would be a better drive and bring back the snappiness? Nothing else in the system has changed.
 
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The P3 Plus is a QLC drive with no DRAM, which can add latency in some scenarios, whereas the SN750 is TLC with DRAM. I'd be surprised if the difference was so noticeable in general usage, but I'm not a fan of QLC for a boot drive anyway.

Can you reinstall Windows 10 again?

The SN850X is a high-end drive, similar to what the 1st gen SN750 was, so you shouldn't have any problems in that respect.
 
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Tetras said:
The P3 Plus is a QLC drive with no DRAM, which can add latency in some scenarios, whereas the SN750 is TLC with DRAM. I'd be surprised if the difference was so noticeable in general usage, but I'm not a fan of QLC for a boot drive anyway.

Can you reinstall Windows 10 again?

The SN850X is a high-end drive, similar to what the 1st gen SN750 was, so you shouldn't have any problems in that respect.
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That makes perfect sense, I'll send back the Crucial and get the SN850X

I want to give W11 a proper go as W10 is coming to the end of it's life. If it feels too slow even after the SN850X then I'll drop back down to W10
 
Definitely DRAMless drives are not ideal for an OS drive in my opinion. But one of the reasons I ditched 11 for 10 on the systems I tried updating to 11 is because it was even busier in the background than my 10 installs even when fully updated and done with the initial background maintenance/"optimisation aka telemetry" tasks. I also found it changed too much around not in a good way over 10 which meant more messing about to make it useful as an OS :(
 
Rroff said:
Definitely DRAMless drives are not ideal for an OS drive in my opinion. But one of the reasons I ditched 11 for 10 on the systems I tried updating to 11 is because it was even busier in the background than my 10 installs even when fully updated and done with the initial background maintenance/"optimisation aka telemetry" tasks. I also found it changed too much around not in a good way over 10 which meant more messing about to make it useful as an OS :(
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Can you let me know what you did, sounds like something I'd be very interested in! I'm always interested in tweaking Windows to make it faster/better since my XP days!

And I'm going to use Explorer Patcher to bring back a lot of the Win10 missing features
 
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robgmun said:
Can you let me know what you did, sounds like something I'd be very interested in! I'm always interested in tweaking Windows to make it faster/better since my XP days!
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I was meaning once Windows has completed its post installation tasks - for the first ~40 minutes of uptime following first booting to desktop after an install it will be busier than normal in the background with various tasks.

I usually use a cocktail of programs like O&O Shutup 10 and Windows Update Blocker to make Windows 10/11 actually useful, but even then they are less reliable and less responsive for productivity in my usage than 7.
 
Just to update all you guys, i swapped my drive for the WD Black SN850X WDS400T2X0E 4TB, did a fresh install of W11, and yeah, I could feel the difference immediately. Maybe I'm just sensitive to latency or something. Don't get me wrong W11 is a touch slower than W10, but the drive made all the difference, most regular people probably wouldn't notice the difference some of us just do.
 
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