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

[Palindrome]

My Samsung 970 Evo has been going strong for years now, however I am considering buying a newer, faster boot drive to replace it. The 970 Evo model is several years old now; and with my board having a Gen 5 M.2 slot, I could take advantage of the latest and greatest NVMe drives. Even a good Gen 4 drive would run rings around my 970 Evo.

As such I'm wondering, what boot drive do you use? What are your experiences with it/them? Any Gen 4/5 drives you'd recommend in particular? Any you'd steer clear of?

My disk usage needs are about as casual as they come, but the prospect of newer, faster tech is enticing nonetheless

The only thing I've really heard are Samsung's firmware woes with the 990 (?) series, so as reliable my 970 Evo has been, I'm a bit unsure whether I'd get a 990. Not too worried about my data, since most of it is on a separate drive and backed up regularly, I'd like to avoid having to go through an RMA process or multiple OS reinstalls with a brand new drive.

Would be great to hear what y'all are using

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

My disk usage needs are about as casual as they come

If that's actually the case and you don't run anything hotter than video games and some average Joe workloads like Blender, Photoshop, some Visual Studio shenanigans you DO NOT NEED this upgrade. You might feel 0.3 ms boost to boot time and perhaps about 0.4 percent efficiency increase in terms of actual work but that's about it. 99.9999% users are limited by the memory itself (more precisely, random reads and writes) rather than the interface which is way wider than any casual user could bother.

Want additional space, go ahead and buy whatever SSD is high quality and big enough in storage space. Want additional speed, look for random reads and writes benchmarks but these aren't 100% accurate as far as I'm aware.

I got an "ancient" Samsung PM981 drive I purchased on Aliexpress about 5 years ago and it's a clockwork. Don't see why I should swap it.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Im running a 980 pro 1tb. Works fine, pretty fast. No complaints.

 

[Zazigalka]

old adata mlc sata ssd, I don't think swapping for pcie5 one would make much difference. you might shave off a second or two, but that's it.

 

[Onasi]

I run an Adata 8200 Pro. Doesn’t really functionally matter, TBH. Unironically - get any decent Gen 3 and above SSD. That’s it. Any difference beyond this are imperceptible. Avoid Gen 5 like the plague for now - hot, expensive and completely unnecessary unless all you do is move BIGHUGE files every day, all day.

 

[Yukikaze]

Running an AORUS 7300 1TB (it was the cheapest Gen4 1TB drive when I was building this system). No complaints.

My honest recommendation is to pretty much keep what you have. I've been running drives in the 2000MB/s to 7000MB/s range and there is zero difference between them all in pretty much every casual use case. I doubt going into Gen5 territory would suddenly make things any different.

 

[jak_2456]

I used to boot my main PC off of a 128 GB SanDisk SSD for the longest time and didn't really mind it; the PC was still plenty snappy. Now I run a Crucial 1 TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe in it instead at Gen 3 speeds because my B450 board can't run Gen 4. It loads games extremely quickly and the PC boots in a matter of seconds. I haven't tried any Gen 4 drives but I think Gen 3 is still very quick for the vast majority of users. Heck, even a SATA SSD is still perfectly usable. Just don't boot your PC from an HDD! Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with people using HDDs as storage drives; just don't use them as your OS drive.

 

[dgianstefani]

Optane is unbeatable for boot drive.

If your usecase is casual though, it really doesn't matter.

 

[wNotyarD]

For casual use, not even I need to change my boot drive from my old faithful sata Samsung 840 Evo, and I do have two NVMe drives installed.

Would changing the boot to one of those NVMe drives make Windows boot faster? Sure thing, in absolute numbers. Would I notice it? Just maybe. Would it be worth the hassle? I do not think so, such that I didn't do it.

 

[FoulOnWhite]

My boot drive is a WD SN850X 1tb. Never even looked at a optane. From bios screen to login on win 10 is very fast maybe less than 5 seconds.
On win 11 though it can be up to 30 seconds for some reason, maybe all the bloaty background stuff on win 11 dunno

 

[Knight47]

Samsung 990 Pro 2TB.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I've used Samsung 840-980 pros, Crucial MX 500, adata xpg 8200 pro, WD sn850/sn770 and couldn't tell them apart in a blind test assuming all other specifications were similar.

Currently using 980 pros in all my systems but other much cheaper drives you'd likely not notice and especially vs what you are already using.

I haven't used a gen 5 drives yet but I doubt I'd notice still I made sure my board supported 2 for games/os down the road.

I prefer a 1tb OS drive or larger otherwise idgaf as long as it's Sata ssd or faster.

I only install windows and Core programs on it though all other applications/games are on secondary drives.

I'd say if you're going to go through the hassles of swapping boot drive just buy the best gen 5 drive you can afford then their is 0 chance of fomo at least vs anything you can currently purchase.

 

[Tropick]

My boot drive is a WD SN850X 1tb. Never even looked at a optane. From bios screen to login on win 10 is very fast maybe less than 5 seconds.
On win 11 though it can be up to 30 seconds for some reason, maybe all the bloaty background stuff on win 11 dunno

I can second the excellent performance of the SN850X. I have the 2TB model and absolutely love it. Power button press to desktop is roughly 15 seconds on W11 but that's after I excavated all of the startup bloat.

 

[dirtyferret]

WD SN550, starts my PC just like any other SSD drive I've used

 

[Double-Click]

WD Black SN-750 500GB in my main rig, at the login screen in ~10 seconds w/o fast boot.

As for recommendations, a good Gen 4 drive is all you need I wouldn't bother with the flaming fireball that is Gen 5.
WD Blacks and Samsungs are both solid, I just go with whatever is cheaper at the time.

 

[64K]

My boot drive is an ancient Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB in my present build from 7 years ago. I have kept this rig for almost twice as long as any other in my past for gaming reasons. My next build, at the end of this year, I'm going with a single 4 TB NVMe. I feel like a tech dinosaur right now.

 

[Fokker]

I've been using a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2 TB Gen 4.0 M.2 for over a year now with no issues. I run everything from it.

 

[RaceT3ch]

My Samsung 970 Evo has been going strong for years now, however I am considering buying a newer, faster boot drive to replace it. The 970 Evo model is several years old now; and with my board having a Gen 5 M.2 slot, I could take advantage of the latest and greatest NVMe drives. Even a good Gen 4 drive would run rings around my 970 Evo.

As such I'm wondering, what boot drive do you use? What are your experiences with it/them? Any Gen 4/5 drives you'd recommend in particular? Any you'd steer clear of?

My disk usage needs are about as casual as they come, but the prospect of newer, faster tech is enticing nonetheless

The only thing I've really heard are Samsung's firmware woes with the 990 (?) series, so as reliable my 970 Evo has been, I'm a bit unsure whether I'd get a 990. Not too worried about my data, since most of it is on a separate drive and backed up regularly, I'd like to avoid having to go through an RMA process or multiple OS reinstalls with a brand new drive.

Would be great to hear what y'all are using

I still use 970 Evo Plus, mostly because I only have a Gen 3 system.
Getting an NV2/P3 Plus will provide you better performance than the Samsung, and cost way less at the same time.

 

[JoeTheDestroyer]

970 Evo.
Don't see any point in changing. How many times do I boot my system per day? (Answer: 0.024)

 

[bonehead123]

#WD4ME4EVA#

I've been using the 750x's & 850x's in my own rigs (5) as well as client builds for quite a while now, they run fast & cool without the "sammy tax", neveranottaproblemo.....

So much so that I bought about $7k worth of 2 & 4TB models late last year when the prices crashed !

 

[Blaeza]

Crucial T700 1tb.

 

[wheresmycar]

I've got several builds...

Sammy 990 PRO (gaming)
Sammy 960 evo (home office)
Sammy PM981 (2nd gaming)
Seagate FireCuda 520 (office)
WD SN770 (office)

If you're wandering why 990 PRO overkill for gaming - i got 2 on a sweet staff discount from a mate who works at Samsung. One in service and the other one spare.

 

[Shrek]

Don't see any point in changing. How many times do I boot my system per day? (Answer: 0.024)

The benefit of pure Optane is more than just booting; I also like the idea that the drive is not changing mode (SLC, QLC) as it fills up but keeps up the full speed throughout.

 

[evernessince]

For your use case there's really no need to upgrade. I have an optane P5800X 800GB as a boot drive and had a T700 4TB as a boot drive (now just a storage drive) and the T700 provided zero noticeable performance uplift for normal tasks. I really only have these drives explicitly for training and loading AI models.

 

[kiddagoat]

I'd keep with what you got; you aren't going to notice it.

I have used a OCZ RD400 Revo Drive, Western Digital SN850, Various Inland branded SSDs, and PNY ones, can't tell a difference between them. You really cant.