Over the years as I upgraded my PC’s I kept adding additional HDD’s and SSD’s. So at the moment, I have a decent amount of SSD’s and HDD’s. With the cost of SSD’s and HDD’s being so low, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to get rid of my old ones and reduce the amount I have. I just don’t like having 8 - 10 drives in my system.
I would like to fully go SSD; however, with the amount of space, I would need it would be a little spendy. At the moment I have Samsung Evo’s:
1 970 EVO plus NVMe - 1TB
1 850 EVO M.2 - 500GB
1 850 EVO - 250GB
1 OCZ Agility 3 - 120GB
1TB Seagate HDD
2TB Seagate HDD
What I plan on doing is getting a 1TB Gen4 NVMe and using that as my boot drive. Then using my 970 NVMe in my secondary M.2 slot. I don’t really use my other smaller SSD’s and I store my music and movies on my HDD’s. So Im going to get a 4TB HDD to replace all my other drives.
I’ve usually always gone with Samsung EVO’s in the past, but now there seem to be more decent options to go with. Most of the Gen4 NVMe’s seem to be pretty close in price so I’m curious which ones you guys like between the ones I’m looking at.
Here are the Gen4 ones I’m looking at:
Western Digital SN850 - 1TB
Samsung 980 PRO - 1TB
Gigabyte Aorus - 1TB
Corsair Force MP600 - 1TB
Sabrent Rocket - 1TB
I can get all of those for 169 or 179 except the SN850 and 980 Pro are 229. Do you think it’s worth spending the extra 50 bucks for SN850 or 980 Pro? The primary purpose is for gaming. I’m guessing the difference between gen4 and gen3 is fairly small and since all I’m doing is gaming I wonder which one I go with will matter much. I’ve had a great experience with my Samsung’s and that SN850 does look tempting.
I would like to hear some thoughts any of you might have.
To be honest, I wouldn’t go with a PCIe 4 drive “just” for gaming because you almost certainly will not notice a difference. If I had to oick one of those drives, I would pick the 980 Pro, simply because it is the single fastest device and if I were to pick one, it would be the fastest.
For gaming all you need is ANY SSD. The difference in performance between SATA SSD and PCIe Gen4 is so small it’s not worth it.
Here’s how I would do in your situation…
I wouldn’t get a PCIe Gen4 SSD for boot and software drive. You said you want to keep your 970 Evo, so you can use that as a boot drive. And then your HDD for pure storage. I would just say get a SATA SSD for gaming. It really doesn’t matter, compared to the PCIe gen4 SSDs… And the SATA drives are so cheap it’s not even funny.
You really wouldn’t see any meaningful difference between the 970 Evo and any of the Gen4 drives. Unless you have some workload in mind that would take advantage of the massive speed - it really isn’t worth it spending 200 bucks for pretty much no noticeable performance.
I was aware like I mentioned that the performance difference was minute. So your probably right I probably should just get a SATA SSD. Looks like 2TB Sata runs about 200USD these days. Only reason why I considered the Gen4 drives was to me an extra 1TB isn’t all that much and thought maybe a faster drive would be worth more than the space.
Although your solution might better solve my probelm of getting rid of my tiny SSD’s and all of my HDD’s. Going this router would leave with my existing m.2’s, reduce all of my sata ssd’s to 1 drive, and all of my HDD’s to 1 drive.
The other thought I had was with the advent of PS5 and Xbox Series X; developers will be optimizing for PCI drives so games might benefit from them in the future. Decisions, Decisions lol.
Well, I was honestly thinking the same thing… But my guess is more on the side of “slow HDDs will be left behind” more than “NVMe will become requirement”… But to be fair I don’t see that happening in the next at least couple years.
IMO just get like intel 665 or Crucial P1 / ADATA Swordfish etc, 2tb for like $180-$200 for a games drive, you dont need higher perf that that imo. Could stay sata if you wanted for a bit cheaper too, I just like less cables
Yeah thats kind of why I’ve started this little project because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have so many drives that I can replace with 1 or 2 lol
Future proofing only makes sense when you plan on using those features. IE no need to get an PCIe Gen 4 M.2 if you don’t need it now. By the time you need it, new tech will be out and if you don’t need those new tech features, the older tech will be cheaper.
My recommendation would be go all SSD and start retiring spinning rust. I run an all SATA SSD shop. I have not need for NVMe yet (Poor Dozer). When I build my next system (Ryzen 3 or 3.5) then I will look at PCie Gen 4 M.2and see if I need it then. If not I will go PCIe Gen 3 M.2 because, it is cheaper and still faster than my SATA SSDs.
As mentioned FIFO is a good process to follow unless there is some bad tech in between.
I would like to go all ssd; however, I didn’t want to spend too much money. But literally, as I’m writing this I realize that 199 for 2tb sata ssd and 139 for hdd; I would probably be better off getting two 2tb sata ssd’s for 400 since it’s only a 60buck difference.
The only issue with this route is I’m getting 4tb versus 6tb. I’m currently using 2.7tb out of the 3tb of spinning rust.
I have 2 Sabrent Rocket M.2 drives. One of the stupid fast copper coloured ones and one of the white Rocket Qs. The fast one is 500GB and my boot drive and the white one is a little slower 2TB and is for fast storage, I absolutely do not utilise their speed and could have gone with slower drives.
I also have a Crucial BX 2TB Sata drive that is for safer fast storage of stuff I don’t want to lose to imploding rust, like my music and pictures and so on.
I am also slowly moving away from HDDs, at this stage they only hold games and anything I am okay with losing.
I also have a 970 EVO 500GB in my NUC.
Purely for boot speed it depends on the system. The Sabrent is faster but on the 3700X system it still boots slower than the 970 EVO on the NUC. We are talking a few seconds, nothing world changing.
Before this I booted off a 850 PRO Sata and I don’t notice any change in system responsiveness or boot times, they are all faster than I have any need for.
I still run all sata SSDs in my personal rig because nvmes don’t really do much for gaming. With that in mind i’d go for a Sabrent RocketQ it’s about the same price as sata SSDs but much faster.
Maybe it’s time to do some housekeeping in your files LOL says the man with gazillion terabytes most likely with triple duplicates, not touched for over a decade…
The point is do what I say, not what I do
Take the 2x 2tb of fast storage, clean up no be happy
Yeah, I decided I am going with all SSD’s now. I will have to do some cleanup, but it will be tough. My movies and music is 3TB; while the music is pretty much what it is, the movies I probably can trim down a bit.
so you at least do not have less space
says the man with gazillion terabytes most likely with triple duplicates, not touched for over a decade…
