Which SSD to keep

[Zekrom75]

Hi everyone, I just recently acquired 2 secondhand SSDs for my laptop. My laptop only has PCIE GEN 3 support and the 2 drives I bought were Sabrent Rocket (the NVME PCIE GEN 3 one) and WD Black SN770. I bought 2 because the seller only gave me the deal if I bought both of them. So now I’m planning to sell one and keep the other.

My arguement to keep the Sabrent is I don’t need a GEN 4 SSD for now and it has DRAM Cache but I know Sabrent can be unreliable and die very often (according to some Reddit posts but I don’t know to a full extent) and most importantly Sabrent won’t honor the warranty since I’m not the original buyer and doesn’t have the orginal box for it. The argument for the WD Black SN770 is that WD warranty can be slightly easier to deal with even with secondhand buying and without the original box (allegedly), but the drive can be a little bit excessive for my use case as a game drive. I wonder what are you guys thought and appreciate any feedback. 
 

Sorry in advance if I made any mistake, this is my first post on the forum.

[Tetras]

If it is going into a laptop you might want to check how hot they run and what their power usage is like.

[JoHeJo06]

40 minutes ago, Zekrom75 said:

Hi everyone, I just recently acquired 2 secondhand SSDs for my laptop. My laptop only has PCIE GEN 3 support and the 2 drives I bought were Sabrent Rocket (the NVME PCIE GEN 3 one) and WD Black SN770. I bought 2 because the seller only gave me the deal if I bought both of them. So now I’m planning to sell one and keep the other.

My arguement to keep the Sabrent is I don’t need a GEN 4 SSD for now and it has DRAM Cache but I know Sabrent can be unreliable and die very often (according to some Reddit posts but I don’t know to a full extent) and most importantly Sabrent won’t honor the warranty since I’m not the original buyer and doesn’t have the orginal box for it. The argument for the WD Black SN770 is that WD warranty can be slightly easier to deal with even with secondhand buying and without the original box (allegedly), but the drive can be a little bit excessive for my use case as a game drive. I wonder what are you guys thought and appreciate any feedback. 
 

Sorry in advance if I made any mistake, this is my first post on the forum.

check the power consumption in some data sheet or product page, some fast ssds like the kingston KC3000 that i have can draw up to 10 watts with heavy use and a couple watts with normal use. if it draws a lot of power, it can really have a noticeable decrease in battery life. (ssds with dram caches generally draw a significant amount more since they have the ram chip and are higher-end parts)

 

some other things you should test:

-make sure that they dont get too hot when gaming for long or doing another intense task.

-check the lifespand of the ssd, and look at the maximum online, modern ssds normally wont reach their maximum write capacity with normal use but it doesnt hurt to check.

 

you can use the hwinfo64 program to check all sensors and look at the remaining lifespand.

[podkall]

I only know that WD SN770 is just better overall, and it's only up to you if you need the reliability for a game SSD, if it's just for games technically the endurance doesn't really tank since game drives usually just install the games and then read them over and over again, and reading doesn't really wear the SSD

 

Sabrent failing would only be an inconvenience, losing game files means you just have to install the games again, unless the games stored some more important saves onto the same location they're installed at,

 

I understand the trickyness of the situation, the WD is double juicy, it's good but it'll also probably sell for noticeable price

[podkall]

@JoHeJo06 yeah I guess that's pretty good thing to keep in mind too

[Zekrom75]

1 hour ago, Tetras said:

If it is going into a laptop you might want to check how hot they run and what their power usage is like.

 

54 minutes ago, JoHeJo06 said:

check the power consumption in some data sheet or product page, some fast ssds like the kingston KC3000 that i have can draw up to 10 watts with heavy use and a couple watts with normal use. if it draws a lot of power, it can really have a noticeable decrease in battery life. (ssds with dram caches generally draw a significant amount more since they have the ram chip and are higher-end parts)

 

some other things you should test:

-make sure that they dont get too hot when gaming for long or doing another intense task.

-check the lifespand of the ssd, and look at the maximum online, modern ssds normally wont reach their maximum write capacity with normal use but it doesnt hurt to check.

 

you can use the hwinfo64 program to check all sensors and look at the remaining lifespand.

Yes, I already tested out the drive before buying it and it seems to run fine with the expected temp and bytes written are generally low (one has 0 bytes written). And for power draw the SN770 may be a little bit more sufficient without the DRAM on average (tho I could not find anything too concrete on this, I could only guess using a similar drive)

 

1 hour ago, podkall said:

I only know that WD SN770 is just better overall, and it's only up to you if you need the reliability for a game SSD, if it's just for games technically the endurance doesn't really tank since game drives usually just install the games and then read them over and over again, and reading doesn't really wear the SSD

 

Sabrent failing would only be an inconvenience, losing game files means you just have to install the games again, unless the games stored some more important saves onto the same location they're installed at,

 

I understand the trickyness of the situation, the WD is double juicy, it's good but it'll also probably sell for noticeable price

Yeah, I know right? The SN770 to me is better in terms of performance and support overall, but one thing the Sabrent has going for is the DRAM cache (tho I'm not even sure it matters that much, at least for a game drive) and I'm honestly not entirely sure if it would sell as well so I would have to think haha.