@dgianstefani
except your setup/use, isnt really the avg win OS user/gamer.
short of forums, i havent seen anyone using an 10 version that's not home/pro, increasing size by a lot, vs yours.
and saying something is out of service life, when its more than 1y in the future, ok.
anyone with 7/8 able to get 10 for "free" or cheap, is still better off doing so..
my "cleaned" 10 pro takes up almost 50GB with all updates,
virtually no sw installed.
things like editing sw that will use shadow files in equal size (fun with 4K stuff), things like 3D mark (+10GB),
or folks with office/outlook will add more. now consider having 32 or 64gb ram and needing decent sized page file,
and some space left, voila, ~120GB are almost full..
and thats not even looking at things like most prebuild stuff now come with at least 256 or 500GB,
and ppl usually not looking to have less than before, i still say, for most getting a 500GB/1TB gen 4 or 5 M2 will be better "value",
and perf will not really be that much different in real world use..
i get what your saying, but someone looking for 500GB/1TB in storage,
will probably not drop down to a tenth..
So your particular OS/software takes 50 GB.
According to your specs, you have six M.2 drives, what's the issue?
3Dmark is benchmarking software, very few people need or use it. Even then, if you want it, it's 10 GB, so 60 GB.
Office is 1-10 GB depending on what you install, my installation of Pro Plus is about 5 GB.
Acrobat is 1-2 GB depending on the version.
Even for people using just two local drives, one 15x bigger than the other, like myself, a 50-60 GB OS/Software install is not a problem. OK, my setup is not common, but even for the "average" user, they're likely to have at least two drives.
Noone who runs editing software professionally (or even competently) uses a single drive system. Bare minimum a two drive system, and even then, it's common to see a super fast scratch drive, OS drive, plus a lot of bulk storage in the form of multiple other drives.
What I'm essentially saying is that you can run with a ~120 GB system drive with zero issues, people have just gotten lazy with how cheap bulk storage is. But it's cheap for a reason, there are many drawbacks. There are many good reasons why enterprise drives use completely different cell tech from consumer drives. Some people have wised up to the software side of things and run non consumer editions of Windows, or Linux distros, or ECC RAM etc, but it seems there's not much awareness of the differences in storage tech at a enthusiast level. I.e. people think high end is Gen 5 NVMe, and low end is Gen 3, but the reality is, those are very similar at a technical level of the flash, few more layers, maybe 2.4 GB/s instead of 1.8 GB/s flash chips, slightly better controller etc. Endurance will likely still be 600 TBW per 1 TB of capacity, actual low queue depth reads/writes will still be low 100's of MB/s.
In certain ways even spinning rust hard disk drives have benefits over many NAND flash based drives. For one thing, they don't wear out as fast as TLC/QLC variants or especially small (1 TB and lower) M.2 drives, with only one or two flash chips. Secondly, the MTBF ratings tend to be higher (shockingly), e.g. 2.5 million hours vs 1.5 million, or 2750 TBW compared to 600 TBW (all these numbers are for 1 TB current model variants). The way you get write endurance with NAND flash is by adding more capacity. Each GB of storage you add increases the amount of cells, so wear leveling algorithms etc can do their job more easily. Of course this becomes more difficult when the drive is 90% full for example, as both performance and wear degrades at this point, because the controller can't shuffle around writes so easily, to avoid quickly running into the wear limit.
The average amount of writes you can do for a cell seems to be around 600, based off the TBW ratings of most drives I see reviewed. That isn't that much if you're actually
using the drive.
I have no software installed on my secondary 990 Pro drive besides a couple of larger games and some specialist licensed scientific software for university that I can't have multiple installs of, and that's partly because if I need to remove the drive to bring my software/dataset with me in an external m.2 to use with laptop, I can. Yet, I still have over 30 GB free. This drive includes my downloads and documents folder, as well as my desktop. The only user folders directed to my second drive are the photos and videos. This is not inconvenient nor complicated to setup, and it has not been an issue for the entirety I've had this system (since 2020).
Including some backups of Windows Updates/feature packs, drivers, etc. so I can roll back, this is how much space my install takes, after updates/usage/backups etc.
If I removed everything I didn't need/use, including automatic "backups" (all my files are backed up anyway and software is easy to reinstall), I could get this down to <8 GB with a little bit of effort.
I just don't see how people are content with an OS install that takes upwards of 25 GB. Of what exactly? AI junk? Worse versions of industry standard productivity software? Adware?
As I mentioned, "almost full" isn't an issue with Optane, there's zero accelerated wear or reduced speed when approaching a full drive. This isn't NAND flash.
I've still got a comfortable 33 GB if I need to install anything.
For the average user who doesn't seem to care about buying new products every few years in a continual mid range, short lifecycle hardware situation, sure, I guess I can see how cheap, large SSDs make sense. These users likely won't notice any issues, because their hardware isn't actually pushed hard. A few hours of gaming a week and some office work isn't going to be putting many writes on their disk, but I sure do remember seeing a lot of dead SSD threads from people who actually work on their computers and do a lot of writes.
I guess I'm still peeved about Optane failing commercially, because people just couldn't get that $/GB out of their head as the only metric that was important. Quite sad really.
Every NAND flash TLC/QLC SSD out there being pretty much a consumable piece of hardware with a set lifespan ticking down, seems hard to unnotice for me, and the cheap $/GB starts becoming questionable when you start doing the math as to how long the drive will last if you actually write to it. Case in point, my 118 GB Optane having a higher TBW rating than my 2 TB 990 Pro drive, currently one of the
best consumer NAND flash drives you can buy.
Oh, that 600 TBW/TB is for a good drive too.
Buy a QLC and this is what you get. 450 TBW for 2TB, so, 225 TBW/TB.
So, when people ask "best SSD for system drive" I think of the best tech drives, which are, unquestionably, Optane, or maybe some of those SLC/XL-cell flash models.
Here's how Optane looks compared to the competition at best case scenario for the NAND competition (high queue depth).
That drop after 30-50 S is the SLC cache running out.
