I need to switch to SSD, my hard drive grinds forever and causing my computer to basically pause until it finishes grinding, and especially after a prolonged period of inactivity the computer needs several minutes to respond normally…
I notice huge variation on prices for SSD for a given capacity. I can’t use M2 SSD because my motherboard for some reason lack slots for it, but for sata SSD price varies by as much as 200%.
Does it matter which ones I buy?
For SATA drives, I can recommend Crucial MX500.
I’ve had 3 running 24/7, for several years, without any problems or failure.
In reality, any of the name brands will be just fine. SSDs are very reliable these days.
If you read reviews online, most will tell you to stay away from drives without DRAM (Kingston S400 or Crucial BX500, for example). But, if you’re a light user and on a tighter budget, a DRAM less one will be fine.
I’m looking at this one:
It seems to have the lowest cost/gb out there because I was somehow under some impression that I could get 2TB SSD for less than 2000.
Guanhua seems to have a price premium for some reason.
No really no, Brand names, Transcend/Kingston/Crucial/WD/Seagate will be better and probably more reliable.
We picked up a bunch of cheap TEAM CX2’s a few months ago, they seem to be fine to me.
As long as it’s a major brand name you should be good… If it sounds like something you can get from Alibaba/Wish, I highly suggest you don’t. Although Samsung laptops are trash, their SSDs are rock solid and I have used some Evo drives, but the other brands mentioned above are good too.
I bought a TEAM 2T SSD.
Had to reinstall windows from scratch as I heard cloning hard drives are unreliable.
However I left my HDD connected as I did that and as soon as I removed the HDD the computer wouldn’t boot (because somehow all the boot data was still written into the HDD.
Anyways after all the reinstalling, I’ve started playing Cyberpunk, RDR2, etc., games that were really slow under the HDD despite the 3060ti and all that, and now everything loads FAST. I’m using a SATA SSD however.
Is nvme much faster in reality? I know they can read like about 3 gigabytes per second, which for SATA tops out at about 500mb/second. Someone told me that in practice nvme is only slightly faster than sata, and that transfer speed only matter if you are copying files…
Guess I got here a bit late but for posterity, XPG SX8000 pro is a great SSD with a very good price and you will support a domestic product as well.
Yes, NWME does have a faster bus rate. SATA SSD drives are actually held up by the SATA buses they use on the motherboard. NWME there is no such bottleneck.
In reality, you might experience a few more frames per second driving at speed through Night City on Cyberpunk, but it’s not going to be a “jizz in your pants” spectacular moment.
Seagate HDD’s used to be a nightmare, and an old Western Digital hard disk of mine fried the other day. Smoke and everything.
I replaced a lot of my stuff with refurbished Sandisk SSDs, they work quite well and were cheap. I even replaced the HDD in my PS4 with a refurbished Sandisk SSD, but this caused some instability in the games, I’m assuming the faster data delivery mechanisms resulted in some bullshit race conditions or something.
Someone basically told me that nvme speed is really only useful if you are copying files… but other factors contribute to SSD’s speed and that transfer speed isn’t really THAT important… it has to do with latency, seek speed and all that (off of those are obviously very slow on HDD’s)
I have a XPG power supply so that it can run with the 3060Ti I got, because my previous power supply can’t really supply the juice needed.
Transfer speed is the new bottleneck, but its a marginal gain.
It’s like how laptop hard drives are substantially slower because they rotate at 5400rpm, whereas desktop ones run at 7200rpm and therefore still have tolerable performance. Probably the same kind of difference between SATA and NVME.
I’m using a desktop with HDDs right now.
Regardless of what hardware you have, Cyberpunk 2077 will never run as well as GTA5 on an Xbox 360 did.
I can’t use nvme because my motherboard for some reason lacks slots for it… can’t ever understand why.
So for me to use nvme I must replace the motherboard with ones that have M2 slots. That’s going to cost more with no performance increase.
Cyberpunk 2077 now runs very well on my computer with everything on max.
The only “game” my computer has trouble with is a Unreal Engine 5 demo that I found, when everything’s on max (basically the entire thing looks photorealistic) the computer struggles, but that mode essentially requires a RTX 4090.
Yeah, not worth it.
The sequel to CP77 is being written in Unreal Engine 5, so I’d like to see what hardware they blame on that layer-cake of inefficiency.
Before when I turn on the computer it would “boot” pretty fast but the HDD had to grind away for at least a good 10 minutes before the computer is even usable at all (before the HDD finished grinding the PC is essentially unresponsive). I told guys at guanhua about this and they said the HDD could have been broken.
I had a Seagate Barracuda HDD that I bought back in 2019, and it had been my OS drive until now.
I feel the only real benefit a nvme would have for me is it can keep the case relatively unobstructed with cables and such. That and Guanhua seems to really favor nvme ssd, because they aren’t selling many sata SSD at all (they only have Micron brand ones).
That and the HDD was causing issues, like constant stutter as the HDD grinds away to load stuff, and in CP2077 it was causing bugs as things loaded too slowly, and I’ve read articles out there saying this is why Cyberpunk seems buggy, as the game really requires SSD.
CDPR has updated their system requirement saying it requires a SSD now.
Sounds like Fast Boot/Hibernate taking ages, or some disk formatting issue which causes it to have to check its journal each time. Either way, it wasn’t being shut down correctly somehow.
SATA SSD is a retrofit for older platform machines, NVMe is better, I just don’t think it would be a cost effective difference for you because you seem to complain of money trouble, but also as I suggested towards earlier, Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t developed very well so they have made the minimum requirements for users higher due to their really inefficient code.
Yea honestly I wonder if them moving to unreal engine 5 will help at all.
But unreal engine 5 seems fairly polished, as if you are able to tweak its setting you can achieve good, close to photorealistic rendering in real time even with a 3060ti.
Since at much higher settings the processing power required goes up a lot with very minimal improvement in eye candy…
One more thing…
Restarted the computer after everything (or most things) are loaded.
SSD still “grinds away” (it’s a silent grind) but instead of taking over 10-15 minutes before the computer is usable, now it is usable within a minute.
nvme drives seems to be cheaper than SATA now, but too bad my motherboard don’t have M2 slots.
HDD’s have to be defragmented from time to time, so that the file chunks are not scattered around too much. If you did not do that, then the reading performance will degrade over time.
This is not an issue with SSD’s. They don’t need to be defragmented.
I think the SSD would still technically have fragmented memory (it wouldn’t be contiguous just by the nature of deletions) but the fact that every storage block is accessible at the same time nullifies the detrimental impact of fragmentation.
I suspect back in the “formative” years of computing, some optimisations were added to file system formats (such as journaling) to try to mitigate against the fragmentation issue for HDDs, I doubt with the invention of solid state they’ve taken these optimisations out (which would probably be effectively uselessly executed procedures). I mean, NTFS hasn’t changed for decades.
Thing is on a harddrive fragmentation is bad because the read/write heads must physically access where the data is and that takes time, and it’s much faster to read the file if it were all in one place.
SSD has no such problem as it doesn’t need to physically access the location of the data, it’s all electronic. In fact defrag would be detrimental to SSD because you are just writing to it needlessly which wears them out.
Nothing to do with file system.
