Best SSD for system drive

[P4-630]

My best drive should be my 2.5" 512GB 850Pro but since my 980Pro is much faster I chose to use that as boot drive.

Using the 850 Pro since 2016, few years as boot drive, now for games, still 99% health.

 

[SPDIF]

They are still superior drives the 970PRO, they use better NAND then the 980 and 990PRO versions.
Even they are oldies, still fast enough, you don't see the difference in real time at boot with faster SSD.s.

They don't make SSD anymore with this type of NAND with has a bigger TBW.

So don't throw that SSD away, it's very good to use as boot drive, for years to come!
Came out in the year 2017 if i am not mistaken. So almost 7 years old.

Write-intensive workloads drive most TLC drives into a steady state condition much faster than MLC drives.

 

[Calenhad]

Hello Forum,
It planning to buy a new system SSD for some time, but now it's fells like time to get it.
I have a Samsung 970 PRO 512GB, which is amazing. Sadly I did not have the buck for the 1TB version back then
The most important thing is that how reliable the drive is and generally big TBW.
I had to return a Samsung 980 PRO this year, and it felt really bad, luckily it was only a temp storage drive.
Secondly I would like to have a fair chunk of SLC cache, if I can't have the luxury of the full pseudo-SLC of the awesome 970 PRO
I seen the new Samsung 990 PRO 1TB only has 114GB of SLC
And costs about the same as the Kingston Fury Renegade 2 TB which has a relative big ~679GB SLC cache
For a long time my best candidate was the Seagate FireCuda 530 1TB but according to TPU's SSD DB it only has 55GB dynamic cache. (Mostly this is the reason why I opening this thread.)

As long as you have room for more drives I would keep the 970 Pro as the system drive. And install another, larger SSD. Also, SLC cache is a marketing gimmick. The larger caches requires that the drive is basically empty for that number to be correct. To use NAND TLC as SLC you store one bit instead of three per cell. Take the Fury Renegade as an example 2048/3 = 682.7 or basically the ~679 figure from the marketing bs. (GB vs GIB again)

Generally speaking any TLC drive need 3x the SLC cache size available as empty space. Luckily this cache is dynamic in size for all these drives. Meaning the drive can use one third of the available space, up to whatever limit set in the firmware. But the bottom line is, screw the SLC cache numbers. They are 99.5% hypothetical. Marketing wanted bigger numbers, so they got bigger numbers.

You used expensive drives and they are not as inexpensive as they were due to popularity but the Kingston NV2 punches above it's weight even on TPU.


Those adapter cards are click bait in modern Main stream systems. Unfortunately those adapter cards were born in the Consumer space during X99 and X399. Asus was the first to give us one on the consumer space and they were inexpensive ($60 CAD) on Amazon. Where it does not make sense is how AMD cuts lanes on the APUs so you can't even use that to get mass storage at 4x4x4x4.

The other board that has these are believe it or not B550.. Yep Asus gave us a B550 XE board that is better than 90% of X570 boards in terms of flexibility. It really shows the potential of when they actually try.

I want TR to be successful enough that AMD gifts us plebs with a 12 core chip with VCache. I don't even need all 128 lanes but I want to see what 5.0 is in RAID 0 across 4 drives.

The adapters assume that you do not have a GPU in the primary x16 slot. You either have to use a x1 (or x4 where available) for display and x16 for storage. Do not look like OP have an APU, from the system specs, so it is possible to use 4 SSDs with an adapter. At the sacrifice of GPU performance, partly due to being connected to the chipset instead of directly to the CPU but also from lack of pcie lanes.

 

[csendesmark]

The adapters assume that you do not have a GPU in the primary x16 slot. You either have to use a x1 (or x4 where available) for display and x16 for storage. Do not look like OP have an APU, from the system specs, so it is possible to use 4 SSDs with an adapter. At the sacrifice of GPU performance, partly due to being connected to the chipset instead of directly to the CPU but also from lack of pcie lanes.

I use my videocard in PCIe 8× and the AIC Adaptor also in 8× mode, so I can only use the first two m.2 slot.
Wish I could afford the new Threadripper with it's really great connectivity

 

[kapone32]

As long as you have room for more drives I would keep the 970 Pro as the system drive. And install another, larger SSD. Also, SLC cache is a marketing gimmick. The larger caches requires that the drive is basically empty for that number to be correct. To use NAND TLC as SLC you store one bit instead of three per cell. Take the Fury Renegade as an example 2048/3 = 682.7 or basically the ~679 figure from the marketing bs. (GB vs GIB again)

Generally speaking any TLC drive need 3x the SLC cache size available as empty space. Luckily this cache is dynamic in size for all these drives. Meaning the drive can use one third of the available space, up to whatever limit set in the firmware. But the bottom line is, screw the SLC cache numbers. They are 99.5% hypothetical. Marketing wanted bigger numbers, so they got bigger numbers.


The adapters assume that you do not have a GPU in the primary x16 slot. You either have to use a x1 (or x4 where available) for display and x16 for storage. Do not look like OP have an APU, from the system specs, so it is possible to use 4 SSDs with an adapter. At the sacrifice of GPU performance, partly due to being connected to the chipset instead of directly to the CPU but also from lack of pcie lanes.

With AMD APUs you are actually restricted to 8 lanes on the first slot even if it is wired as x16.

 

[Shrek]

For boot I would tend to get a largish reputable SSD and run it near empty, to extend the life (by having it run in SLC mode), and so alleviate concerns about paging.

You could run one of the drives you already have in this manner.

 

[SchumannFrequency]

TBW Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 2TB = 1,2PB
GB per day = 657,5GB

TBW Kioxia Exceria Pro SSD 2TB = 800TB
GB per day = 438,4GB

TBW Samsung 990 Pro = 1,2PB
GB per day = 657,5GB

 

[Bagerklestyne]

I'm running a Crucial P5 Plus. Not the highest end of drives by any means but a pretty solid performer with decent TBW warranty.

What I did decide to do in my build phase was up the ram installed to reduce (and in turn, remove) my paging file.

 

[Shou Miko]

I am running 3xGigabyte M30 1TB NVME Gen3 with 2GB DDR3L Cache as system drives with Windows 11 Pro and they do a really good job plus the extra cache really do help under longer transfer, download and such tasks I have tested compared to 1GB of cache.

Link: https://www.gigabyte.com/SSD/GIGABYTE-M30-SSD-1TB#kf

TBW = 650TBW with 5 years warranty

This SSD will be fine for most people and I only paid like £51.59 / 64.78USD / €60,19 through work with one of the distributors which have 20+ in stock everywhere else it's like 3-5 up to 15 workdays for delivery with the prices listed for £53.11 / 66.70USD / €61.96.

The drives that @SchumannFrequency lists are I have problems finding here and with the stock prices being at least 1/4 of the price of the Gigabyte I won't complain.

I'm running a Crucial P5 Plus. Not the highest end of drives by any means but a pretty solid performer with decent TBW warranty.

What I did decide to do in my build phase was up the ram installed to reduce (and in turn, remove) my paging file.

Just be careful setting the paging file to 0 because some applications and games do need it.

 

[dgianstefani]

Nothing beats optane. If you can't afford the 5800 series the P1600X and 905p are pretty cheap.

Every other NAND SSD is just some variant of 100MB/s rnd.

 

[R0H1T]

Cheap & Optane, you sure about that unless we're talking used or refurb/open box drives? The comparison obviously being with SSD.

 

[dgianstefani]

You can get a brand new 905p 1 TB for less than £280, considering it has two orders of magnitude better endurance and better latency too, and 3-5x better real world performance than NAND flash (rnd), yes, that's cheap.

A 118 GB P1600X has the same benefits for less than £65 and is enough for boot drive. Consumer ignorance and marketing bs around sequential perf which is irrelevant are what caused optane to die, which is the biggest loss for storage technology to ever happen.

 

[R0H1T]

It's not really comparable to the top end SSD's these days, despite the stellar QD1 numbers, also it's mostly inefficient with that kind of power draw. And before you say it's all that really matters ~ you can get similar or better performance with software solutions(Primocache) & probably similar endurance as well with deferred write enabled.

 

[dgianstefani]

It's not really comparable to the top end SSD's these days, despite the stellar QD1 numbers, also it's mostly inefficient with that kind of power draw. And before you say it's all that really matters ~ you can get similar or better performance with software solutions(Primocache) & probably similar endurance as well with deferred write enabled.

No, you can't.

 

[kapone32]

No, you can't.

I seriously want to know where I can get Optane for decent prices. I have looked in Canada and they are super expensive vs NVME drives. I would like to see how this compares to my MP700 in my system.

 

[unwind-protect]

I seriously want to know where I can get Optane for decent prices. I have looked in Canada and they are super expensive vs NVME drives. I would like to see how this compares to my MP700 in my system.

Amazon.com

 

[Selaya]

[ ... ] Consumer ignorance and marketing bs around sequential perf which is irrelevant are what caused optane to die, which is the biggest loss for storage technology to ever happen.

NJET

There Is Nothing Wrong With Optane And 3D Xpoint (NASDAQ:INTC)

Both Intel and Micron have dropped their pursuit of 3D XPoint / Optane. There is nothing wrong with the well-received technology itself. Read more here.

seekingalpha.com

 

[dgianstefani]

NJET

There Is Nothing Wrong With Optane And 3D Xpoint (NASDAQ:INTC)

Both Intel and Micron have dropped their pursuit of 3D XPoint / Optane. There is nothing wrong with the well-received technology itself. Read more here.

seekingalpha.com

Hopefully it's revived at some point.
2018 drives being five times faster with a few thousand times more endurance than two generation newer 2023 pcie flash is just embarrassing.

 

[R0H1T]

No, you can't.

You can’t what? Endurance is probably not going to get there outside of SLC based SSD's, performance is already way ahead of Optane with such software(Primocache) & efficiency is also better!

From #564

 

[csendesmark]

Nothing beats optane. If you can't afford the 5800 series the P1600X and 905p are pretty cheap.

Every other NAND SSD is just some variant of 100MB/s rnd.

Sadly I do not have u.2, but it would be appreciated!
Checked it out, and would be nice to have this for main drive.

 

[dgianstefani]

Sadly I do not have u.2, but it would be appreciated!
Checked it out, and would be nice to have this for main drive.

Doesn't matter, you just use u.2 to m.2 adapter which is often included in box.

Or just buy a P1600X.

 

[Bagerklestyne]

Just be careful setting the paging file to 0 because some applications and games do need it.

I'm keeping it at 4 gig for now, I might limit it, but we'll see. Any idea if there's a tool to track it's size over time at all ?

 

[mechtech]

Nothing beats optane. If you can't afford the 5800 series the P1600X and 905p are pretty cheap.

Every other NAND SSD is just some variant of 100MB/s rnd.

Nothing beats it for (serious question)? Every application or specifically as a boot drive? Can get a 1TB Kingston KC3000 for that price.

Amazon.ca

 

[LabRat 891]

They go on sale for as low as $45, $55-60 is 'reasonable':

Intel Optane SSD P1600X SSDPEK1A118GA01 M.2 2280 118GB PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe 3D XPoint Enterprise Solid State Disk - Newegg.com

Buy Intel Optane SSD P1600X SSDPEK1A118GA01 M.2 2280 118GB PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe 3D XPoint Enterprise Solid State Disk with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

If one cares to read Intel's literature, OP's use is amongst its advertised use cases.

 

[Shou Miko]

I'm keeping it at 4 gig for now, I might limit it, but we'll see. Any idea if there's a tool to track it's size over time at all ?

2 or 4GB as from my experience is fine, there are several threads even on Microsoft's community about the pagefile but there it's like you will run into issues with the Office pack, and the hibernation was a part of the pagefile now Microsoft has split it in Windows 11 into Hibernation.sys, pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys.

Mine is set to default and in general I do not have any issues.

They go on sale for as low as $45, $55-60 is 'reasonable':

Intel Optane SSD P1600X SSDPEK1A118GA01 M.2 2280 118GB PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe 3D XPoint Enterprise Solid State Disk - Newegg.com

Buy Intel Optane SSD P1600X SSDPEK1A118GA01 M.2 2280 118GB PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe 3D XPoint Enterprise Solid State Disk with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

If one cares to read Intel's literature, OP's use is amongst its advertised use cases.

Sadly Optain here is like either about £4.6 / 5.8k USD here because they are only enterprise the only none enterprice is the 16GB Optane boost drive for like £30 / 38USD.