What would be the best replacement for WD SN730 NVME Gen3 drive be?

JamesUK

JamesUK

JamesUK

Associate
Joined
22 Nov 2002
Posts
465
Location
Liverpool
Hi, I have a Dell G5 15 5500 Laptop that has a 1TB WD SN730 NVME Gen3 drive.
The life has start going below 40%, and I am thinking I should consider its replacement and clone my drive sooner rather than later.
When I look around on searches, I must admit, the Samsung 970 Evo keeps coming up as being a good drive? There is a plus version that says it's faster, I assume that would also work in my laptop?
Would that probably be the recommended drive?
Does that drive have a better life compared to my WD? It's hard to tell, my WD on Amazon shows as 1.75 million hours life, but the Samsung shows as 1.200TBW, so it's kinda hard to interpret them both?

The other thing I'm not too sure on is why the big difference in price between my WD and the Samsung, my WD is currently around £125 for the 1TB and the Samsung is £56 is the WD actually a better drive?

Or is there another drive that I would be better considering?

There is then having to clone the drive, do i literally just need to buy an M.2 Enclosure and pop the new drive in and run which ever software I use within Windows11? Then swap the drives after?

Thanks for any help.

James
 
From what can I gather the SN730 is an OEM drive. I can find a datasheet @ WD and a technical spec @ Sandisk. They both list the endurance for a 1TB drive as 400 TB written and the MTBF is (as you stated) "up to" 1.75 million hours. That (the latter) seems fairly high for a consumer drive, but maybe OEMs expect them to last, so it could be a combination of marketing and component choice, since the endurance is not very high by modern standards.

Kingston's NV2 is one of the cheapest drives and that has endurance of 320 TB (1TB capacity) and may use QLC memory, so I'd argue this drive is probably worse than yours.

The Samsung 970 Evo Plus has endurance of 600 TBW (in 1TB capacity) and is guaranteed to use TLC, but I'm not sure if I'd trust one, given Samsung's recent problems. They also have a different controller and NAND to the drive when it was reviewed and originally built a reputation as a solid drive.

Since you're putting the drive in a laptop, I'd want it to be efficient and not too hot, but what worries me most is that your current drive's health is so low. How much have you written to the drive? What is your typical usage?

If you're a heavy user, it might be worth either changing your habits in some way (like getting a cache or RAM drive), or buying a drive intended for heavy-duty use, with DRAM, a decent TBW and an optimised controller/firmware.

From what I can gather, your laptop is only a few years old and potentially (unless your write amplification is very high, or the drive has bad blocks), you've written over 120 TB per year.
 
Last edited:
Not sure why sn730 is that price
But currently drives are seeing big price drops
You could get a 2tb for less than that
Even a gen4 wd sn850x is about 80 for 1tb
And 150 for 2tb

Your laptop may be able to take more than 1 drive
Though might be 1 x 2.5ssd and 1 x m2
Maybe even 2 x m2 not familiar with that model

For cloning
Yes you could do it that way
Or if you have an external drive
You could make an image then restore the image
To the new drive
Rather than cloning
Having a backup image would be my preference
using macrium or similar software
I hope you have nothing important on there
Given the health of that drive
Or you at least have some sort of backup
 
I've been using various Samsung NVMEs including the 970 Evo Plus (not Pro) without any issues so far. Aside from some earlier batches of 870 Evo SSDs and some 990 models the issues IMO are overblown for the rest of Samsung's line up.

The only negative I'd say with the 970 is they seem to run a touch warmer than many of the competing products which is a slight downside in a laptop.
 
Last edited:
JamesUK said:
How come fredflint? I was reading with the Samsung anyway, the 2TB version had better life span and it's also a little faster.
Click to expand...
Larger drives have longer lifespan because there more space for data to be written and the speed of the drive is less likely to be affected as it fills up.
 
Last edited:
JamesUK said:
How come fredflint? I was reading with the Samsung anyway, the 2TB version had better life span and it's also a little faster.
Click to expand...

The SN770 has the same 1200 TBW endurance as Samsung's 970 Evo Plus, but the 970 is theoretically a higher-end drive (even though it is PCI-E 3.0) and has DRAM, which the SN770 doesn't.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom