What type of storage should i get?

[mdiiorgi]

I am planning on building a new pc for mainly school work (word, excel, powerpoint) and some light gaming like gta v, minecraft, and league of legends etc... What type of storage should i get? I am choosing between samsung evo 500gb, samsung 950 pro (M.2) 512 GB, or a combo between the two ssds (one for boot and one for storage)

Specs:

intel core: i5 6600k
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z170x UD5
CPU Cooler: Hyper 212 Evo
RAM: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8 GB (2x4)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 960 4GB SSC ACX 2.0+
Storage: Samsung 950 Pro 512 GB/Samsung Evo 500 GB
Case: NZXT S340
PS: Corsair CX 750W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

850 EVO 500GB SSD.

 

[John_234]

950 PRO would be best option for OS and certain games, otherwise the samsung evo should be fine still. For storing schoolwork a standard hard drive should be sufficient unless you have no beudget limit go ahead and get a high capacity SSD.

 

[geofelt]

My son wanted my Samsung 850 pro 500gb, so I replaced it with the Samsung 950 500gb pro m.2
It works fine, but truthfully, I can not tell the difference.

My advice...
If 500gb will be all you need, buy the 850 evo.
If you think you will need more, then buy a single 1tb ssd.

It is much easier to manage a single drive than two.
There will be no performance difference.

 

[martinch]

You likely won't notice a difference between a SATA and PCI-E/NVMe SSD in terms of actual use (yes NVMe is 4x faster, but I doubt you'll actually notice it - Visual Studio 2013 loads in < 2s off my Samsung 850 Pro - saving 1.5s is not something I care about). The most noticeable performance increase comes from getting data onto an SSD (this would be reduced load times), so go with a larger SATA drive over the M.2, so you can fit more games on it. In terms of documents, a HDD is more than fast enough, although if you want to avoid having a HDD (noise, power, etc), have a look at the large-capacity "value" SSDs.

 

[game junky]

There really isn't a bad option since they're both great hardware - it's really a matter of your budget and your expectations. The 950 will have higher IO which will improve transfer rates and boot time, but they're still not exactly cheap. The 850 Evo is one the best drives out there in terms of price vs performance, but if you can afford the 950 that's the direction I would go.

I use an 500GB 850 Evo for my OS disk and a 4TB HDD for my file storage - get all the speed you need and all the space you could want