Help me pick a 2 TB SATA SSD

[SsystemXx]

Any recommendations for an "affordable" 2 TB SATA SSD? I'm on X79 and can't run NVMe SSDs (and don't want to do the add-in card thing if it's even possible). Currently have a 256 GB Crucial m4 for OS/programs and a 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Black for games/pictures/downloads/files/etc. Want to just put everything on a single drive to simplify everything and also have games on a SSD.

Did some quick research and it seems the 2 TB Crucial MX500 fits the bill. The 2 TB Samsung 870 QVO is pretty much the same price but according to what I read it should be "inferior" to the MX500 because it is QLC-based. How would the MX500 compare to the more expensive 2 TB 870 EVO?

Any thoughts/recommendations?

 

[Denpepe]

I would not use a QLC drive as an OS drive, it's fine for games and stuff, QLC are not great at writing data, they are fine for reading though.

I for one like to keep my OS on a smaller drive that can easily be formatted/replaced it needed while I use bigger drives for storage, find it easier.

Both Crucial and Samsung are among the better brands for SSD's so you should be fine there.

 

[likeman]

if you not planning on having 2 disks

get a 2TB SSD and when your setting up the ssd set it to 200GB for OS/base programs and whatever is left for second partition and point all your games/steam type clients to that (if you don't want to reload you can clone the OS but set it to 200GB size and then copy the hdd to the remaining 1.6TB ssd space)

only thing i have noticed that samsung does do TRIM command (and secure erase) are done as an background garbage collection task (immediately accepts the TRIM and says its done Trimming, but it's actually doing it in the background so you wont notice it at all)
my MX500 commits TRIM right away there is an impact but not really noticeable (unless i am looking at it)
my 1TB NVME XG4 commits TRIM Very badly (does it as an higher then normal internal disk IO so overrides system read/write IO) and hangs the OS up if i have deleted a large amount of data in the past (or i have less then 200GB free)
for QLC ssds, once you filled the SLC cache drops to half the speed of a HDD (samsung does not provide much SLC space on there QVO SSD installing a game can trigger it and takes about 10 minutes for it to clear out the SLC cache back to QLC)

mx500 gives a lot of feedback as to the state of the ssd (smart attributes, when the SSD is having problems you usually get RAIN events in there recovering lost data due to nand failure most likely)