2.5" SSD for gaming?

SomeFknGuy

SomeFknGuy

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It seems like they've gone full speed towards the m.2 form factor for new drives. Can anyone give me any suggestions on a 2tb+ SSD in the 2.5 form factor? My motherboard only has a single M.2 slot and it's already being taken up by my OS drive. Looking to replace the last spinner drive in this machine with a SSD to improve load times on my games. This drive is still going strong but it's at 91k hours of power on time so not only is it slower than the current crop of SSDs it's also a ticking time bomb at this point. Any suggestions? I see plenty of teamforce, crucial, and samsung drives that fit the build...but I'm not sure how well received they are(the non samsung drives).
 
Top choices are the Samsung 870 Evo and Crucial MX500. Most anything else is most likely going to be DRAMless and/or QLC.

Does your system have a free PCIe slot? m.2 adapters for NVMe SSDs are another option.
 
If you just want it for storage and have a spare USB 3/C port you can always get a M.2 drive and a cheap enclosure.
 
Most Sata ssds will work fine, most will saturate sata III standards, firmwares are very mature by now, you can still get higher endurance drives, but really dont matter for your use. With this im just saying buy whatever is cheaper imo, in the past i used be a Samsung fan, today... i really dont care on sata ssds, even m.2, after i experience a ocuple of samsung failures, i been with WD, Skhynix, Inland, Kingston, Adata, Seagate, etc.
 
If you have free PCIe slots, you can get M.2 to PCIe adapters.
https://www.amazon.com/M-2-Adapter-Aluminum-Heatsink-Solution/dp/B07JJTVGZM
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The cards with multiple M.2 slots usually require that your motherboard supports Bifurcation, basically splitting a 16x slot into four 4x slots.
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silentcircuit said:
If you just want it for storage and have a spare USB 3/C port you can always get a M.2 drive and a cheap enclosure.
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External USB is never ideal for the type of load a game or OS uses with read / writes.

Even though a 2.5" SATAIII SSD caps out at 500MB/s, it is perfectly fine for games. sure and NVMe may load milliseconds faster, literally, but beyond that, load a game up and monitor the NVMe read/write speeds.. you wont ever see it using Gbps of usage...like ever....
 
MrGuvernment said:
Even though a 2.5" SATAIII SSD caps out at 500MB/s, it is perfectly fine for games. sure and NVMe may load milliseconds faster, literally, but beyond that, load a game up and monitor the NVMe read/write speeds.. you wont ever see it using Gbps of usage...like ever....
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True. But an NVMe unit is a bit more future-proof, and might be better when the time comes to upgrade to a new system. There's also tech like Direct Storage, which, while not yet widely implemented, AFAIK requires an NVMe SSD.
 
2.5 inch SATA SSD should be more than suffice to replace a HDD unless your use case is continuous recording of surveillance video.
However don‘t expect any improvements to them other than shift to QLC or PLC to lower cost. The market for 2.5 SATA is shrinking as notebooks shifted to m.2. Very few notebooks have 2.5inch bays anymore.

I also think M.2 NVMe SSD has also reached the same point. Further developments will be i.) shift to QLC, PLC ii.) shift from x4 to x2 or even x1 PCIe interfaces to lower cost. iii.) Shift to smaller 2230 size. Gen 3x4, Gen 4 x2 and Gen 5 x1 is probably all that’s is needed most of the m.2 market which is focused on client notebook and SFF. Those m.2 Gen 5 12000MBs read write SSDs are halo products for benchmarks only.
 
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Sadly my motherboard is 1 generation too old to support pcie bifurcation, at least according to asus. Looked into that. I do have a few pcie slots open that could use a single stick m2 drive though... Was hoping to go 2.5" just due to cost and the fact that my old cooler master cosmos case has a nifty 2.5 hold down right inside the window heh. A samsung 4tb is ~279 at my local worstbuy and I haven't found many 4tb m.2 drives from companies i typically trust in the same price range especially considering having to add 15-20 for a pcie adapter card. Might be the direction I have to go though. When it comes to the m.2 variants, other than your typical WD, Samsung, and Crucial(maybe?)...who are the trustworthy brands?
 
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SomeFknGuy said:
that looks like a solid option... I don't suppose getting windows to talk to that thing once it's in an adapter will be an issue would it?
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No, M.2 and U.2 are electrically compatible, it's just a physical adapter. Windows does not know or care the difference.
 
I am not sure how worth it is to try to future proof (outside maybe if you go for expensive 4TB options) if it involve an m.2 expansion, but they are cheap and can be useful for something else at some point.

By the time direcstorage-Nvme is a big deal versus direct storage SATA SSD on games, much better-larger nvme drive that what you would buy could have become quite cheap and if 2TB ssd still mean something you will still have a nice data drive, by the time sata port are no more your current choice will not have any relevance anymore being my guess.

The good brand with the best deal right now would be my favored option, if it is on a m.2 drive, adapter for single drive are small and cheap.
 
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Abula said:
Most Sata ssds will work fine, most will saturate sata III standards, firmwares are very mature by now, you can still get higher endurance drives, but really dont matter for your use. With this im just saying buy whatever is cheaper imo, in the past i used be a Samsung fan, today... i really dont care on sata ssds, even m.2, after i experience a ocuple of samsung failures, i been with WD, Skhynix, Inland, Kingston, Adata, Seagate, etc.
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I mean.... Higher endurance drives generally have longer data retention too. So it's not as simple as only considering one singular aspect of a product.
 
As already mentioned, Samsung 970 or Crucial MX500 are the usual SATA suspects. If you want to pinch some pennies, the Team GX2 or CX2 have worked for me.
 
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I got a 2TB SATA MX500 to copy my 1TB Steam NVMe (Corsair) to. I needed the NVMe/slot for something else more important so moved my games to SATA. I havent noticed much of a difference to be honest.
 
I just came to make USB feel better about itself.

USB 3.0 is kinda negligible vs SATA depending whether your saturating tue bus with anything else.

USB 3.1 has considerably higher throughput, although I can't speak to any latency differences between it and SATA. Granted, USB and SATA are technically both serial buses FWIW.

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MikeTrike said:
I just came to make USB feel better about itself.

USB 3.0 is kinda negligible vs SATA depending whether your saturating tue bus with anything else.

USB 3.1 has considerably higher throughput, although I can't speak to any latency differences between it and SATA. Granted, USB and SATA are technically both serial buses FWIW.

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how much CPU overhead is required for the USB to maintain that 5-10Gbps? I really don't want another dongle hanging off of this box heh
 
SomeFknGuy said:
how much CPU overhead is required for the USB to maintain that 5-10Gbps? I really don't want another dongle hanging off of this box heh
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No clue, I'd just use the SATA3 option... 750MB/s peak throughput seems sufficient... Obviously that depends on the max the SATA SSD can dish out...

You've got options.
SATA3
USB 3.0+
PCI-E NVMe card
 
MikeTrike said:
No clue, I'd just use the SATA3 option... 750MB/s peak throughput seems sufficient... Obviously that depends on the max the SATA SSD can dish out...

You've got options.
SATA3
USB 3.0+
PCI-E NVMe card
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I did the u.2 card and that 7.7 micron drive. All in for ~340. Couldn't get anywhere close to that with a standard m.2/adapter or SATA 2.5 drive... I'm curious how the setup will bench...not that it really matters...I only want it to load games faster heh
 
Apparently FedEx hates me... The drive was supposed to be shipped 2 day from Brownsville and it disappeared in fort worth... I hate my life. Should've had it installed and running yesterday but noooo. At least the u.2 adapter card came in all but next day. It's sad when Amazon does that good... And scary
 
That sucks! Interested to see how it works when you get the drive. What U.2 adapter did you get?
 
bluestang said:
That sucks! Interested to see how it works when you get the drive. What U.2 adapter did you get?
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Ended up with this one, not the cheapest but had good reviews if you trust the bots on amazon... Now if the drive will just show up...
 
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Kinda had a similar issue to OP a few years back and took the strats suggested by a lot of folks above.

For "older games" that I want to load fast (and are <10GB) I have a 500GB 970 EVO in one of these adapters. It's hamstrung a bit because I'm running it in the third PCI-E x16 slot (I think it's 2.0 x4, so speeds limited to 1600MB/s), but that's fine for what's needed. For documents & media I have a 1TB 860 EVO, which is obviously much slower but gets rid of the need for a spinner.
 
Drive came in today. Got it installed, fired up macrium and am cloning my game drive over to it. Will get a benchmark off of the drive once everything is copied over and I have a chance to nuke the spinny drive from rotation until i can format it and get it running as an unpack drive for...err...linux isos...
micron.jpg
 
So...2 hours into cloning everything over and I'm only at 50%... Might get to use the drive tonight...jesus
 
Well...4 hours in and finally done. Everything has been swapped over, data integrity looks good. Now to the benches...The difference is outstanding just from a pure throughput perspective. I'll chime in later after I get a few rounds of gaming in!



The old drive was a WD Black 2TB drive. Old unit but it's been a work horse...check these power on hours!

wdblack.jpg



Here's the bench for the WD:
wd bench.jpg


And now the bench for the micron drive:
micron bench.jpg
 
Might be worth checking if PCIe 2.0 x 4 link rate is expected. I guess this is a x99 board?
 
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On my Asus X99 board, even with a 40 lane CPU its pure mental gymnastics working out the slot/m.2/USB3 combinations.

If you plug A into B then C no longer works and D becomes x2 and E will...and so on. As far as I know nothing drops to PCIe 2.0 on my board, it's all PCI 3.0. The x4 slot will drop to x1 if I use a certain combo when there is a R in the month. I have used it that way for a while as it still ran a drive at around 500MBps iiirc which is still usable.
 
evilmedic said:
Might be worth checking if PCIe 2.0 x 4 link rate is expected. I guess this is a x99 board?
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Crosshair 6 Hero, x370 chipset. It's in the bottom 2.0 x4 slot... I thought about trying to work it out to use the 3.0 slot next to the gpu but was afraid the heat soak would become a problem. might try it just for shits to see what it does, but i'm doing 10x the throughput and seat of the pants feel is already night and day better than the old setup.
 
SomeFknGuy said:
Crosshair 6 Hero, x370 chipset. It's in the bottom 2.0 x4 slot... I thought about trying to work it out to use the 3.0 slot next to the gpu but was afraid the heat soak would become a problem. might try it just for shits to see what it does, but i'm doing 10x the throughput and seat of the pants feel is already night and day better than the old setup.
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You can also get an x4 to U.2 adapter cable.

https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-SFF-...006&sprefix=pcie+x4+to+u.2+cable,aps,161&th=1
 
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SomeFknGuy said:
Drive came in today. Got it installed, fired up macrium and am cloning my game drive over to it. Will get a benchmark off of the drive once everything is copied over and I have a chance to nuke the spinny drive from rotation until i can format it and get it running as an unpack drive for...err...linux isos...
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I was using a 6TB WD Blue as my download and unpack drive for my Linux ISO's but had to switch to my System drive as that is the only SSD in the machine when I upgraded to 2 Gbps internet.
Downloads hit nearly 300MB/s and my drive only did 150 or so.
 
So...after a few days of use(still in the 2.0 slot) the seat of the pants difference is insane... Load times are cut by significantly more than half. With WarThunder and BF2042 I would usually join games and they would already be starting on a new map load. Now I can join in and the game will be loaded and I'd still have 15-20 seconds to select loadouts etc before the game starts. Definitely worth the ~$350! Now...to save up and buy some drives to upgrade my NAS...40tb and already hitting my 80% threshold warnings. Anyone have any leads on some 10+tb drives cheap?
 
I finally replaced all my 5 year old Samsung 960 Pro / 970 Evo SSD with 2.5 inch SSD's and ran some testing with crystal disk mark on the new drives.


Micron 7400 Pro 7.68TB (PCIe 4.0 x 4)
- Q1T1 Read performance isn't particularly impressive. But this is not surprise as the controller + firmware isn't really optimized it.
- Write performance is very good.
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Samsung 870Evo 4TB (SATA)
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Intel 905P (PCIe 3.0 x 4)
- Results as expected given its Gen 3 device.
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Great, now I'm really kicking myself for missing the news on that Micron/Crucial 7400 Pro deal.

Those numbers are quite phenomenal at that $/TB ratio, barring the Q1T1 for obvious reasons, but if you want high Q1T1 performance, you buy 3D XPoint/Optane.
 
NamelessPFG said:
Great, now I'm really kicking myself for missing the news on that Micron/Crucial 7400 Pro deal.

Those numbers are quite phenomenal at that $/TB ratio, barring the Q1T1 for obvious reasons, but if you want high Q1T1 performance, you buy 3D XPoint/Optane.
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I believe they did restock, so it’s worth the waitlist.
 
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