Inexpensive SSD recommendations? (from Amazon, also buying phone case/screen protector)

PianoPlayer88Key · April 20, 2016

TL;DR version, as suggested...

Buying phone case & screen protector on Amazon, also want ~250/500GB SSD. (Phone camera lens broke already, also need car mount.)

primary SSD use: VMs, housing large >10-20GB audio/video files for editing, swap, etc

Installing in this system, keeping system ~7-8 years.

Prefer $70 ~250GB or $110 ~500GB, will consider $90 ~250GB if better overall value (including performance & reliability).

Want adequate performance for SATA - prefer not 500/300MB/s seq. read/write or 22k/40k IOPS. (Prefer 450-500MB/s+ seq. read/write, 65-75k+ IOPS. Reviews on 1 drive I'm considering concern me - A-Data SP550.)

Possible SSDs:

240/480GB A-Data SP550
250/500GB Crucial MX200
240GB PNY CS1311
250GB Samsung 850 EVO
240GB Sandisk Ultra II

Also may consider:

480GB AMD Radeon
240/480GB Crucial BX200
240/480GB OCZ ARC 100
480GB PNY CS1311
240/480GB PNY CS2211
500GB Samsung 850 EVO
480GB Sandisk Ultra II

Also need SATA data cables.

Later (can't afford yet), need more HDD space, also have ~>6+ TB data not backed up accumulated over past year.

Also, how much longer before it'd be cost effective (similar $/TB & per-drive capacity to then-current spinning greens, NVMe/PCI-E performance on SSD) to switch to all-SSD? (Currently have 14 TB of mechanical drives installed (2TB in laptop), plus another 8.5 TB sitting dormant.

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Hi all...

I'm about to pull the trigger on a phone case and screen protector for my LG G4 on Amazon, and was thinking I'd like to add an SSD to my order. I'm mostly thinking about 240-256GB size range, although there's a couple 480-500GB drives I'd maybe consider, all of the 2.5" variety.

(BTW I'm wishing I'd been able to decide on a case sooner. My phone's only about a month or two old, and the camera lens on the back is already broken, which affects the camera. I've tried to be careful with it. Any ideas on getting it fixed without spending a lot (not sure if they'll warranty that damage), and more importantly, without T-Mobile or LG replacing the phone? I have some app data that I don't have backed up, as the phone isn't rooted (I understand it would void warranty) and therefore I can't install Titanium Backup Pro.) Also I'm wanting to get a windshield/dash mount, but I haven't decided on one yet. Any general recommendations there on what to look for or avoid?

Now, on to the SSDs. I was looking on pcpartpicker, newegg & amazon at several drives, and at some reviews/specs. I ruled out drives that had considerably a-synchronous read vs write speeds (like 550 MB read, 300 MB write) and absurdly low 4K/IOPS speeds (like 20k-30k for example), also ones that consistently got poor reviews on newegg & amazon didn't make the cut either. Also I'd like one that won't die early, and when it does start running out of write cycles, I can still read from it and get the data off. (One thing that concerned me in at least one article I read was that some drives, although you can read from them temporarily after they stop writing - after you reboot, you can no longer even detect them. That would not be good, cause I'd likely learn that I could no longer write, THEN go out and buy another drive to copy it to, wait a day or two for it to ship, have to shut down (unless I already had while waiting for shipping) to install the drive, and on reboot the old drive would no longer work at all.)

I'll be using it to run some programs, house some data (some of which can be upwards of 20+ GB per file), run multiple VMs simultaneously and edit audio/video (cause Audacity doesn't support running multiple instances simultaneously in one OS, and when i have a long process going in one Audacity project it won't let me work on the other one), among other things. (I'm finding that trying to run multiple VMs and editing files off a spinning HDD makes things deathly slow.) I'll be installing it into this system. Btw another use would be swap space, but is there a better solution for getting around my 32GB RAM limit without getting a new system? (I was planning to keep this system about 7-8 years or so. I do have a laptop that'll support 64GB RAM. One idea I had was a PCI Express SSD if I could get a 32GB or 64GB one for the same price/GB/performance as standard non-OC'd DDR3/4 RAM (or if PCI Express 3.0 x16 doesn't have enough bandwidth, then less $/GB), but that would be later, like a few years down the road.)

I'd really like to keep it below $70 for a ~250GB or $110 for a ~500GB SSD, although if it'd be a much better value to go for a ~250GB around $90, I'd consider it.

Some drives on my shortlist include the A-Data SP550 240GB & 480GB, PNY CS1311 240GB, Sandisk Ultra II 240GB, Crucial MX200 250GB or 500GB, or Samsung 850 EVO 250GB. I would prefer to get a decent price for the capacity, which would steer me toward the A-Data, but if reliability and performance is a significant concern, then I'd go for a higher priced drive.

Reading a few professional reviews on the A-Data, I'm concerned about sequential write performance tanking after a while in some use cases. I don't see much on the PNY, but it seems to get generally favorable reviews, at least on Amazon (Newegg has very few reviews). The Sandisk, Crucial and Samsung are familiar brands and claim decent performance, but if I don't have to spend that much I'd rather not for now.

Some drives I've rejected for now from my shortlist are the 480GB AMD Radeon, 240/480GB Crucial BX200, 240/480GB OCZ ARC 100, 480GB PNY CS1311, 240/480GB PNY CS2211, 500GB Samsung 850 EVO, and 480GB Sandisk Ultra II. However, would some of those drives be worth considering after all for my use case?

Also I'll need some SATA data cables, Any particular brands/etc you'd recommend, or that I should avoid? I don't need anything aesthetically fancy, just something that works, and isn't too short. I'd like to keep costs down in this category, within reason, although I haven't recently researched prices. For example, if a dirt-cheap but unreliable cable is 50¢, an inexpensive but reliable cable is $1, and a fancy cable (like the concept of Linus's $1k HDMI cable) is $20 or something, I'd go for the $1 cable.

Also, eventually I need to get some more larger drives (like 5-8 TB), as well as a few to back up like 6-7 TB of data that I've accumulated/recorded (much of it media of course) over the past year or so that isn't backed up. I'm not yet financially ready to make that purchase though, so I'll probably make a new thread when I'm ready to buy something like that, but for now, a few questions...

Would the Seagate 8TB Archive drives be adequate for full-backups? (For example, if I clone my smaller drives to them using GParted, then put them back in their boxes, and get them out if I need to do an extensive / full restore.)

If I was to eventually build a NAS, could I build one that supported at least 6, preferably 8 or 10 drives, and the entire system, including software but not including the drives costs less than a single 4-5TB WD Red or equivalent? (If I used FreeNAS/ZFS and needed ECC, then the RAM would also be excluded from the price limit, but the board+CPU (which would need to support at least 32-64GB RAM), etc. would be included. Also my price example assumes I bought one now; it falls apart as things progress and prices change in the future.)

Also if I set up a NAS, I wouldn't want multiple drives to be treated as one large volume or something. I want to be able to pull individual drives out at will without breaking an array, so I guess that means I wouldn't be setting up RAID. (In the OS, each physical drive would have its own drive letter or mount point.) I'd want to be able to keep track of which drive has what data. I think I'd need to be careful to not yank the backup/redundant drives, but if I wanted to pull a data drive to copy stuff to another computer not physically located nearby (and not networkable, but that I could drive to), I want to be able to do that.

If I'm doing drives for general storage, are Greens or equivalent okay, or should I keep using Red/NAS drives? Or would purple/surveillance drives be okay too?

Also, how much longer before it'd be cost effective (similar $/TB & per-drive capacity to then-current spinning greens, NVMe/PCI-E performance on SSD) to switch to all-SSD? (Currently have 14 TB of mechanical drives installed (2TB in laptop), plus another 8.5 TB sitting dormant.)

I'd want to switch to all-SSD once the price per TB drops below, and the capacity per drive rises above, where green/5400rpm drives would have been if the general trend rates (falling $/TB, rising capacity) had continued if the Thailand floods hadn't happened.

niccaa23 · April 21, 2016

if i wanted to read that much i'd grab a book!

gahhh TDLR!!!

PianoPlayer88Key · April 21, 2016

30 minutes ago, niccaa23 said:

if i wanted to read that much i'd grab a book!

gahhh TDLR!!!

Re-read the top, I added a section for that. More details remain in the post for those who want to read it. (And also it's a lot shorter than some books I've read, like some novels, the Bible, etc, as well as some I haven't read like physical encyclopedias, the entire source code to Windows 10, etc.)