Best SSD for system drive

[Bagerklestyne]

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.

Fair enough. I don't hibernate at all and don't use office (does notepad/wordpad count)

 

[Shou Miko]

Fair enough. I don't hibernate at all and don't use office (does notepad/wordpad count)

The hibernation I been turning off on desktops but not laptops because I tent to use hibernation sometimes on laptops and disable this for customers ain't good when they run a laptop so just leaving it on.

 

[CheapMeat]

Optane 100%. I'm so glad I didn't give a damn about what the naysayers were saying about it for years now and I didn't spend a fortune on it either like how people imply. I even started off with the 16GB one as cache for my video editing even on an X79 system (when people were convinced it wasn't possible to use when it launched). Plus, Optane has built in PLP & doesn't practically slow down the fuller it gets in comparison to NAND drives. I'm also a big fan of PrimoCache but I doesn't take away from my Optane experience. I'm still going to use Optane as my OS & pagefile on all my systems until something else comes close to it or production starts again.

 

[iameatingjam]

Can only recommend the drives I have personally had a good experience with. That being the Netac nv7000, the P5 plus, and the sn850x. Though I don't think any of those have especially high tbw. I was mostly going for lowest price with dram. Never even tried a Samsung drive personally, the price never seems to be competitive, at least in my area. All the failure reports didn't help either.

 

[P4-630]

I use a 980 Pro 1TB since May 2022 as C drive, also the page file on it, it has been working great sofar.

 

[jarablue]

4 TB 990 Pro. I get over 1,600,000 read IOPS. Makes Win11 zippy.

 

[ThrashZone]

I can add 3 more m.2 SSD-s if I wanted.
The main reason is to just have a bigger space for the Windows and non-game programs.
The 970 PRO would stay with me as a scratch drive, since it still quite fast, and actually beats the 980 and 990 PRO SSD-s in average speed

As I mentioned, the 2TB Kingston Fury gives almost 700GB of SLC, and currently my system could live only in that, and costs about the same as the 990 PRO
Wish TPU had tested SN850X, but the specs and price looks right.

Sometimes when I have many many layers in PS.

If WD, then I would choose the SN850X, also nice SLC buffer

Good point, and I am still thinking heavily how could I manage my things, the drive is on 95% TBW, so still have years in it.

@FreedomEclipse
I noticed how good the Lexar SSDs are
Would buy a 4TB KC3000 or one of these Lexar drives for fast media storage 4K60 or 8K-RAW footages.
But that is for next year.

Hi,
Here it is

Western Digital SN850X (w/ Heatsink) 2 TB Specs

2 TB, TLC, PCIe 4.0 x4, M.2 2280

www.techpowerup.com

I bought two naked sn850x 4tb and added my own cheap heatsinks and they are good.

WD Black SN850 1 TB SSD Review - The Fastest SSD

The WD Black SN850 is the fastest SSD we ever tested thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface. In our extensive real-life testing it beats the Samsung 980 Pro, the Phison E18-based Corsair MP600 Pro, and even the MLC-based Samsung 970 Pro.

www.techpowerup.com

Yeah not a review but I believe Tom's is pretty good.

 

[jarablue]

Take Toms with a grain of salt. My 990 Pro benched a bit faster than they tested. It's not the tomshardware of the late 90s.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
It's tough now days to recommend samsung with all the brainfart firmware they've been releasing with products not to mention higher prices seems like a sammy tax like ek does

 

[jarablue]

Yeah. It sucks because it seems everything has issues. 990 Pro was dying at first until Samsung released a firmware. That is why I try to always build a system after a generation has been out for awhile and all hardware/drivers have matured. Buying new stuff always comes with the dreaded fear or not knowing if its going to have issue, and eventually need an update. Show stopper bugs suck though. Prices are horrible everywhere now. A video card should not cost 2.5k. That is the cost of a used car. But it does seem like everyone is rich now. You have couples buying 3 million dollar homes while in their early 20s. Back in the 70s and 80s that was unheard of. Lots of millionaires in the world now.

Nature of the best when buying/living in a society with new technology.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Well here's the two m.2s 970 evo+ 500gb and sn850x 4tb
Both doing pretty good this morning ran these just after doing a system image
SN850x looking better with just a cheapo heatsink lol so if you can find a naked one you can likely save some bucks just getting a cheapo heatsink instead and be good.

 

[SPDIF]

The 990PRO is the fastest SSD around in PCIE4.0, there's no argue in that...

 

[ThrashZone]

The 990PRO is the fastest SSD around in PCIE4.0, there's no argue in that...

Yeah and it may die quick to

 

[LabRat 891]

The 990PRO is the fastest SSD around in PCIE4.0, there's no argue in that...

Yeah and it may die quick to

If optane isn't an option, the Solidigm P44 Pro, would be my 2nd choice.

Solidigm P44 Pro 2 TB & 1 TB Review - The Fastest SSD you can Buy

The Solidigm P44 Pro is the company's new PCIe 4.0 flagship M.2 NVMe SSD. It is built using the blazing fast Hynix ACNS075 controller paired with 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. In our review we saw impressive performance numbers, making the P44 Pro the fastest SSD we ever tested.

www.techpowerup.com

 

[Shou Miko]

The 990PRO is the fastest SSD around in PCIE4.0, there's no argue in that...

After the issues Samsung had with their SATA drives and my own cooling their 970 Evo Plus no matter what I did even trying to level the thermal pads for better contact I sold it off and when with a Gen3 drive with 2GB of cache and I do not complain it's easy to cool, transfer speed runs more stable with larger file transfers.

 

[SPDIF]

Yeah and it may die quick to

That's already a while ago, they will not burn their fingers again... And it's also at moment the most sold SSD available. And also WD, Crucial, Micron had dying SSD, don't forget that.

 

[Shou Miko]

That's already a while ago, they will not burn their fingers again... And it's also at moment the most sold SSD available. And also WD, Crucial, Micron had dying SSD, don't forget that.

Problem with Samsung is their drives has been rock solid 95% of the time up to 860/970 Evo than with the 970 Evo Plus than there started to be temperature issues and problem cooling it plus their ssd's died.

I am still rocking a Samsung 850 Evo 1TB in my ThinkServer Tiny and my dad in his M720q a 870 Evo which I am very careful with.

So 2 same configurated Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny's only difference is actually memory they are same capacity but different speed because my dad re-used his 32GB from his 6th gen i5.

 

[SPDIF]

Ah yes, the good old EVO, i also still have an 860 EVO and an 860PRO, SSD, always been Rock Solid, same as the 850series. They don't make memory like that anymore. Your 850 has the best memory NAND, much better then now, as the 860 series.

 

[Durhamranger]

Optane all the way....

480gb 900p....

They can be found on fleabay.......

 

[Frozoken]

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

Yeah and get a shit ton of overhead from your cpu using ram to cache your ssd ruining the point of it. Ive used primocache it is not equavilent unless your specifically trying to make your storage really fast as it eats into your cpu performance doing that and its still not actually writing anything meaning you cant use it as your OS drive unless your want to brick your system when you do any remotely unstable shut down once.

 

[R0H1T]

Yeah and get a shit ton of overhead from your cpu using ram to cache your ssd ruining the point of it.

That's BS, I've been using primocache on & off on multiple systems for nearly a decade now if not more, since the very first pre-alpha in the days of eboostr. So your claim is absolutely untrue, unless you're probably still running Core 2 quads or dual cores from a decade back!

its still not actually writing anything meaning you cant use it as your OS drive unless your want to brick your system when you do any remotely unstable shut down once.

That's partly true when you have deferred cache running & yes it's dangerous for system stability, an unsafe shutdown or power going off for a sec could wreck your entire system. As for not writing anything to disk you've never used it with deferred write off then? I don't use anything but RAM for caching, nothing fancy like SSD's as L2 cache on most systems I have it installed on. I did it back in the day when I still used HDD but again that's way back in the past now, on systems I personally own I don't have a single HDD anymore, so YMWV.

 

[DaemonForce]

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.

This is mostly pure luck, or straight up lack of it. There are some really good products out there that have incredible TBW tolerance and best suited as data partitions for loading REALLY large games or apps that pull everything into memory, which is likely the future norm for AIML to the tune of several xxGB. You won't have much grief with these but a bad batch of silicon (can we call them that?) happens sometimes and it's enough to ruin anyone's day. My first was a 30GB OCZ that disappeared one morning and was likely the junk Indilinx controller making it go poof. RIP. Gotta roll with it. For system partitions you're going to want something of a normal size and then very large/fast disks for data. I take this to the extreme depending on whichever system I've appointed for whatever task.

My workstation does not have a place for HDDs anymore. My drive cages are drilled out and I couldn't find a reason to bolt them back up to save my life.
Sata: 120GB KingDian s280
M.2: 240GB Corsair Force MP510
That's it. That's all that I attach to this system and the sata is more of a local luxury than security.


My servers do the real heavy lifting and lots of it with HDDs, cheap 16-60GB sata SSDs, Udisks, 400-800GB PCIe SAS-SSDs, I can't even keep track of half my enterprise junk anymore. It's great.

Point is, I don't need the SSDs for any particular task. They exist to fit a task. They're a provision for things where I need speed as a security and that's all. The bigger the SSD, the bigger status as a luxury product and a bigger sign of failure somewhere in the chain for appropriately configuring hardware. You probably have something else going on where there are frequent reads and less frequent writes, so a normal consumer SSD is fine. I have the opposite going on where I need a ton of scratch space for junk that rarely (if ever) gets read. If you have just one or two systems, you can figure out what is best suited for whatever task and where it belongs.

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.)

1-2TB volumes with a variety of SLC cache anywhere from 55-679GB. Figure out why you are looking at these sizes and a particularly large cache then minimize if possible. If it's a game storage medium, it probably isn't going to matter. If you're doing some kind of editing, it probably matters a bit more but I don't see anything that calls for double digit GB of cache. If it's needed, you're probably doing stuff that's way over my head.

on systems I personally own I don't have a single HDD anymore, so YMWV.

That's awesome. If I could do this, it would be great but the price of storage and the way we use storage in specific ways tells the market to drop the price and encourages me to keep buying. There's also the thing where a lot of people for whatever reason just don't have another system and that hurts. I like the minmax approach.

 

[Waldorf]

@csendesmark
having used the samsung/wd/xpg/corsair/msi,
i would go with the corsair (tlc) MP500/600 core XT/pro NH/elite

 

[Waldorf]

@csendesmark
one thing to consider when looking at any slc cache,
the faster the drive/controller overall, the less you need to sustain speeds.

e.g. i could have a drive being twice as fast on R/W as the one with the biggest cache (at same size),
while having the smallest slc portion of all identical sized drives.

and it can get kinda useless, once you have a slow drive with massive cache,
as it will take longer to recover once its filled, so overall perf would still matter more,
unless your data fits in it, and you dont copy much after that, with time for the drive
to write it to nand,

ignoring that if you do transfer stuff and a power outage happens, short of using a UPS,
the drive would have to come with power-loss protection, so cache data wont get lost.

 

[dgianstefani]

For system drive?

Optane is unbeatable.

Intel DC P1600X ~$65

More endurance than a 2 TB 990 Pro, in a 118 GB M.2

Better 4K/Mixed than RAID 0 Stripe NAND flash.

Latency closer to RAM than flash memory.

No

"help me RAM, I've run out of SLC cache"

Just flat lines in benchmarks and consistent performance.