Question OS drive: Intel 660p vs. WD Black SN750 NVMe?

[Spooneyes]

I currently have an Intel 500gb 660p drive which I was planning on installing Win10 on, but WD is running an enticing promotion for there WD Black NVMe drive.

If I were to have both, which would be a better choice to install windows on?

 

[rgd1101]

just for windows?
what the other one use for?

 

[Spooneyes]

just for windows?
what the other one use for?

My original thinking was my 660p would be the os drive and Adobe programs, and the WD Black would be my gaming drive.

I'm just not sure if I'm gimping myself by using the technically superior drive as just a gaming drive.

 

[popatim]

From a user standpoint, you are best severed by having the faster drive be the gaming drive. There would barely be a difference with the OS esp when you add fastboot to the mix.

 

[ElectrO_90]

From a user standpoint, you are best severed by having the faster drive be the gaming drive. There would barely be a difference with the OS esp when you add fastboot to the mix.

Severed? that's harsh, I am sure you mean served

There is almost no difference between SSD and Nvme when booting into windows. It's your choice, but I would have the bigger drive as D drive.

 

[mdd1963]

The WD Black SN750 is quite impressive in the comparisons...; it would be my choice if priced competitively..

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13759/comparing-adata-sx8200-pro-vs-hp-ex950/7

 

[popatim]

There is almost no difference between SSD and Nvme when booting into windows. It's your choice, but I would have the bigger drive as D drive.

Exactly why I said have it as the game drive. Windows thousands of little files won't see a huge improvement but games with larger texture packs to load will.

 

[cryoburner]

From all the benchmarks I've seen, fast SSDs make very little difference for game load times compared to SSDs with more moderate performance. We're talking about maybe shaving a second or two off of load times, which will be mostly unnoticeable in practice. Games are not just loading the files, but processing their contents, so you typically don't gain much by going with a significantly more expensive drive. I would go for whatever SSD gets you the most storage for your money if you intend to install a large collection of games on there without regularly having to uninstall things to reclaim space. Given the choice between a 500GB WD Black SSD, or a 1TB Intel 660p for about the same price, I would want the drive that offers double the capacity with a minimal difference in performance for most real-world tasks. I suppose if one only had a small number of games that they wanted installed, some argument could be made for the smaller, faster drive, but I find it a little hard to justify a doubling in price for maybe a 10% reduction in load times.

 

[cryoburner]

To expand on that a bit, note the differences in load times in this video comparing a fast NVME SSD, a SATA SSD, an Optane cache, and a 7200 RPM HDD. As far as game load times are concerned, there's very little difference between Samsung's 970 Evo, and their 860 Evo, which offers double the capacity at a similar price...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BS_6xOf0mw



Or in Tom's Hardware's review of the 1TB Intel 660p ($110), compared to the 1TB 970 Pro ($350), the drive costing more than three times as much doesn't even shave 1 second off a 21 second load time in Final Fantasy XIV, and the 1TB WD Black ($220) performed almost identical to the 660p. In fact, with the exception of the Optane SSD (which costs $1200 for just under 1TB), all the SSDs tested, including the SATA models, performed within about 10% of one another in that test...

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-ssd-660p-qlc-nvme,5719-2.html


And this carries over to most application tests as well. While a high-performance SSD can potentially be faster at some things, like copying files, for the most part a regular user isn't going to notice much difference between them and a drive that will get them a lot more capacity for the money.