SSD pricing, bigger or faster?

silk186

silk186

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 26, 2008
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I missed the Samsung 970 Evo for £90 during the Black Friday say at Amazon.
It's on for £90 again today and I'm thinking if I should go for it or wait a bit longer.
My system is in my signature. I recently upgraded from an i5-2500k z68 platform to an i7-6700k z170 with an M.2 port.
My current OS drive is a Samsung 830 256GB which gets full pretty easily. Ideally, I would go for a fast 1TB M.2 as an upgrade.

The Samsung 970 evo is on sale for £90 for a second time.
Samsung 860 Evo 1TB was on for £100 a week ago.

Are prices expected to keep coming down soon? I would like to get a decent M.2 NMVe 1TB for somewhere around £120.
 
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ADATA SX8200 imo its a great drive for the money, see for how much you can get it on your region.
 
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Yeah in the UK the 500GB 970 is £91 and the ADATA is £107. I got the 970 500GB for £89 about a month ago for my other half.

The ADATA is a great drive but some companies havent been as on the ball with their pricing of late.

I don't think prices will drop too much more. Maybe another 10-15%?

Create a 'Storage' Wishlist on Amazon of all the SSD stuff you fancy and wait for the notifications...
 
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Prices have been falling, and still are, how far and how fast that happens is anyone's guess however. With that said, my choice would be size, most brand name SATA SSDs are great for normal use, and you will never notice that it's slower in benchmarks. I have everything from early gen super cheap SanDisk SSDs to SATA Evos, to 2TB Micron, to NMVe Evos. If you put them all in front of me, I would be hard pressed to tell which was which. Game loading is the same speed on the 860 and 970, and the cheap SanDisk boots the quickest. Unless you are using a program you KNOW will make use of the 970's speed, it's just a "nice to have" thing. Honestly, doing it again, I would have gone with a 2TB SATA, over the 1TB 970 for more game space.
 
Honestly if it isn't a boot drive or game drive you won't notice the difference. Running apps like office adobe will not show much difference at all or being used as a data store will show no difference for normal users.
 
It will replace my Samsung 830 as my OS/game drive.
I have found that office can become bogged down when working with very large documents.
It would be nice to get a boost in speed and capacity.
 
I have a 970 Evo 500GB that will arrive tomorrow. The 970 was on sale for £90 and the 960 is £100.
I'm not going to open it yet as I have until the end of January to return it is I can find a better deal.
I don't have any free SATA ports so I can only consider M.2 drives.
I will only return the 970 if I can find a good deal on a decent 1TB drive that is faster than my 830.
 
silk186 said:
Are prices expected to keep coming down soon? I would like to get a decent M.2 NMVe 1TB for somewhere around £120.
Click to expand...

Always. 128GB SSD's are $20 in the states and 64GB drives are barely even findable (outside of Optane drives). I don't think they will go lower than $20, but the capacity that is the lowest price point will keep increasing. 240GB aren't too far behind in the $40 range.

It's actually quite shocking how quickly SSD's have come down in prices. Compared to the history of hard drive prices, the prices for SSD's have been in freefall almost their whole life.
 
Keep an eye out for the Western Digital Black NVME drives. After I bought my Samsung 970 EVO 1tb, I found the WD Blacks on sale for even less and the performance is on par (maybe even a little bit better IIRC than the EVOs) but for less $$$.
 
I didn't find any great deals so installed the 970 Evo 500gb tonight. The only hassle was setting up boot priority in the BIOS.
The drive didn't even show up under the EZBIOS. This will do me for many years. I will upgrade the 830 256GB to something bigger when SATA drives come down more in price and I need a large drive for games.
 
I've been running the M.2 for a day now. I'm in the final stages of editing my thesis so I migrated the OS from the Samsung 839 256GB.
After I submit, I will make a fresh instal on the M.2 and migrate appdata from the 830 and format it as a games drive.

I've read that I should not notice a difference between my 830 and the 970 Evo outside of benchmarks. The main reason I upgraded was to improve responsiveness and I have noticed an obvious difference. I've migrated the OS drive so it a fair test with identical drivers and software. The 830 is 73% full so that should not affect performance either. I noticed a difference in boot speed, which is irrelevant. I notice a difference in the responsiveness of Chrome, opening documents, saving, printing to PDF. The difference isn't major, but it removed all the annoying little hangs that were bothering me. The difference is not even close to the move from HDD to SATA SSD.

TLDR; I upgraded from a Samsung 830 to a 970 Evo and my system is more responsive. I recommend NVMe for an OS drive.
 
I finally pulled the trigger on an 860 Evo 1TB drive. I have an 850 Evo 250 for my OS drive. I was thinking about getting a 1 or 2 TB HDD but I wanted a better speed to load games from my storage drive. If you have the money get the biggest size SSD you can get within reason. The m.2s will always be faster for the larger file transfers, I was just in the market to change my storage drive space and get some performance increases from HDD to SSD.
 
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