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Question Recommendations for 2TB 2.5 inch SSD boot drive?

J

jamesdsimone

Golden Member
Looking for a recommendation for a SSD drive. It will be a boot drive. Newegg has a bunch of brands I've never heard of. I had a Team Group thumb drive go bad after a couple of uses so I avoid them.
 
I'd still lean heavily towards a PCIe 3.0 NVME drive. You won't get a 4 TB TLC-based drive, but you can still find a lot of 1-2TB ones for boot purposes.

If you do want to go SATA, basically just find a TLC-based drive from a reputable brand and you should be fine (Samsung, Mushkin, Team, SK Hynix, Intel, WD...).
 
I picked up a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro nvme drive recently for like $120. There are cheaper drives but Samsung's hasn't made a lot of lemons over the years.

If you're insistent on SATA, then something like the Crucial BX500 or MX500 is a solid choice. The MX is faster than the BX, but the BX is cheaper. Both will be limited by the SATA bus, but the BX will struggle a bit w/heavy write workloads. Either one will be in the $90-110 range.

Crucial and Samsung are probably two of the brands I trust the most for this sort of thing. They both make their own NAND (Crucial is a subsidiary of Micron) and Samsung makes their own controllers, so they tend to put a bit more effort into making a product that doesn't suck.
 
If you're insistent on SATA, then something like the Crucial BX500 or MX500 is a solid choice. The MX is faster than the BX, but the BX is cheaper. Both will be limited by the SATA bus, but the BX will struggle a bit w/heavy write workloads. Either one will be in the $90-110 range.

I ended up going with the Crucial BX500 from Amazon. From what I saw on my searches the MX500 didn't give that much more performance for the price. I don't expect any heavy write workloads just day to day computing and gaming. They were 89.99 but I used the leave the item in the shopping cart trick. The price dropped to 86.99 and then they gave me 11.00 off on each. One is going in my new 5900x/6950 build and when I get around to upgrading my old FX8350 I will use the other.
 
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jamesdsimone said:
If you're insistent on SATA, then something like the Crucial BX500 or MX500 is a solid choice. The MX is faster than the BX, but the BX is cheaper. Both will be limited by the SATA bus, but the BX will struggle a bit w/heavy write workloads. Either one will be in the $90-110 range.

I ended up going with the Crucial BX500 from Amazon. From what I saw on my searches the MX500 didn't give that much more performance for the price. I don't expect any heavy write workloads just day to day computing and gaming. They were 89.99 but I used the leave the item in the shopping cart trick. The price dropped to 86.99 and then they gave me 11.00 off on each. One is going in my new 5900x/6950 build and when I get around to upgrading my old FX8350 I will use the other.
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Cool beans.

Just FYI, when I say "heavy write workloads" that includes the big dump of data most people do when they get a new drive and copy a bunch of data from their old drive. Depending on the SSD in question, after the first few dozen GB get written at "normal" speeds, it may get pretty slow (like, 50MB/sec or so) - don't get frustrated, just grab a cup of tea and let it go. Speeds will recover after the drive has a few minutes to sit and do internal housekeeping, flush its write cache, etc.
 
dave_the_nerd said:
If you're insistent on SATA, then something like the Crucial BX500 or MX500 is a solid choice. The MX is faster than the BX, but the BX is cheaper.
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BX500 (in all its many versions) is DRAM-less. Also some BX500 are TLC, some are QLC. So better avoid this one as the boot drive.

One MX500 2TB version comes with only 512MB of DRAM cache (the rest of MX500 2TB versions have 2GB DRAM cache).

There was also a certain batch of MX500 drives with a high failure rate.

Because of this shoddy practice of selling different products (with important differences) under the same name, I would avoid Crucial SSDs on principle.
 
Reason for the SATA drive? Your motherboard would have M.2 NVMe x 2. I second the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB. Crazy cheap. To think that I spent $299 when it first came out.
 
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