Hi, I'm looking to upgrade to an SSD for Windows OS and I need advice

Hi, I’m looking to upgrade to an SSD for Windows OS and I need advice on what I should be looking out for when buying one. My system is a Ryzen 5 1600X Asus Strix B-350(so it can be an M.2) Corsair LPX 3200oc.

Thanks for any help you can lend.

What’s your budget and what country do you live in?

Generally when looking at SSDs I just make sure it’s from a reputable brand and it has the speed I want. Perhaps one of the largest misconceptions about SSDs is that M.2 means that the SSD is NVMe, it does not. M.2 is just a form factor, so one M.2 SSD may use the SATA bus (limited to SATA speeds), while another may use the PCIe bus and be much faster.


My general recommendations:

I personally like the Western Digital Black SSDs. In my opinion they are a good combination of price and performance. It’s NVMe too.

The Samsung 960 Evo would have a little better performance, but would also cost more. Also NVMe.

If you don’t care for NVMe, then the Crucial MX300 is very cheap for the capacity. No NVMe here, so it’s the same speed as a 2.5" SSD.

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This is how I would structure your storage if it was me…

120 gig nvme

250 500 secondary nvme slower maybe ssd speeds or even ssd 500 1 terabyte

tertiary hdd large volume 1 t or greater.

OS drive doesn’t need a lot of space unless it is the only drive space available. Caveat being the usually the larger drives often have greater speeds than the smaller ones.

Secondary can be structure for apps and games

Hdd bulk storage

I can not stress hard enough about keeping your data separate from your os.

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Boot drive, OS, drivers, etc. Only the most basic software.

I wouldn’t say NVMe… I would say any kind of ssd. NVMe are still kinda expensive. Even a 2,5" SATA SSD is fast enough for most software and games and stuff…

Oh yes. Some elitists may say “spinning rust is dead”. You can still have 4TB hard drives cheaper than 500GB SSD. . And for media and just storage for files, size really does matter…

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It depends of the mb… My Taichi does support that secondary nvme but at under 2000 speeds. A larger sdd would be cheaper.

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NVME are still expensive, dude… And I think the OP said X370 prime or something. X370 have a single NVME and single SATA M.2… Don’t think it have dual NVME…
PS: it’s B350… It’s definitely one NVME and one SATA…

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Might be the reason why I listed both options ?

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Thanks for all the replays it’s been very helpful, I’m good on HDD for bulk storage now I need a cheap but good M.2 nvme 128GB for the OS and I’m going to pick up 2 SSDs later on. Got any tips for the M.2 nvme, I don’t really want to break the bank on this I just want something that’s reliable. I’m in the UK by the way if anybody knows a good deal.

About the fastest for the money atm…

The next bracket up 240

If you want sub 200 GB then I’d go Corsair MP500. The marketed read/write numbers aren’t accurate, but they’re close enough.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/120gb-corsair-force-mp500-m2-(22x80)-pcie-30-(x4)-nvme-ssd-mlc-nand-read-3000mb-s-write-2400mb-s-150

Although if you don’t mind going a little larger then the Samsung SM961 is only a little more expensive for twice the capacity.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-samsung-pm961-polaris-m2-nvme-(22x80)-pcie-30-(x4)-ssd-polaris-read-2800mb-s-write-1100mb-s-25

Nvme drives are probably really nice, but I’m still running two sata ssds for my two operating systems and I don’t mind them at all. One was considered fast 3-4 years ago when I bought it, the other is newer but was the absolute cheapest option. I’m sure my system could be faster—to be honest, I don’t know how much faster it could go—but I’m satisfied as is. No fancy ssd can replicate the performance jump from spinning rust.

So if budget is a concern, I’d suggest my loadout—256 gb cheap ssd for OS and programs + however many HDDs are necessary for games, media, etc.

One caveat is that, since I’ve never owned an nvme drive, I don’t know what I’m missing. But if you’ve never owned one either…just my 2 cents.

Quick edit: I’ve found that 128 gb is not enough for OS + programs to fit comfortably—I sometimes need to cull my Windows drive. CAD programs especially take up waay too much space. My linux drive has never had this problem with 256. So either get 2 drives, one 256, or embrace the spartan lifestyle.

My 2 cents, don’t bother with nVme, not worth the price premium. Go with the best $/GB in a 2.5" sata ssd. Ignore anything below 240GB. You’re still under 100 lbs. If you afford more get more. You never have enough space. As for the 128 GB drives, they’re too small. Yeah windows will fit. So what? What about all the other crap that just has to go on C:? It’s a serious aggro and you’ll find a bog standard install balloons to 170GB after a while.

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Forget about 128GB drives, that’s just a waste of money. I have 3 AAA games on my 256GB C:\ drive and have 80GB left. 128GB will be full in no time.

Get the biggest reputable 2.5" SSD you can get with your budget. I can only recommend the Crucial MX200 and the Samsung 850EVO and 850PRO drives. I’ve installed the Samsungs in plenty of builds and am using 8 or 9 of them myself. Never seen a single one go bad.

As for NVMe, as an NVMe user I can only say that the extra speed is nice on paper but in real life it just isn’t anywhere near as big a step up from SATA as SATA is from spinning rust.
If you’re working with a budget, you can always save up for an NVMe drive later and turn the 2.5" into extra storage at that point.

The only benefit I can feel with NVMe is I have a C:\Temp working directory where I put big video editing files and 3D renderings. My Intel 750 PCIe SSD tests 4x faster than SATA, but I can’t notice the difference IRL.

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Same here, my 950PRO is 4x faster than a SATA SSD but you only really notice that when copying large files to itself or to another drive which is equally fast. In everyday usage it’s hard to tell the difference.
If your OS or a program needs to load a 1MB file, you’re really not going to notice the difference between the 0.002 secs and 0.0005 secs that takes.

I notice the NVMe speeds in games (esp. ones like FO4) and when I’m working with decent sized datasets.

Certainly not going to notice it browsing YouTube or something.

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And here I am, running Windows 7 for 4 years with 64GB SSD… I just jumped to W10 with the same 64GB SSD. It’s fine. This is why it’s an OS drive. For the OS… Not AAA games. There is another drive for that.

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Shugs… I am of the opinion that you should avail yourself of the technology you are paying for and that even includes an usb 3.1 type c usb drive. My 120gig nvme os drive is more than enough for just windows.

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Now I narrowed it down to the Corsair - Force MP500 vs the Samsung - 960 EVO and as I was comparing the two I noticed that the 960 EVO has a 512MB CACHE and the MP500 has none does that matter to me if I’m only going to use it for the OS?

Two different techs there. The Corsair is MLC and the Samsung is TLC. Samsung uses a cache of SLC to keep the performance reasonable. It works. If you write data larger than the cache size you’ll see a performance hit. BTW, it’s the big difference between the EVO and the Pro. Pro is MLC and has no cache.

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