What storage should i get?

[Alex-Appleton]

Within the next few weeks i'm going to be buying a new rig.

I was originally going to use a 250gb Samsung 960 EVO NVMe for my OS along with a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO for all my media such as games and maybe a few movies.

However, today i started looking at a few reviews for the 250gb 960 EVO and i'm being told that it's quite bad as far as NVMe's go so i was wondering what you would recommend as a good replacement?

I'm limited on what drive i can get as i'm getting the rig from scan so i can only use what they provide. Would the 256GB version of the Samsung SM961 NVMe drive be better? or should i just get a 500gb 750 EVO?

Would you recommend any other kind of storage setup? Below is a link of the system i'm having built, if you go to storage you can see what they provide, i only wana spend around £2400 total though and would like it to be mainly SSD's if possible.

https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/shared/e338ea7f-d36a-4b15-a904-508b5fc8f41d

Thanks,

Alex.

 

[Alex-Appleton]

bump?

 

[Multipack]

Who told you the 960 Pro was a bad NVME? For what reasons? It has the best memory controller on the market, although whether its worth the extra price is debatable, as you are unlikely to need an NVME that fast unles you have huge file transfer workloads, but then you could experience throttling without good cooling too.

It would be a lot cheaper to build yourself though.

 

[Alex-Appleton]

Who told you the 960 Pro was a bad NVME? For what reasons? It has the best memory controller on the market, although whether its worth the extra price is debatable, as you are unlikely to need an NVME that fast unles you have huge file transfer workloads, but then you could experience throttling without good cooling too.

It would be a lot cheaper to build yourself though.

Not the 960 Pro but the 960 EVO.

I've looked online and many people say that while the 500gb/1tb versions of the 960 EVO are quite good the 250gb version i was going to use is quite bad in comparison as it uses different components or something along those lines which gives it bad endurance among other things.

I'm not doing any significant file transfers or anything so would you recommend me just using a 500gb 750 EVO for my OS and applications and then a 1TB 850 EVO for my media?

 

[Multipack]

Sorry, my bad. And all smaller capacity drives are inferior to their bigger brothers really, have less durability and lower IOPS, it's kinda the way they work. I haven't heard of that exact drive having issues, but I am sure the 500gb models are slightly better. 256gb drives are the new 120gb in the sense that they are starting to be too small to be useful with games/software exceeding 50gb each.

The 750 evo is SATA 6gb/s interface, so quite a bit slower than a 960, but like I say, you are unlikely to need a drive faster than that for a good few years. Samsung make the best SSD's on the market, tho are a bit overpriced, but have a 3 year warranty and as long as you have a backup system in place it'll be fine.

The OEM drives are more economical (I have a SM961) as long as you dont mind the OEM style and dont want the nice black polished look.

 

[Alex-Appleton]

Sorry, my bad. And all smaller capacity drives are inferior to their bigger brothers really, have less durability and lower IOPS, it's kinda the way they work. I haven't heard of that exact drive having issues, but I am sure the 500gb models are slightly better. 256gb drives are the new 120gb in the sense that they are starting to be too small to be useful with games/software exceeding 50gb each.

The 750 evo is SATA 6gb/s interface, so quite a bit slower than a 960, but like I say, you are unlikely to need a drive faster than that for a good few years. Samsung make the best SSD's on the market, tho are a bit overpriced, but have a 3 year warranty and as long as you have a backup system in place it'll be fine.

The OEM drives are more economical (I have a SM961) as long as you dont mind the OEM style and dont want the nice black polished look.

I see thanks a lot for the information it's greatly appreciated.

I'm starting to lean to the 750/850 combo setup.

As a last question is the 750 EVO as reliable as the 850 EVO? i wanted to get a 500gb variant of the 850 for my os/application drive but scan only do the 750 evo for some reason in that size.

 

[Multipack]

Yeh the 850 evo has the new V-NAND controller, and consumes less power too, whereas the 750 has regular NAND flash, but again we are talking margins, and they are all very good SSDs.

I would imagine SCAN only make available what they have in stock, which would explain it, and I see now the choice is quite limited. An Intel 600p NVME would be a good compromise too. They arent quite as fast as Samsung NVME's but are plenty fast enough and are a good compromise between speed and cost.

It's best you understand the differences between the drives before spending that kind of cash so I wont just recommend a setup without reasons.

 

[Alex-Appleton]

Yeh the 850 evo has the new V-NAND controller, and consumes less power too, whereas the 750 has regular NAND flash, but again we are talking margins, and they are all very good SSDs.

I would imagine SCAN only make available what they have in stock, which would explain it, and I see now the choice is quite limited. An Intel 600p NVME would be a good compromise too. They arent quite as fast as Samsung NVME's but are plenty fast enough and are a good compromise between speed and cost.

It's best you understand the differences between the drives before spending that kind of cash so I wont just recommend a setup without reasons.

Thanks,

Judging that the 750/850 aren't too different i'm likely going to go with that then.

The rig is primarily going to be for gaming so i don't need the added speed from an NVME drive as comparison tests show that at present there's literally fractional differences in speeds due to bottlenecks from what i would guess is the CPU plus I'm not going to be doing any significant data transfers either.