Which 2TB drive??

StevieP

StevieP

StevieP

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I've currently got a 960GB SanDisk Ultra SSD and I'm finding myself getting towards 90% full so was wondering what the best course of action was for an upgrade?

Should I be looking to replace the existing drive with a 2TB (and if so, what sort - I've read a little about NVMe and M.2 but have no idea what the real-world speed differences are??) or whether I'd simply be better off adding a 2nd 1TB SSD and using that?

My mobo is a Gigabyte B450 Aorus Elite so I believe it supports NVMe!

Any recommendations on which drive to go for?
 
Yeah, looks like you've got two of those m.2 slots on your mobo and it'll set you back 300 - 350 quid for a 2TB drive. The real world speed advantages with m.2 compared with SATA SSD for gaming is barely noticeable, however you're getting the benefit of a much tidier case with no cables attached to the drive. As for which m.2 drive to buy, this looks promising:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14732/adata-expands-xpg-sx8200-pro-range-with-2-tb-model

However, the Adata 2TB version is brand new at the moment and may have an artificially inflated price to purchase over here. Still somewhere around 300 pounds, but you're getting "pro" features that Samsung wouldn't normally want to give away without a premium price tag, such as increased endurance, i.e. Samsung's 960 Pro 2TB is somewhere around £1,000 to buy on OCUK.

I feel pretty bad for having purchased 3x Samsung 950 Pro 512GB for 300 pounds each a year and a half ago now I've seen those Adata drives, put it that way. Could have had 6TB rather than 1.5TB for the same money.
 
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Thanks for the replies - having done some reading up and watching a couple of YouTube comparison videos it doesn't look like the M.2 drives make much of a real world difference to loading times etc (and I don't do much, if any big file copying!) so I'm thinking this will be overkill for my uses!

Due to this I'm leaning towards either getting another 1TB SSD or a 2TB!

Has anyone got any experience of the Samsung 860 QVO? The 2TB version can be had for around £200 but on paper it doesn't look to be as good as the MX500 from Crucial or the 860 EVO!
 
Undesirable said:
Yeah, looks like you've got two of those m.2 slots on your mobo and it'll set you back 300 - 350 quid for a 2TB drive. The real world speed advantages with m.2 compared with SATA SSD for gaming is barely noticeable, however you're getting the benefit of a much tidier case with no cables attached to the drive. As for which m.2 drive to buy, this looks promising:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14732/adata-expands-xpg-sx8200-pro-range-with-2-tb-model

However, the Adata 2TB version is brand new at the moment and may have an artificially inflated price to purchase over here. Still somewhere around 300 pounds, but you're getting "pro" features that Samsung wouldn't normally want to give away without a premium price tag, such as increased endurance, i.e. Samsung's 960 Pro 2TB is somewhere around £1,000 to buy on OCUK.

I feel pretty bad for having purchased 3x Samsung 950 Pro 512GB for 300 pounds each a year and a half ago now I've seen those Adata drives, put it that way. Could have had 6TB rather than 1.5TB for the same money.
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I bought some Adata sx8200 pro 2Tb NVMe for a little over 200 quid, seems like a bargain to me, I keep wondering what the issue might be with them but the better my Samsung 1Tbs which are admittedly old sm961 and pm961.
 
sandys said:
I bought some Adata sx8200 pro 2Tb NVMe for a little over 200 quid, seems like a bargain to me, I keep wondering what the issue might be with them but the better my Samsung 1Tbs which are admittedly old sm961 and pm961.
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Whats the atto benchmark with the 2tb version? as I am looking for a drive for my storage and games?
 
I could run some later when back home but should be in the same ball park as the 1Tb in this review, seems plenty quick enough to me.

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/adata-xpg-sx8200-pro-ssd,5955-2.html

I have a crystal diskmark vs the old samsung pm961.

adata.jpg
 
I ran Atto, my numbers are broadly in line with the review above, slightly slower but I think Ryzen systems don't tend to hit the same highs as an Intel ones for what ever reason, still fast.
 
Having gone back and forth on this I'm now leaning towards getting a 256GB M.2 drive (possibly a Sabrent Rocket) and then using a 2TB Crucial MX500 for my games to sit on.

That way I get the benefit of having a super fast boot drive for my OS and my Steam/uPlay installs can just sit on the SSD so I don't have to bother with re-downloading if I do a reformat!

Total cost is similar to the 2TB Sabrent with better management for my uses!
 
StevieP said:
Having gone back and forth on this I'm now leaning towards getting a 256GB M.2 drive (possibly a Sabrent Rocket) and then using a 2TB Crucial MX500 for my games to sit on.

That way I get the benefit of having a super fast boot drive for my OS and my Steam/uPlay installs can just sit on the SSD so I don't have to bother with re-downloading if I do a reformat!

Total cost is similar to the 2TB Sabrent with better management for my uses!
Click to expand...
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you have a Ryzen, utilize the Fuzedrive thing with a 2Tb SSD and 256 NVMe, it is quite impressive, I use it on my daughters 2400G machine with an old PS4 1Tb drive that is a slower than slow 2.5" laptop drive and fuzed it with a 256Gb NVMe, only on the rare occasion do you notice the slow drive which is amazing because that thing is Chronic, with a Sata SSD as your Slow tier you would never know the difference.

The fast tier (your NVMe in this case) is your priority drive and data is shifted out to slow tier if it does not get used. Machine just sees one big 2.256Tb drive if you had 2TB +256Gb and does the data management itself.

Pre Store MI


Post Store MI (It has actually got faster than this, I guess it had not transferred all data.)

 
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I'd never heard of Fuzedrive - looks quite interesting but I'm wondering how much of a performance increase I could expect over the configuration I'm considering given that most games don't seem to load much, if any, quicker on an NVMe drive compared to an SSD anyway??
 
AMD call it storeMI

IMO there is not a lot of point to a super fast boot drive, bit of a waste of a 256Gb NVMe, I struggle to understand the logic in that, once machine has booted your done with it, with this software any of your most active data with be promoted to the fast drive along with your boot stuff so you will use all your storage intelligently.

read some of the faqs on it https://www.enmotus.com/fuzedrive-faq

The docs seem to suggest you only get a 128Gb fast tier free from AMD but it is in fact 256Gb.

I installed it on my daughters as a trial run for me, ran it whilst testing cpu/gpu and memory overclocks etc on the 2400G with lots of crashing etc to see how it would cope, no issues with data loss, seems quite robust. I intend to use it with Optane and SSD. You can even add a couple of Gb of RAM as cache.

I guess the only drawback is that you don't have two seperate drives, everything just goes on C drive but thats fine to be honest.
 
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sandys said:
I guess the only drawback is that you don't have two seperate drives, everything just goes on C drive but thats fine to be honest.
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I'm not overly concerned about benchmark speeds to be honest - it's more about real world loading times for games etc - I've always just had a single SSD that I've tried to utilise for both my OS and games drive but games are just getting bigger and bigger and 1TB just isn't enough anymore!

On the one hand a 2TB NVMe drive would suffice but I'm warming to the idea of keeping my OS on a separate drive so I'm not faffing around re-downloading games on Steam etc if I do a reformat!
 
Fuzedrive will improve real world speeds.

Not sure why you would be needing a reformat, not something I have had to do for years, in the age of W10 things just work even when changing platforms but even so I have things backed up that need to be kept on my NAS and cloud.
 
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