Which SSD Should i Buy

[BenKrapohl]

Hi there LTT community. I recently built my first computer and im very happy with the build. Except for one thing. Let me give a little background on it. When i went to make this pc i already had a pc that i had bought at bestbuy a few years back and it worked good enough for the time but i did find that i was needing some more power. So i made this new pc that i currently use. The pc i had bought from bestbuy had nothing that i could really take and put into the new pc except for the drive. So to save money and make it easier i just took the 1tb harddrive from the older computer and put it into my new build. Well everything works its just that i find it bottlenecking everything when it hits 100% load on the harddrive. So this leads me to think hey i might need to buy an ssd. But as someone thats rather new to this pc building thing i wanted to ask around and see what people had to say to it. My pc that i built is an I7 6700k With a gtx 1050 ti and 16gb of ddr4 ram. And yes before i get the hate of choosing a better processor over graphics. I use my computer for rather heavy work loads as i am a video production student. And i just do little bits of gaming. Currently the harddrive i have works but i find that it gets so overloaded that my pc will crash and it just overalll bottlenecks. So please if anyone has some recommendations on what i should get for an ssd please let me know. I would prefer to stay under 100$ for the ssd. Once again thank you for your advice and have a great day!

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

5 minutes ago, BenKrapohl said:

Hi there LTT community. I recently built my first computer and im very happy with the build. Except for one thing. Let me give a little background on it. When i went to make this pc i already had a pc that i had bought at bestbuy a few years back and it worked good enough for the time but i did find that i was needing some more power. So i made this new pc that i currently use. The pc i had bought from bestbuy had nothing that i could really take and put into the new pc except for the drive. So to save money and make it easier i just took the 1tb harddrive from the older computer and put it into my new build. Well everything works its just that i find it bottlenecking everything when it hits 100% load on the harddrive. So this leads me to think hey i might need to buy an ssd. But as someone thats rather new to this pc building thing i wanted to ask around and see what people had to say to it. My pc that i built is an I7 6700k With a gtx 1050 ti and 16gb of ddr4 ram. And yes before i get the hate of choosing a better processor over graphics. I use my computer for rather heavy work loads as i am a video production student. And i just do little bits of gaming. Currently the harddrive i have works but i find that it gets so overloaded that my pc will crash and it just overalll bottlenecks. So please if anyone has some recommendations on what i should get for an ssd please let me know. I would prefer to stay under 100$ for the ssd. Once again thank you for your advice and have a great day!

How much storage do you want?

 

This is largely based on how much you want to limit the things on your C:\ Drive. If you're fine with keeping almost everything on other drives, you could save a few bucks and get a 120GB, although it's not recommended (though it is an option)

Recommendation

Since you live in the US, and prices are rather low there, I'd recommend an 850 EVO .

If you want to stay even lower than that and still get rather good performance, the Sandisk SSD Plus is great as well (link). If you can strech another $20 you could get the 480GB on sale at microcentre in your state.

 

[BenKrapohl]

Ill for sure look into those 2 thank you!

[DailyProcrastinator]

10 minutes ago, BenKrapohl said:

Hi there LTT community. I recently built my first computer and im very happy with the build. Except for one thing. Let me give a little background on it. When i went to make this pc i already had a pc that i had bought at bestbuy a few years back and it worked good enough for the time but i did find that i was needing some more power. So i made this new pc that i currently use. The pc i had bought from bestbuy had nothing that i could really take and put into the new pc except for the drive. So to save money and make it easier i just took the 1tb harddrive from the older computer and put it into my new build. Well everything works its just that i find it bottlenecking everything when it hits 100% load on the harddrive. So this leads me to think hey i might need to buy an ssd. But as someone thats rather new to this pc building thing i wanted to ask around and see what people had to say to it. My pc that i built is an I7 6700k With a gtx 1050 ti and 16gb of ddr4 ram. And yes before i get the hate of choosing a better processor over graphics. I use my computer for rather heavy work loads as i am a video production student. And i just do little bits of gaming. Currently the harddrive i have works but i find that it gets so overloaded that my pc will crash and it just overalll bottlenecks. So please if anyone has some recommendations on what i should get for an ssd please let me know. I would prefer to stay under 100$ for the ssd. Once again thank you for your advice and have a great day!

 

I can highly recommend the Crucial MX300 SSD's they're the best price per GB @ $90 for a 275GB SSD and $140 for a 525GB SSD. Really solid product and I use crucial m.2 and SSD's in several of my builds.

[BenKrapohl]

1 minute ago, JM21 said:

I can highly recommend the Crucial MX300 SSD's they're the best price per GB @ $90 for a 275GB SSD and $140 for a 525GB SSD. Really solid product and I use crucial m.2 and SSD's in several of my builds.

Ill look into them thank you! 

[DailyProcrastinator]

9 minutes ago, BenKrapohl said:

Ill look into them thank you! 

Also, they're better than lots of others on the market for read and write speeds. While not hurting your bank account. In my main system I have a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro for my boot drive and main program files but it cost quite a bit more. But in that same system I just bought two 1.1TB Crucial MX300 SSD's to run in Raid 0 for super fast storage. And in my most recent ITX build I put my a 1.1TB MX300 NVMe m.2 for my boot drive and all program files, its a really good product.

[JoostinOnline]

First off, no matter how many ill informed tell you otherwise, an NVMe drive is NOT a good investment for your boot drive.  While they are spectacular for reading and writing large files, the rate that they read small files is barely higher than a SATA drive.  That's what matters for performance.  If you're reading or writing large files, it's an excellent investment, but a waste of money for running  Windows or most programs.

 

I recommend getting a ~240GB one.  I've purchased a few of these and they perform very well for the price.  Clone Windows onto it and put a few of your frequently used programs there too.  There's currently a worldwide NAND shortage, so prices are pretty high all around.

[Eddie Current]

Samsung all the way. 850 Pro (Sata) or the 950 Pro (M.2) they are a little more but the performance makes up for it.

[DailyProcrastinator]

5 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

First off, no matter how many ill informed tell you otherwise, an NVMe drive is NOT a good investment for your boot drive.  While they are spectacular for reading and writing large files, the rate that they read small files is barely higher than a SATA drive.  That's what matters for performance.  If you're reading or writing large files, it's an excellent investment, but a waste of money for running  Windows or most programs.

 

I recommend getting a ~240GB one.  I've purchased a few of these and they perform very well for the price.  Clone Windows onto it and put a few of your frequently used programs there too.  There's currently a worldwide NAND shortage, so prices are pretty high all around.

 

I definitely agree, m.2 isn't worth it from a price to performance stand point and to truly benefit from NVMe storage you need like 1TB and it costs way to much for a Samsung 960 evo or pro m.2 right now. But at least here in Canada the Crucial MX300 m.2 drives have the same read and writes as the SSD version and actually cost a few dollars less at some retailers for the same capacities. So they're not true NVMe drives in the sense of 1000+MB/s read and writes but for the small compact form factor its great, and the MX300 still has 560MB/s read and 510MB/s writes I believe. So pretty good.

[JoostinOnline]

4 minutes ago, JM21 said:

I definitely agree, m.2 isn't worth it from a price to performance stand point and to truly benefit from NVMe storage you need like 1TB and it costs way to much for a Samsung 960 evo or pro m.2 right now. But at least here in Canada the Crucial MX300 m.2 drives have the same read and writes as the SSD version and actually cost a few dollars less at some retailers for the same capacities. So they're not true NVMe drives in the sense of 1000+MB/s read and writes but for the small compact form factor its great, and the MX300 still has 560MB/s read and 510MB/s writes I believe. So pretty good.

Absolutely, if you can get an m.2 SATA drive cheaper than a 2.5" SATA drive, go for it.  Fewer cables and you save money.

[DailyProcrastinator]

7 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

Absolutely, if you can get an m.2 SATA drive cheaper than a 2.5" SATA drive, go for it.  Fewer cables and you save money.

Yeah exactly, I got my 1.1TB Crucial MX300 m.2 for $10 less than the 2.5" SATA SSD version and at the time it was the best price per GB SSD on PCpartpicker here in Canada. It was also the best choice for the ITX build I put it in.