Which 2TB drive??

StevieP · 27 Oct 2019 at 10:31

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?

StevieP · 29 Oct 2019 at 10:45

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!

StevieP · 29 Oct 2019 at 10:57

Haze said:
I was after a cheaper 2nd drive and went with a Patriot p200

Hmmmm, looks interesting and while not as quick, it's about £50 cheaper than the same capacity MX500!

StevieP · 16 Nov 2019 at 00:10

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 · 16 Nov 2019 at 09:15

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??

StevieP · 16 Nov 2019 at 12:25

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.

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!

StevieP · 16 Nov 2019 at 18:42

It's not something I particularly need to do very often but every now and again I like the idea of a clean slate!