[Question] SSD for gaming laptop

[cobo6964]

Hello everyone, I'm planning on buying a gaming laptop.
I've been looking at the The New Razer Blade, Asus GL502 (1060) and MSI GS63 Stealth Pro.
On Amazon I can get the GL502 for $1400 without an SSD and with a 1TB 7200RM HDD. (This is significantly cheaper than the other laptops)

So I was planning to just buy a 256GB or 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD seperatly and put that one in.

I was looking at the Intel SSD 600p as their 512GB model is significantly cheaper than anything else I could find.

I found this tread Intel 600p vs.Samsung 950 Pro where someone posted a perfomance sheet where the Intel SSD 600p seems to perform quite bad. Some tests deals with large archive files though which if I ever had to deal with those they would be on the HDD anyway. Only the file copy test is a little disappointing compared to the other drives for me.

So if the Intel SSD 600p is compared by price to the performance of some older SSD's, is it a good deal or not? And if not, would you recommend another drive instead of thisone?
I'm not looking to spend any more money than the 600p, which sells for about $180 on Amazon.

TL;DR - Intel SSD 600p worth it, or are there better SSD's (perhaps older models) which for the same price perform better?

 

[UsandThem]

It depends on price.

If there was a good sale on one of Anandtech's recommended SSDs (850 EVO, PNY CS2211, etc), I'd just grab one of those for a laptop.

If I could get the Intel 600p at the same price, or cheaper than a good mainstream SSD, I would pick one up. But I wouldn't spend extra just to get one after seeing the benchmarks you mentioned.

The 600p performs like a regular SSD in most tests. It only really performs like a dog when writing large files that most people don't do very often outside of backups. For gaming and regular computer use, you would likely not notice a difference between it and another good SATA SSD.

 

[cobo6964]

The GL502 laptop has a slot that fits M.2 PCIE SSD (since you can buy it with one of those already in it). I noticed that the 850 EVO 500GB is a M.2 SATA III, does this fit in the same slot? (I know very little about this, I just about noticed from the picture that the connection points look different)
The 850 EVO is only about $10 cheaper than the the 600p on amazon. (At $169 as opposed to $180)
But the Crucial MX300 525GB M.2, which I saw was on the recommended Q3 2016 list, is only $130.
So if for gaming the difference will be not noticable as you say I will go for this one. $50 is a nice price difference.

EDIT: Just saw that the 600p was on THIS list too, I wonder why :S

 

[shabby]

EDIT: Just saw that the 600p was on THIS list too, I wonder why :S

Because its the cheapest nvme ssd, that's why. Check out this ssd, just came out, beats the 600p easily http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mydigitalssd-bpx-nvme-ssd,4780.html except in battery life

 

[UsandThem]

The GL502 laptop has a slot that fits M.2 PCIE SSD (since you can buy it with one of those already in it). I noticed that the 850 EVO 500GB is a M.2 SATA III, does this fit in the same slot? (I know very little about this, I just about noticed from the picture that the connection points look different)
The 850 EVO is only about $10 cheaper than the the 600p on amazon. (At $169 as opposed to $180)
But the Crucial MX300 525GB M.2, which I saw was on the recommended Q3 2016 list, is only $130.
So if for gaming the difference will be not noticable as you say I will go for this one. $50 is a nice price difference.

EDIT: Just saw that the 600p was on THIS list too, I wonder why :S

Yes, the Anandtech talks about it, but doesn't recommend it as one of "the best Q3" drives in the article:

The Intel 600p is the first drive in this segment with TLC NAND. Since it uses Intel's 3D TLC NAND flash rather than planar TLC, the 600p is able to perform respectably, but it is not in the same league as the MLC-based competition. On light workloads the 600p is able to outperform any SATA SSD including the Samsung 850 Pro, but under pressure of a full drive or sustained writes it loses almost all of the advantage of using PCIe and NVMe and performs worse than the Samsung 850 EVO.

And far as the M.2 slot in the laptop, it depends. For example, my laptop has a M.2 slot, but it only supports SATA-based drives. Generally if the M.2 slot supports PCIe-based drives (like the 600p), it will support SATA-based drives as well. However, you want to make sure to see what what drives it supports in the manual to rule out any 'it should work' assumptions.

If I was buying a drive for my laptop, I would personally go with the Crucial MX300 for $130. I have a 850 EVO drive in my laptop, and while it is a generally universal recommened 'mainstream' drive, it also was on sale for around $135 when I bought it. The prices on the Samsung SSDs have gone up in price over this year.

EDIT:

I also just looked at the user manual for the laptop model you provided, and on page 83 it states:

The M.2 2280 slot supports both PCIe (NVMe) SSD and SATA SSD

EDIT OF THE EDIT:

I guess let me possibly take back the first 'edit'. What is the full model number of the laptop you are looking at? When I Googled "GL502", the first link was to Asus's site, but the model it took me to was the GL502VT. It looks like there are five different variations of that laptop, and one site that had a review on just the "GL502" said it supported PCIe M.2 drives, but didn't say anything about SATA.

 

[cobo6964]

I guess let me possibly take back the first 'edit'. What is the full model number of the laptop you are looking at? When I Googled "GL502", the first link was to Asus's site, but the model it took me to was the GL502VT. It looks like there are five different variations of that laptop, and one site that had a review on just the "GL502" said it supported PCIe M.2 drives, but didn't say anything about SATA.

The exact model is GL502VM, I found the manual for it and it does say it supports both.
I will go for the Crucial MX300 then, as the MyDigitalSSD BPX mentioned by @shabby is still $70 more expensive for about 45GB less storage space.

EDIT: Thanks for the replies, this helped a lot

 

[shabby]

n/m