Looking for ssd , which one to buy?

[vignesh.vijay]

Hi,
I have many sata hdd and it sucks to say the least, loading samples takes time, converting midi to audio has a lot of issues, etc.
I am looking to buy an ssd to solve some of my problems. Which one would you recommend me buying out of these? I am looking to store my libraries on my hard drive and load/use them.
https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/me ... te-drives/

[rageix]

Samsung makes very good SSDs. I've had 3-4 of them now and never an issue. The Samsung EVO line is fine for most people, so just pick whatever size you want.

[Shabdahbriah]

+1 ^^^

[vignesh.vijay]

whats the difference between EVO and NVME? Is NVMe better than EVO?
I dont see a significant price difference for 2 TB

[rageix]

The EVO comes in NVMe and non-NVMe flavor.

"Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a storage interface introduced in 2013. “Non-Volatile” means the storage isn’t erased when your computer reboots, while “Express” refers to the fact that the data travels over the PCI Express (PCIe) interface on your computer’s motherboard."

Basically these days motherboards have specialized M.2 slots that you can plug an SSD into. If your mothboard has an open M.2 slot then you want the NVMe version (they look like this). If your motherboard is older and doesn't have an M.2 slot or all M.2 slots are filled then you want an SATA version (which looks like this).

The SATA versions are a lot slower but still pretty fast. SATA is 560MB/s Seq. Read and 530MB/s Seq. Write. M.2 version is 3,400MB/s Seq. Read and 2,500MB/s Seq. Write. So the M.2 version is ~5-6x faster if your system can support it.

They both install differently as well.

I'm assuming you are on PC. If you are on Mac chances are none of this is actually relevant and you would have to get an external one that plugins in via thunderbolt or buy an M.2 enclosure that connects via thunderbolt and put an M.2 version in there.

[SantaClaus]

As long as you avoid the DRAMless/QLC combo, you're fine. Also, keep in mind that the faster an NVME is, the hotter it gets, and some can reach crazy temperatures.

[jonljacobi]

whats the difference between EVO and NVME? Is NVMe better than EVO?
I dont see a significant price difference for 2 TB

EVO is the branding. It's not a technology like NVMe. I review these things for PCWorld. To be perfectly honest, even the 2nd tier brands will be fine for most purposes. The main difference is in write speed, not read speed which is nearly universally quick. And then it's mostly sustained writes that will suffer.

The synthetic benchmarks will describe a greater difference because they do their own direct I/O, but that difference largely disappears in real life due to the operating systems antique disk I/O.

And SATA doesn't suck. It's obviously not as fast as NVMe, but don't expect the jump you got moving from HDDs to SATA with the move from SATA to most NVMe.

If you can, over purchase on capacity. Writes will slow as they fill up due to less NAND available for secondary caching.

[AdvancedFollower]

As long as you avoid the DRAMless/QLC combo, you're fine. Also, keep in mind that the faster an NVME is, the hotter it gets, and some can reach crazy temperatures.

DRAMless isn't even that much of an issue any more with Host Memory Buffer support in most modern NVMe drives. PCI-E devices (which is basically what NVMe is) can directly access system RAM without involving the CPU and set aside a small amount of the system RAM. It was more of an issue with SATA SSD's that had to use their RAM to store the entire block lookup table in order to emulate and present themselves as a regular mechanical drive to the host system. DRAMless SATA SSD's perform horribly, since every block lookup has to be read from flash rather than RAM, and they have lower endurance and worse wear levelling.

Of course onboard DRAM still helps with heavier workloads (large servers with IO heavy tasks or many concurrent users), provided the drive has enough of of it to make a difference, but the difference isn't as significant as it used to be.