Question Return SSD drives and wait?

Nov 26, 2005
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310
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Picked up a 256GB & 512GB Samsung Pro 960 almost a month ago in anticipation of using them for a new rig. I'm waiting for the Dark Hero board to become available and a lot of people want it: making me think it'll be a while before I get one. I haven't opened up the SSDs yet, and have till Dec 13th to return them for a full refund. I was going to use the 256 as the boot drive and the 512 as a temp storage drive. Now I'm thinking of going NVMe for a boot drive, after reading the review on the Samsung 980 Pro. My dilemma is every time my boot drive has crashed and been unrecoverable I've had to swap in/out another SSD drive in order to get back up and running: then recover files from the crashed boot drive in slave mode. This has worked fine the past 10yrs as i've had backup/storage SSD drives that I could swap in and out. That's why I was going the SATA SSD route with the new build as it's super easy to do and easily accessible. Should I go the NVMe boot drive route and if so is the 980 Pro 500GB a good decision? It's on sale right now for $129 at my local MC. Or should I take back the SATA SSD drives I bought and just wait till the board I want comes in??

Nice to see the forums back up and running,

Thanks :)
 

sdifox

No Lifer
Sep 30, 2005
94,654
14,928
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Nvme gets my vote. There are cheaper brands that perform well. I mean I paid 135 + tax for a AData sx8200 pro 1TB in July 2019.

Backup your data to at least two external storage location. With OneDrive you have third copy. Just put in new drive, install fresh and copy back your data. Otherwise you are just wasting time.

 
Last edited:

dlerious

Golden Member
Mar 4, 2004
1,769
717
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Nvme gets my vote. There are cheaper brands that perform well. I mean I paid 135 + tax for a AData sx8200 pro 1TB in July 2019.

Backup your data to at least two external storage location. With OneDrive you have third copy. Just put in new drive, install fresh and copy back your data. Otherwise you are just wasting time.

I don't know if Tom's Hardware thinks the same about that Adata drive now.
 

MalVeauX

Senior member
Dec 19, 2008
653
176
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Heya,

You already swapped to the NVMe, so you're set. That's a good move.

To change things up, do incremental backups to an external SATA drive (or even an internal SATA drive) from your NVMe. So that if your NVMe were to go bad, you have a SATA drive with a backup image on it that you can image over to a new drive of your choice. Get all the benefits of your NVMe and a cheap little 2TB~4TB HDD could be internal just as a backup point that happens when you're not using your system (like over-night, etc). Or manually do it, when you feel like it. You could do entire disc image output so that restoring is super simple. You could do this to an internal SSD/HDD via SATA, or external via USB3 (or 3.1 / 3.2), external SATA (eSATA) or via NAS. You could do it as often as daily, or weekly, or monthly or just whenever you please. You can re-image your backup to any disc regardless of its capacity (assuming it has enough capacity on the low end which everything would) and regardless of it being NVMe, SATA, etc.

Very best,
 

ArisVer

Golden Member
Mar 6, 2011
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While a 250GB (or a 500GB) drive can be used as a boot drive, today going less than a TB seems unnatural. Prices are cheap enough and if you are playing games, they tend to be large. I am using half of a TB in my "new" approximately 1 year old rig (no games). I can easily trim it down to half if I want to, but why bother?
 

aleader

Senior member
Oct 28, 2013
502
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These are great, and are much cheaper than the so-called 'high-end' drives. I still think the 1TB drives should be $100 or less by now, but for whatever reason, they're still not. 5 year warranty, plenty fast enough for anything you'll do:

https://www.newegg.ca/western-digital-blue-sn550-nvme-1tb/p/N82E16820250135?Item=N82E16820250135

I've been using these ones for a while now. I also have a Crucial MX 500, Samsung 860 EVO, and WD Blue 1TB SATA SSD's and I've never had any issues. For that matter, I also have 2 old Kingston 120GB V300 drives (my entry into SSD's) that still work perfectly. I honestly can't tell the difference between any of them when loading games or booting to windows.