# Storage for new gaming PC



## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

Building a new gaming PC.

I have a 500GB 970 Evo Plus for my OS and Steam games. Now looking for 2TB secondary storage for older games and large file storage.
Budget is not fixed, but let's consider a max of about INR 15,000 ($200).
Options: 

WD hard drive WD20EZBX 7200 RPM: INR 5,199 ($69)
Seagate hard drive ST2000DM008 7200RPM: INR 6,979 ($93)
WD Black WD2003FZEX: INR 11,200 ($150)
Seagate SSHD ST2000LX001: INR 13,139 ($175)
Samsung 870 QVO SSD: INR 16,799 ($224) - QLC NAND: cheap but with bad performance.
Crucial BX500 SSD: INR 18,500 ($247) - cheaper TLC option from Crucial
Crucial MX500 SSD: INR 19,999 ($267) - slightly more expensive option
Samsung 870 EVO SSD: INR 23,349 ($311) - MLC NAND: fast enough to saturate SATA ports, expensive
970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD: INR 27,358 ($373) - the fastest but too expensive, plus will exhaust both of my M.2 ports 


As you can see, there's a large disconnect between the HDDs and even the cheaper QLC SSDs at this size.
Should I just get the HDDs or stretch a bit and get one of the SSDs? What about the hybrid Seagate SSHD?
Higher performance is good but not a necessity.


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## skizzo (Oct 26, 2021)

If you're buying an 870 QVO for your OS drive or one you will write to often....then its suboptimal performance will be highlighted often.
but if all you're doing is putting games on it, which will sit there indefinitely, then that performance isn't such an issue when all you do is read from it. 
It's what I use one for and it's def better in comparison to a HDD, and 1/3 cheaper than their next best SSD option the 870 EVO.

If that turns you off then get fastest HDD you can afford. I'd go with the WD Black in that case


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## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

I have a 970 Evo Plus 500GB SSD for my Steam games and OS.

WD Black any good these days? What is its durability? In the pre-corona days I heard people push it too hard resulting in them failing earlier than Blue or Green drives.

What about the SSHD?


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## P4-630 (Oct 26, 2021)

I have a couple of 1tb 860 evo's for my games and some other data.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Oct 26, 2021)

WD black, I have had three Seagate sshhds die on me so can't recommend them plus the speed up wasn't worth it or effective in typical usage.


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## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> I have had three Seagate sshds die on me so can't recommend them


Hmm. I've heard something similar about those. Unfortunately Seagate is the only brand doing something of this kind right now.

Fine, WD Black it is. It's not too cheap and not too expensive. Is it any faster than a plain WD Blue or similar HDD though? Otherwise I'd be spending the extra $80 for nothing.


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## skizzo (Oct 26, 2021)

specs? you'll need to look at the brands respective websites for those!
I personally have avoided using SSHD's.....I say pick one or the other, never been down with the hybrids since they do not meet my use case.



cst1992 said:


> looking for 2TB secondary storage for older games and large file storage.


this statement translates to you write a bunch of random files to it whether that is games or a large photo library etc, once and that is it. they aren't files you are continually writing to because your editing audio, video, photo, etc type of work. perfect candidate for 870 QVO (honestly, I'd say the ONLY way to justify purchasing that disk lol). if you think you're going to be writing to it on the regular, then get a HDD

Those prices though? I assume you're outside of the USA so these may be be irrelevant. I'm finding the 870 QVO for $180 on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-870-QVO-SATA-MZ-77Q2T0B/dp/B089C6LZ42?th=1). I got mine for $200 literally a year ago so $224 seems odd! The MX500 is going for $167 right now too on ebay (https://www.ebay.com/itm/294427977529) and on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX50...3J5JB12/dp/B0781VSXBP/ref=dp_ob_title_ce?th=1) according to the lists on SSD benchmark which is actually a very good deal I recommend if you can get that disk for that cost!


			SSD UserBenchmarks - 1071 Solid State Drives Compared
		

check that link out and use the slider on the left hand side to slide up capacity so it is showing 2TB+ drives. Then sort by price. Do the same for HDD if you want. It's a great tool looking for best price for these components

if you're willing to spend that much on WD Black then go for a SSD!
you REALLY should shop around.... case in point, 10secs of googling I can buy that disk for $85?! Why pay double for that!?
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FJRS628?tag=userbenchmark-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1)


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## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

skizzo said:


> specs? you'll need to look at the brands respective websites for those!


Specs of what? The disks? Assume slower->faster top->bottom.


skizzo said:


> this statement translates to you write a bunch of random files to it whether that is games or a large photo library etc, once and that is it. they aren't files you are continually writing to because your editing audio, video, photo, etc type of work. perfect candidate for 870 QVO (honestly, I'd say the ONLY way to justify purchasing that disk lol). if you think you're going to be writing to it on the regular, then get a HDD


I'd be writing large files to it, but not regularly. I just need a secondary data storage to dump all my excess data and not have to maintain it on external drives if at all possible. Also for particularly large games - the kind which might take 100GB to themselves.


skizzo said:


> Those prices though? I assume you're outside of the USA so these may be be irrelevant.


These are either Amazon prices, or on stores which have lower than Amazon prices.


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## skizzo (Oct 26, 2021)

Sorry for the confusion, I meant that specs comment regarding you were asking me for spec level data (durability)....you're gonna have to look that up yourself lol
And wow for inflation or high tariffs or whatever factors are coming into play for why your region has all these components priced higher! I don't envy your situation there. 
Though with what you shared, it doesn't sound like you have a use case that justifies the extra cost of WD Black......the WD Blue in my opinion is more suited towards your use case. You could get a bigger capacity even if you think you will use it.


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## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

skizzo said:


> You could get a bigger capacity even if you think you will use it.


2TB seems enough. I have looked at WD Black. I'll look into benchmarks and such, and if the extra price is not justified I'll get the Blue.


skizzo said:


> I don't envy your situation there.


Don't quote me on this, but the primary factor for this is import tariffs, secondary is demand/supply.


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## Chrispy_ (Oct 26, 2021)

The 870 QVO is a shit SSD but as a solid state games library (and using a better SSD for your OS and other applications) then it'll do.

With Steam now supporting multiple libraries you can just move games you aren't actively playing to a mechanical drive. I have a 1TB games drive and rather than uninstalling a game I'll just move it to the library on my NAS now. The only penalty is having to wait a few minutes if you decide you want your slow-to-load game back on your SSD as Steam moves everything across at ~150MB/s or so...


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## GerKNG (Oct 26, 2021)

don't buy samsung QVO SSDs... they are incredibly awful and worse than the cheapest QLC SSDs from Micron/Crucial.

the Sandisk 3D Ultra is fantastic (basically a 860 Evo) and they are very cheap as well.


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## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

GerKNG said:


> Sandisk 3D Ultra is fantastic and they are very cheap as well


Not here, and not the 2TB variant. Maybe a scalper, but on Amazon it's $392.



Chrispy_ said:


> Steam moves everything across at ~150MB/s or so


If that is a limitation of the hardware then that shouldn't be an issue if say, I decide to go with the MX500. Then it should be able to manage thrice that.


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## londiste (Oct 26, 2021)

I would vote for MX500. It has been the mainstay SATA SSD for a reason. It is nothing special but a decent TLC SSD without significant downsides.

BX500 is DRAMless that does show up in performance often enough to not justify the price difference.
870 QVO (and most other SATA QLC drives) are not cheap enough to justify the performance and potentially endurance hit.

There is a considerable performance gap between HDD (SSHD is mostly in HDD camp) and SSD but so far a very minor one between SATA and NVMe SSDs. For gaming what primarily gets affected is loading times, including asset streaming during gaming. Whether PS5/XBSX will bring heavier requirements for SSD speeds remains to be seen but this is not a discussion for today or probably this price range


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## phanbuey (Oct 26, 2021)

I use an MX500 drive for gaming library and it gives me no trouble at all.  Very solid option.


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## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

Per this video, the only advantages of a WD Black drive over a Blue one is vibration protection and time-limited error recovery(which is used in RAID environments).

I need neither, so I think if I decide to go for a HDD then Blue would be a better option than Black.


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## yotano211 (Oct 26, 2021)

Only get the Samsung 870 qvo if you must. Once the SLC cache is used up, it will drop the transfer performance down to 150mb/s. I use a 870 qvo in a external case for movie/shows storage.

There is nothing wrong with getting a hard drive vs SSD if you are worried about cost. A 2tb 7200rpm HD will have transfer speeds of 150 to 180mb/s. Store your extra stuff on there and pocket the savings, or maybe get larger 4tb HD.


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## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

skizzo said:


> The MX500 is going for $167 right now too on ebay (https://www.ebay.com/itm/294427977529) and on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX50...3J5JB12/dp/B0781VSXBP/ref=dp_ob_title_ce?th=1)


By the way, for prices I usually apply the rule of 100 meaning if the item is $x in the US then it's INR 100x here.

By that logic, it seems the 2TB variant is playing hard-to-get. Prices in the USA vs here(Amazon):

MX500 1TB: $90.81/INR 8,599
MX500 2TB: $166.99/INR 19,999

That 2TB variant is certainly more expensive than it should be.



yotano211 said:


> Once the SLC cache is used up, it will drop the transfer performance down to 150mb/s.


Try 80.


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## yotano211 (Oct 26, 2021)

cst1992 said:


> By the way, for prices I usually apply the rule of 100 meaning if the item is $x in the US then it's INR 100x here.
> 
> By that logic, it seems the 2TB variant is playing hard-to-get. Prices in the USA vs here(Amazon):
> 
> ...


My drops down to around 150mb/s when I transfer things. The 860 qvo was around 80mb/s.


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## ThaiTaffy (Oct 26, 2021)

I use a crucial Mx500 for my steam library but I'm toying with the idea to have some form of dedicated steam library on my NAS either some WD black nvme gen 3 drives or WD black HDDs in raid0.


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## kapone32 (Oct 26, 2021)

With Direct Storage on the way NVME would be the way I go. The Crucial P1 is a good bet.


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## ThaiTaffy (Oct 26, 2021)

kapone32 said:


> With Direct Storage on the way NVME would be the way I go. The Crucial P1 is a good bet.


I have a spare gen 4 nvme slot on my board waiting for this but I tend to play so many games at one time. 
I'll keep that for the big titles, casual and older games that don't really need improved load times can go on the NAS though this is only necessary for me because I can only fit 2x 2.5" in my case Op doesn't have that issue with a full ATX case he can store alot more I would guess.
personally I would half the ssd size to 1tb for big titles and get a 2tb HDD for the lesser games. It's also nice to have a HDD to throw junk on like temp files and downloads so your not eating up your write count on your SSD.


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## Chrispy_ (Oct 26, 2021)

cst1992 said:


> If that is a limitation of the hardware then that shouldn't be an issue if say, I decide to go with the MX500. Then it should be able to manage thrice that.


I picked that number out of my ass as a rough representation of the transfer speed moving game files to/from a mechanical drive that has sequential speeds of ~200MB/s

NVMe to SATA SSD will probably run at close to the SATA write bottleneck as the average game file size is large enough to mean it's mostly sequential.


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## phanbuey (Oct 26, 2021)

I have two cheapo SSDs - one 1tb MX500 and one Samsung 860evo - threw them in a quick and dirty raid 0 array and voila.  2tb of cheap SSD storage with 1100MB/s random reads in AIDA with smooth loads and great $/ performance.  Also gives you an extra layer of caching / buffering which may help smooth things out a bit with lots of IO requests.


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## lexluthermiester (Oct 26, 2021)

cst1992 said:


> WD hard drive WD20EZBX 7200 RPM: INR 5,199 ($69)


For secondary storage that games will load from, this drive is all you need. It has the space you want and the performance that you will need. 

Stay away from QLC based SSD's they are utter garbage for anything other than use as external backup drives. For OS or secondary games storage the lacking durability is unacceptable.


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## oxrufiioxo (Oct 26, 2021)

I would stay away from HDD for anything but storing pictures or video files if gaming get at least a Sata SSD even if that means 1/4-1/2 the storage space..... I use WD Black 10TB for backup and even for that it's painful these days loading any modern game with an engine that streams which is the majority these days and you will see stutter.


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## londiste (Oct 26, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> Stay away from QLC based SSD's they are utter garbage for anything other than use as external backup drives. For OS or secondary games storage the lacking durability is unacceptable.


As long as you know what you are getting and it is a fit for the use case - why not? Speed deficiency is primarily about writes - and large writes at that - and endurance may not be a problem if it is not a write-heavy drive.

I have a 660p for games drive, 26 months and 27TB writes later I am quite happy with it. Reads are fast enough, slow writes seem to occur only when drive is really full or writing tens or hundreds of GB and no indication of any endurance issues so far. 2TB of this was ~160€ back then and I honestly cannot complain about the result.


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## neatfeatguy (Oct 26, 2021)

I've got a 500GB 970 Evo that houses games I tend to be playing more often. Any other game I install on my 1TB WD Black. I've seen other suggest SSD and HD for storing games. If you're just installing a games to be installing them and load times aren't very important to you, put things on a HDD. Any game you want faster load times, put them on a SSD.


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## yotano211 (Oct 26, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> For secondary storage that games will load from, this drive is all you need. It has the space you want and the performance that you will need.
> 
> Stay away from QLC based SSD's they are utter garbage for anything other than use as external backup drives. For OS or secondary games storage the lacking durability is unacceptable.


QLC drives are not that bad. Most users today don't transfer tons of data every day.


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## MIRTAZAPINE (Oct 26, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> For secondary storage that games will load from, this drive is all you need. It has the space you want and the performance that you will need.
> 
> Stay away from QLC based SSD's they are utter garbage for anything other than use as external backup drives. For OS or secondary games storage the lacking durability is unacceptable.



THIS! I'll stay away from QLC their not that good for OS drives versus even plain sata TLC drive. I had use a crucial P1 qlc as an OS drives things do starting get slow once the background writes get going that I find even plain old sata MX500 tlc drives are much more responsive to me. Frankly I find the jump to an m2 tlc ssd to not be much a perceptible difference than a very good sata ssd. 

QLC drives as external thumbdrives are ok though but even I would avoid putting too valuable a data in them.  I pull my data out of it when it started acting abit weird for my external. For a PC storage drive I don't find it too be a good tradeoff versus a CMR HDD for the high price you are paying.


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## Chrispy_ (Oct 26, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> Stay away from QLC based SSD's they are utter garbage for anything other than use as external backup drives.


Not even sure they're good for that, especially Samsung who had the 840 and 840EVO fiasco where unpowered data retention was poor and pre-firmware fix, even powered data retention was bad for data that wasn't recently written. IIRC the problem was voltage drift between data states for TLC. QLC has even narrower voltage ranges per bit so along with the lower endurance is theoretically poorer unpowered data retention too.

Lots of users never got firmware updates (as the OEM-only drives weren't covered) so they had to resort to third-party tools like Diskfresh to keep their data intact over periods longer than a few months.


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## newtekie1 (Oct 26, 2021)

skizzo said:


> If you're buying an 870 QVO for your OS drive or one you will write to often....then its suboptimal performance will be highlighted often.


No it won't.



MIRTAZAPINE said:


> THIS! I'll stay away from QLC their not that good for OS drives versus even plain sata TLC drive. I had use a crucial P1 qlc as an OS drives things do starting get slow once the background writes get going that I find even plain old sata MX500 tlc drives are much more responsive to me. Frankly I find the jump to an m2 tlc ssd to not be much a perceptible difference than a very good sata ssd.
> 
> QLC drives as external thumbdrives are ok though but even I would avoid putting too valuable a data in them.  I pull my data out of it when it started acting abit weird for my external. For a PC storage drive I don't find it too be a good tradeoff versus a CMR HDD for the high price you are paying.


The crucial P1 was plagued by firmware issues. That isn't how a good QLC drive should behave. The P2 was a much better drive and the Intel QLC drives are really good. Even the Samsung QVO drives larger than 1TB perform well, even when writing somewhat large data. 

As for the longevity, you people really over estimate how much you write to your OS drives.


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## ThaiTaffy (Oct 26, 2021)

newtekie1 said:


> As for the longevity, you people really over estimate how much you write to your OS drives.



I try not to write to any SSD I have a 10year old Corsair force SSD that's still pretty healthy as I've pointed out before move your temp folders and so on to a dedicated HDD then you really don't write on them at all, as a general user/gamer. Maybe if your editing video or something else that you regularly load a drive up then dump it when your project is over you might need more longevity.


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## lexluthermiester (Oct 26, 2021)

oxrufiioxo said:


> I would stay away from HDD for anything but storing pictures or video files if gaming get at least a Sata SSD even if that means 1/4-1/2 the storage space..... I use WD Black 10TB for backup and even for that it's painful these days loading any modern game with an engine that streams which is the majority these days and you will see stutter.


Nonsense.



londiste said:


> As long as you know what you are getting and it is a fit for the use case - why not?


Garbage is garbage. QLC, even most recent stuff is only fit for incidental use-case-scenarios, not mainstream use. 



yotano211 said:


> QLC drives are not that bad.


Yes, they are.


yotano211 said:


> Most users today don't transfer tons of data every day.


QLC P/E cycle limits are measure in the mid-hundreds even with the BEST brands. Not acceptable for OS or main access drive usage scenario's.



Chrispy_ said:


> Not even sure they're good for that, especially Samsung who had the 840 and 840EVO fiasco where unpowered data retention was poor and pre-firmware fix, even powered data retention was bad for data that wasn't recently written. IIRC the problem was voltage drift between data states for TLC. QLC has even narrower voltage ranges per bit so along with the lower endurance is theoretically poorer unpowered data retention too.


Yeah, there's also this.



newtekie1 said:


> The P2 was a much better drive and the Intel QLC drives are really good. Even the Samsung QVO drives larger than 1TB perform well, even when writing somewhat large data.


Better, yes. Better is not always good. Samsung QLC is still trash, Micron QLC is a bit better but still poor and Intel is in that same class.


People, QLC is UTTER GARBAGE. Don't use it! Using it is asking for problems at a later date. If you want to gamble with your system, go right ahead, just don't say you weren't warned..


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## londiste (Oct 26, 2021)

newtekie1 said:


> As for the longevity, you people really over estimate how much you write to your OS drives.


Even moreso, people tend to overestimate how much they write on non-OS drives. OP here stated he is looking for secondary storage for older games and large files.

@lexluthermiester has a good point about data retention though. This is somewhat of an unknown for SSDs. Leaving an SSD unpowered for months has certain risk. They *should* be fine when powered.


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## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> People, QLC is UTTER GARBAGE


I'd rather stick with HDDs here. Even the Black variant of WD which has 160MB/s transfer speed is cheaper per gigabyte than the Samsung 870 QVO which reportedly has 150.
Regardless of speed - if QLC is unreliable then it's outta here.


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## newtekie1 (Oct 26, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> QLC P/E cycle limits are measure in the mid-hundreds even with the BEST brands. Not acceptable for OS or main access drive usage scenario's.


The estimated write life of QLC drives is in the hundreds or even thousands of TB's. GTFO with this P/E cycle limit bull, you aren't writing to a single cell constantly. The 2TB Samsung 870 QVO is rated for 720TB of written data. That's way more than any OS drive will ever see under normal use in 10 years.  And storage drives tend to be written to even less.



lexluthermiester said:


> Better, yes. Better is not always good. Samsung QLC is still trash, Micron QLC is a bit better but still poor and Intel is in that same class.
> 
> 
> People, QLC is UTTER GARBAGE. Don't use it! Using it is asking for problems at a later date. If you want to gamble with your system, go right ahead, just don't say you weren't warned..


You're basing this on basically nothing. What makes it trash? You're perceived unreliability, even though the QLC is still likely to outlive every other part of the computer? The slow write performance that is still pretty damn fast?



cst1992 said:


> I'd rather stick with HDDs here. Even the Black variant of WD which has 160MB/s transfer speed is cheaper per gigabyte than the Samsung 870 QVO which reportedly has 150.
> Regardless of speed


The 2TB+ 870 Evo write speed AFTER the 80GB SLC cache is used up, drops to 190MB/s. How often are you writing more than 80GB to your secondary drive from a source that is significantly faster than 190MB/s? The QVO is still miles faster than any HDD when reading though, remember that. The slow limitation of QLC is only for large sustained writes, it does not affect reading from the drive at all or even random small writes.



cst1992 said:


> if QLC is unreliable then it's outta here.


There is nothing to say it is unreliable. It's just the "sky is falling" people that see lower P/E cycles and assume the drives are unreliable. Samsung wouldn't be warrantying the drives for 720TB+ of data written if the drives couldn't reliably handle that amount of written data.  Of course, that itself is an insane amount of data to write to a 2TB drive anyway.


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## lexluthermiester (Oct 26, 2021)

cst1992 said:


> Even the Black variant of WD which has 160MB/s transfer speed is cheaper per gigabyte


The Blue vs Black is really the question then. If you want to afford the Black then go that way as it will not let you down. But if you're on a budget, that WD Blue drive is a good performer.


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## 80-watt Hamster (Oct 26, 2021)

The WD Blue are cheap enough that you could put two in RAID1.  The write performance hit wouldn't be a big deal for this use case, and the bonus read speed could be noticeable.

Or go with one of the QLC drives.  Wear leveling should be sufficient to let it keep on trucking for what you're asking of it, even if it's as bad as Lex says.  I'd personally go RAID1 in your situation, though.


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## lexluthermiester (Oct 26, 2021)

newtekie1 said:


> The estimated write life of QLC drives is in the hundreds or even thousands of TB's.


TB's written is BS marketing jargon. Cell P/E cycles are the defining metric and the only one I care about.


newtekie1 said:


> You're basing this on basically nothing.


Incorrect. Those statements are based on actual endurance testing that I have done. When I test 10 QLC based drives at a time and ALL 10 fail inside of 1 year, I call that unacceptable and I call the drives and QLC technology garbage. 


newtekie1 said:


> You're perceived unreliability, *even though the QLC is still likely to outlive every other part of the computer*?


That is a statement of pure fantasy..


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## yotano211 (Oct 26, 2021)

cst1992 said:


> I'd rather stick with HDDs here. Even the Black variant of WD which has 160MB/s transfer speed is cheaper per gigabyte than the Samsung 870 QVO which reportedly has 150.
> Regardless of speed - if QLC is unreliable then it's outta here.


Its 150mb/s when the SLC runs out. When the 870 qvo is runnng normally, it will run at 500-550mb/s, the limit of a SATA connection.



newtekie1 said:


> The 2TB+ 870 Evo write speed AFTER the 80GB SLC cache is used up, drops to 190MB/s. How often are you writing more than 80GB to your secondary drive from a source that is significantly faster than 190MB/s? The QVO is still miles faster than any HDD when reading though, remember that. The slow limitation of QLC is only for large sustained writes, it does not affect reading from the drive at all or even random small writes.


My 870 qvo tops out at 150-155mb/s when the SLC cache runs out, I have the 8tb version. I dont mind the slower speeds when the SLC runs out, I use it for movie/show storage.


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## sam_86314 (Oct 26, 2021)

I have a couple of 1TB MX500s and a 1TB SanDisk Ultra NVMe as my storage drives. The MX500s are in a striped storage space, and I want to get more to expand it. The array does 1100MB/s read and 1000MB/s write.







I tend to avoid QLC as I find that I do a lot of writing to my drives, hell I was even hesitant to switch to exclusively SSDs for that reason. After seeing improvements in real-world use (game load times, moving files to/from my server over 10GbE), I'd say it was totally worth it.

If you were to go the striped storage space/RAID 0 route, be sure to keep regular backups of your array.


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## cst1992 (Oct 26, 2021)

Everyone calm down please.

Write performance is not critical in this case. So I could basically go for a WD Blue and not really care. Yes, it'll take some time to initially transfer the data but after that I won't even notice.

QVO is not so cheap as to consider it in place of a HDD. It's 3x the price of the Blue/Seagate and 1.5x the price of the Black. I am expecting a drop in the price of the MX500(as posted above, I strongly believe it's overpriced right now), so if I think I need it, I'll just spend the extra and get the MX500.

As for the 870 Evo and the 970 Evo Plus M.2 drive, they just seem like bad value for this use case.


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## Toothless (Oct 26, 2021)

I'd look at Toshiba HDDs. 150mb/s average for my 5TBs and you can get quite a bit storage for a good deal. 

Not sure the hate on HDDs. I get people don't want to wait but is three seconds really going to ruin your day.


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## Bomby569 (Oct 27, 2021)

I can't play on hdd's anymore and i have a very good one. better get yourself an ssd, doesn't need to be anything fancy, a mx500 is enough, you won't notice any difference to anything better just for gaming.

I had all my gaming on a 1tb MX500 and another 250gb 860 evo, but decided to sell them for a nvme just for less cables, because you won't notice any difference in gaming.


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## MIRTAZAPINE (Oct 27, 2021)

Just to add for OP. HDD that is 8TB and below is shingled hdd rather than conventional hdd for brands like seagate especially. WD hdd 8TB and above is still CMR drives. Shingled drives perform rather poor for read/write operation at the same time when the cache is exhausted. I am not not sure how a game would influence shingled drives though I never play games from a shingled drive.  You maybe better just going for purely sata ssd if getting HDD 8TB CMR above is not possible.


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## newtekie1 (Oct 27, 2021)

cst1992 said:


> Write performance is not critical in this case. So I could basically go for a WD Blue and not really care. Yes, it'll take some time to initially transfer the data but after that I won't even notice.


I wouldn't go with the WD Blue HDD just because I don't find them reliable at all. I've had far too many die on me.  But I wouldn't go with any desktop HDD, I'd get an enterprise/NAS drive. Either a seagate Exos or Ironwolf or WD Red Pro(don't get the WD Red non-Pro drives, they are SMR).



cst1992 said:


> QVO is not so cheap as to consider it in place of a HDD. It's 3x the price of the Blue/Seagate and 1.5x the price of the Black. I am expecting a drop in the price of the MX500(as posted above, I strongly believe it's overpriced right now), so if I think I need it, I'll just spend the extra and get the MX500.


I wouldn't consider it in place of HDDs, but I'd consider it in place of other SSDs if the price is right. The problem with QVO is it isn't cheap enough most of the time as you said. A MX500 would definitely be a better choice if the price is somewhat close.


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## claes (Oct 27, 2021)

MIRTAZAPINE said:


> Just to add for OP. HDD that is 8TB and below is shingled hdd rather than conventional hdd for brands like seagate especially. WD hdd 8TB and above is still CMR drives. Shingled drives perform rather poor for read/write operation at the same time when the cache is exhausted. I am not not sure how a game would influence shingled drives though I never play games from a shingled drive.  You maybe better just going for purely sata ssd if getting HDD 8TB CMR above is not possible.


Not all <8TB drives are SMR, but some are. Last I checked none of the WD blacks are shingled.

(Also, the problem with SMR drives is that they slow down when writing over blocks that have previously been written to, not caching)


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## cst1992 (Oct 27, 2021)

I just need a drive for excess data storage.

Believe it or not till now I've been using the 5400RPM 2.5" drives you get when you strip the cover off an external hard drive. Now that I am getting a new PC I intend to leave those drives in my old PC.

Surely a WD Blue is better than those? Black, if not Blue?


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## lexluthermiester (Oct 27, 2021)

cst1992 said:


> Surely a WD Blue is better than those? Black, if not Blue?


Oh heck yes. It might be a wiser idea to get a 4TB WD Blue. You get a lot of space for a price that's easy on the wallet.


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## claes (Oct 27, 2021)

If you are concerned about SMR, here’s a list:





__





						List of known SMR drives
					

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...



					www.truenas.com


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## WatEagle (Oct 27, 2021)

Toothless said:


> I'd look at Toshiba HDDs. 150mb/s average for my 5TBs and you can get quite a bit storage for a good deal.
> 
> Not sure the hate on HDDs. I get people don't want to wait but is three seconds really going to ruin your day.


That's what I was goning to suggest. My 2tb toshiba is a good drive so far, I have nothing to complain about. I also have a wd blue (the 5400 rpm variant). The main thing is speed, the toshiba is clearly faster, but when it comes to noise the blue is far superior.


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## cst1992 (Oct 27, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> Oh heck yes. It might be a wiser idea to get a 4TB WD Blue. You get a lot of space for a price that's easy on the wallet.


IDK on that - the average case comes with 3 2.5" slots + 2 3.5" slots (plus 2x M.2 on the motherboard). I don't need 4TB right now, but upgrade paths are wide open down the road.


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## ThrashZone (Oct 27, 2021)

Hi,
WD did get caught switching parts on the blues but there are 7200rpm blues
Think there is some cheap 1tb wd blacks also floating around WD10SPSX

I have all my t.v. series on wd blacks they work just fine.


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## xrobwx71 (Oct 27, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> WD black, I have had three Seagate sshhds die on me so can't recommend them plus the speed up wasn't worth it or effective in typical usage.


I will never buy another Seagate. At my store over the last 9 years, I've also had 3 Seagate failures and one DOA.


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## cst1992 (Oct 27, 2021)

Hi all, an update.

I've since decided to go with the MX500 1TB version. I have a 500GB 970 Evo Plus M.2 SSD already so that should suffice as an OS + main games drive, and this should serve for storing old games + data.

I liked the MX500 out of all the options overall but I'm a stickler for value and as I said earlier the 2TB MX500 is overpriced - by at least $40. The 1TB MX500 is cheaper than the 2TB WD Black and the 2TB QVO. I have lots of room for expansion later so I can decide later on depending on how much data I have in there.


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## Chrispy_ (Oct 27, 2021)

cst1992 said:


> Hi all, an update.
> 
> I've since decided to go with the MX500 1TB version. I have a 500GB 970 Evo Plus M.2 SSD already so that should suffice as an OS + main games drive, and this should serve for storing old games + data.
> 
> I liked the MX500 out of all the options overall but I'm a stickler for value and as I said earlier the 2TB MX500 is overpriced - by at least $40. The 1TB MX500 is cheaper than the 2TB WD Black and the 2TB QVO. I have lots of room for expansion later so I can decide later on depending on how much data I have in there.


I'm using MX500 as a games drive. It's fine, writes at 400MB/s for several hundred gigs at a time when I'm moving games off to it from my WD Black or SX8200.


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## Ralfi (Nov 3, 2021)

I just purchased a 2TB Kingston KC2500 this week, to compliment the 1TB A2000 my OS is on.

Happy with it so far. & for a sale price of AU$300, I can’t complain.


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## cst1992 (Nov 3, 2021)

KC2500 - you got it pretty cheap it seems; here it's INR 30,960 on Amazon - which is 415.43 USD or 557.96 AUD. I'd rather get the 870 EVO. 

If it does drop to AUD 300 (INR 16,646) like yours was, then it's something to consider. IMO that's a fair price here for a 2TB SSD.


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## Chrispy_ (Nov 3, 2021)

cst1992 said:


> KC2500 - you got it pretty cheap it seems; here it's INR 30,960 on Amazon - which is 415.43 USD or 557.96 AUD. I'd rather get the 870 EVO.
> 
> If it does drop to AUD 300 (INR 16,646) like yours was, then it's something to consider. IMO that's a fair price here for a 2TB SSD.


TPU has just reviewed the KIOXIA Excercia which holds the record for lowest cost/GB and is vastly better than pretty much any other budget drive.









						Kioxia Exceria 1 TB Review - Amazing Value
					

The Kioxia Exceria is the new price/performance king in our SSD reviews. This Phison E12-based drive is priced at just 9 cents per GB, yet offers performance besting most value solid-state drives. This is the drive you want if money is tight.




					www.techpowerup.com
				




Regional pricing may vary but it's basically a flawless midrange drive for 15-25% less money than the competition.


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