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What's your boot drive? (Any recommendations?)

SN850 in my rig, and SN750 in my sons rig.. both run mint.
 
Current system is a Crucial P5 Plus 2TB
 
Intel Optane 900 480gb and 280gb (son's PC)
 
My main rig uses a Corsair PCI-e 4.0 drive, my living room HTPC a Crucial PCI-e 3.0 drive, and my bedroom HTPC an old Adata SATA SSD. Virtually no difference in boot times.
 
Samsung 970 EVO Plus, bought 4 years ago.
 
My boot drive is a WD SN850 500GB, 3-4 seconds faster than the SAata Samsung 850 and 1-2 seconds faster than the AData SX6000Pro it replaced on 22nd of april '22 i believe it was.
It's been rock solid since day1.
Just like oxrufiioxo i only instal win10 and core programs on it.
Also before the SN850 500GB i tried a win10 install on the AData SX6000Pro 3.0 1TB(which is now a secondary game drive), almost no diference between them, any decent PCi-E 3.0 or 4.0 will do the job as a boot drive if you're a casual user.
 
I am currently using a 2 TB WD 7200rpm drive :D. Try beating that. Well, for general use it is fine. It takes a little bit of time on start up but I do not have anything other than drivers that start up and in Linux, it runs fine ( a lot faster than MS ). I need to replace it but meh Just don't have the time at the moment. Maybe One day when I am big and strong I'll eventually get a new SSD :D (old one went poof)
 
I am currently using a 2 TB WD 7200rpm drive :D. Try beating that. Well, for general use it is fine. It takes a little bit of time on start up but I do not have anything other than drivers that start up and in Linux, it runs fine ( a lot faster than MS ). I need to replace it but meh Just don't have the time at the moment. Maybe One day when I am big and strong I'll eventually get a new SSD :D (old one went poof)

To be fair, I'm using a 4 TB WD Red Pro as a secondary drive for my music, photos, videos and games, and the fact that it can hit over 250 MB/s is pretty neat. :)

CrystalDiskMark_Read.png CrystalDiskMark_Write.png
 
Samsung 980 Pro. In truth same feel of performance as both 970 EVO and the SATA 850 pro with some exceptions.

If hibernating, NVME will be appreciated as you dumping several gigs of data to disk in a very short period of time.
If page file is heavily used will appreciate NVME, although this doesnt need to be on OS drive.

Things like boot speed, loading desktop apps etc. is barely any difference between a decent SATA SSD and gen 4 NVME.

My older Qotom broadwell i5 NUC that has a M.SATA boots about 1/3 the time of my desktop PC. Probably because its loading much less drivers etc. My newer N100 NVME gen 3 based NVME boots very close time to the Qotom, a bit quicker which is more likely to be down to the CPU than the storage.

To be fair, I'm using a 4 TB WD Red Pro as a secondary drive for my music, photos, videos and games, and the fact that it can hit over 250 MB/s is pretty neat. :)

View attachment 359778 View attachment 359779
Yep spindle perfectly fine for media.
 
First off, thanks for all the replies. I'm seeing a lot of Samsung and WD NVMe drives, a couple from other brands, a few Intel Optanes, some SATA drives, and one case of spinning rust o_O @PierreJG I applaud your patience, although admittedly I've only ever booted Windows off a HDD, Linux has always been on an SSD for me.

Secondly, the overall message I'm getting is that there's not much point upgrading to Gen 5, or even Gen 4 for that matter. That is kind of what I was thinking as well, but I did want to test the waters first ;)

Thirdly, I looked at Optanes, and while their performance is really good, there are barely any available where I live, and those that are cost far more than I'd be willing to spend, especially for the limited amount of storage. Even though I don't install much on C:, games such as ETS/ATS and Ready Or Not love to store their mods on C:. They can be moved elsewhere, but in my experience it's finicky and some mods just won't work unless they're on C:.

I used to use a Sandisk SSD Plus as my boot drive, which is what this 970 Evo replaced. While not night and day, I did feel a difference going from one to the other, although I guess an OS reinstall probably also played a part in that... on the other hand, I used a PNY CS900 for years in my WFH PC, and that was as snappy as you like, even with it being paired with a 2500K!

Also turns out the slot I put my boot disk in is actually only Gen3x2 so I guess I am getting a free upgrade by moving it up a slot :laugh:
 
240GB Corsair MP510. Started using NVME the day I built this Ryzen box in Oct 2019. I'm just as surprised as you are.

1724173839976.png
 
Still rocking a Kingston A400 240GB, bought 5 years ago. Works really well still!
 
Right now i'm using a Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB, i'm trying to get one of Intel's Optane P5800X to replace this one though
 
Right now i'm using a Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB, i'm trying to get one of Intel's Optane P5800X to replace this one though
P5800X really is the best drive available.
 
First off, thanks for all the replies. I'm seeing a lot of Samsung and WD NVMe drives, a couple from other brands, a few Intel Optanes, some SATA drives, and one case of spinning rust o_O @PierreJG I applaud your patience, although admittedly I've only ever booted Windows off a HDD, Linux has always been on an SSD for me.

Secondly, the overall message I'm getting is that there's not much point upgrading to Gen 5, or even Gen 4 for that matter. That is kind of what I was thinking as well, but I did want to test the waters first ;)

Thirdly, I looked at Optanes, and while their performance is really good, there are barely any available where I live, and those that are cost far more than I'd be willing to spend, especially for the limited amount of storage. Even though I don't install much on C:, games such as ETS/ATS and Ready Or Not love to store their mods on C:. They can be moved elsewhere, but in my experience it's finicky and some mods just won't work unless they're on C:.

I used to use a Sandisk SSD Plus as my boot drive, which is what this 970 Evo replaced. While not night and day, I did feel a difference going from one to the other, although I guess an OS reinstall probably also played a part in that... on the other hand, I used a PNY CS900 for years in my WFH PC, and that was as snappy as you like, even with it being paired with a 2500K!

Also turns out the slot I put my boot disk in is actually only Gen3x2 so I guess I am getting a free upgrade by moving it up a slot :laugh:

Yeah I haven't felt held back in the slightest by the 970 EVO Plus. The only reason I would upgrade is for capacity.
 
I am not that fussy. I tend to buy the cheapest available at the time, that does not seem cack.
Main rig - Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB
Garage rig - Kingston NV2 2 TB
Backup rig - Kingston NV2 2 TB
Test rig - WDS200T2B0B (I ran out of m.2 NVMe drives after the recent price hikes)
Daughter's rig - Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1 TB
Son's rig - Solidigm P41 Plus 2 TB
My rig at son's house - Crucial P3 Plus 2 TB

I don't recall a great deal of difference between any of them for boot times.
I rarely do large file transfers, so top read/write speed isn't much of a concern for me.
I see here the Kingston NV2 is considered cack, so I probably won't buy any more of those.
I also have a couple of other m.2 storage drives in my main rig.
 
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Main PC: Samsung 830 evo 256GB (sata) bootdrive. Second and third drive are Crucial MX500 (1TB sata) and Lexar NM710 2 TB m.2 NVMe. This PC cant boot from NVMe

HTPC 1: Crucial M4 256GB sata
HTPC 2: Samsung 860 QVO 1TB sata
 
My old Samsung 970 PRO 2TB, still going strong... Boot in Windows 11 in seconds. This baby, they don't make them with this quality of NAND storage nowadays...

I think i can take this drive with me in my grave.:p

Rock solid, undestroyable this thing, never felt sorry for buying this SSD. In an older laptop an Samsung 860EVO, way better then the new 870EVO, again because of using rock solid Nand Flash. These drives also never did get a firmware update in their whole lifetime! But all new drives has so many Firmware updates, unbelievable...

I use also WD SN850X or 990 PRO and i can't see any difference in boot time with Windows or games with that old 970PRO.
 
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My old Samsung 970 PRO 2TB, still going strong...
Never seen 2TB version of 970Pro, 1TB at most (i have 512GB 970Pro). You probably mean 970Pro 1TB or 970Evo Plus 2TB.
 
I use WD SN850x for my OS works fine
 
Never seen 2TB version of 970Pro, 1TB at most (i have 512GB 970Pro). You probably mean 970Pro 1TB or 970Evo Plus 2TB.
Yes you are right, typo from the user behind the keyboard...

They never did make a 2TB version of it, because i remember that this was extremely expensive SSD. It costed you almost a kidney.
But no one uses this kind of good and strong NAND anymore.

I also still use a 64GB Intel X-25E on some system here. This drive uses real pure SLC NAND, even Optane can't beat this old drive in quality. Nowadays you can't buy it anymore, only for industrial or military use.
 
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