Best Laptop HDD and mSata SSD?

[bhagatneel15]

Hello,

Planning to get a P34w V3 from gigabyte, just wondering what brands to go with for my storage (128gb msata and 1tb hdd)

I am assuming the generic, nameless drives that come stock are usually not high quality?

[Jambls]

it does not have to be samsung. samsung is still good but crucial, mushkin and sandisk are all good. for the hard drive, western digital is the best.

[D2ultima]

You are looking for M.2 and not mSATA. For M.2 I suggest a Plextor or Crucial. Samsung drives get way too hot for me to recommend them to anyone, and they DO thermal throttle after a certain point.

 

Yes, I just said a SSD thermal throttles. This is the future.

[bhagatneel15]

You are looking for M.2 and not mSATA. For M.2 I suggest a Plextor or Crucial. Samsung drives get way too hot for me to recommend them to anyone, and they DO thermal throttle after a certain point.

 

Yes, I just said a SSD thermal throttles. This is the future.

http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5325#sp

Gigabyte specifies msata I think

For mSata would you still recommend Plextor or Crucial?

And what would you say are the trusted brands for hdd? 

Thanks!

[D2ultima]

http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5325#sp

Gigabyte specifies msata I think

For mSata would you still recommend Plextor or Crucial?

And what would you say are the trusted brands for hdd? 

Thanks!

I went and had a look and apparently this is one of the very few laptops to keep mSATA and not replace it with the M.2 slot, so you're right. Nice job! I shouldn't have assumed; that was my bad. See, technically "M.2" is still "mSATA" tech; just using PCI/e lanes, as opposed to SATA II or SATA III lanes. So some places don't actually know what they're talking about and say "mSATA" anyway.

 

Anyway, I wholeheartedly recommend the Plextor M6M brand of SSDs for mSATA. Samsung... if you can get a 850 Pro or 850 Evo, go for it. I can't recommend the 840 Evo, and my 840 Pro is worse than my Plextor M6M, so Plextor wholeheartedly takes the victory there.

 

As for Crucial, I don't know. The BX100 (I think BX200 is M.2 only; I could be wrong) and M600 are available, but I haven't done extensive research about them. I can say though that the Plextor drive will run quite cool which could help with the ambient temperature in that machine, as it is not a machine capable of stressing the CPU or GPU heavily without thermal throttling on either chip, so the cooler the air inside of it is, the better the edge you can get.

 

For HDD, if you can find a HGST Travelstar 7K1000 you're set. Best HDD I've seen. Like, period. I'm sure some of the better enterprise drives on desktops are better, but it's top quality for the notebook market.

[bhagatneel15]

I went and had a look and apparently this is one of the very few laptops to keep mSATA and not replace it with the M.2 slot, so you're right. Nice job! I shouldn't have assumed; that was my bad. See, technically "M.2" is still "mSATA" tech; just using PCI/e lanes, as opposed to SATA II or SATA III lanes. So some places don't actually know what they're talking about and say "mSATA" anyway.

 

Anyway, I wholeheartedly recommend the Plextor M6M brand of SSDs for mSATA. Samsung... if you can get a 850 Pro or 850 Evo, go for it. I can't recommend the 840 Evo, and my 840 Pro is worse than my Plextor M6M, so Plextor wholeheartedly takes the victory there.

 

As for Crucial, I don't know. The BX100 (I think BX200 is M.2 only; I could be wrong) and M600 are available, but I haven't done extensive research about them. I can say though that the Plextor drive will run quite cool which could help with the ambient temperature in that machine, as it is not a machine capable of stressing the CPU or GPU heavily without thermal throttling on either chip, so the cooler the air inside of it is, the better the edge you can get.

 

For HDD, if you can find a HGST Travelstar 7K1000 you're set. Best HDD I've seen. Like, period. I'm sure some of the better enterprise drives on desktops are better, but it's top quality for the notebook market.

 

Yeah I WISH Gigabyte would switch to M.2, that would open my ssd options up a little bit..I have been eyeing the 850 EVO but the reviews make it look a little sketch..incompatibilities with drivers have given a few people lots of issues, while others have no complaints at all. I won't be ordering this for another month or so, so hopefully everything will get smoothed out.

[D2ultima]

Yeah I WISH Gigabyte would switch to M.2, that would open my ssd options up a little bit..I have been eyeing the 850 EVO but the reviews make it look a little sketch..incompatibilities with drivers have given a few people lots of issues, while others have no complaints at all. I won't be ordering this for another month or so, so hopefully everything will get smoothed out.

M.2 is in its infancy and I SUGGEST avoiding it like the plague. What I said about SSDs overheating and throttling was indeed not an exaggeration. Samsung is in particular bad with this. There have been people who have been considering modifying heatsinks onto their M.2 SSD controllers (something that laptop lacks the space for).

 

I WISH companies would still make good mSATA drives. The whole tech world is diving into 80% good, 20% broken tech and not leaving the option for older 100% good tech to exist. M.2 SSDs are one thing. Thin notebooks are another. 4K displays are yet another. Chasing IPS panels because they're "IPS" without checking colour gamut, response times and ghosting issues is yet another (TN panels CAN be better than IPS panels in all areas except viewing angles, but people don't understand or care about this). Mobile hardware is yet another. nVidia's maxwell desktop GPUs are even another. People who are going googly eyed over "virtual reality" setups that lack stereoscopic 3D's convergence points, which means they're just 2D copied to two different screens and close up is another. I could go on for ages on crappy tech that everybody is head over heels for.