I am a little late to the party with SSD’s
I had a read of all the related threads.
Does anyone have any thoughts or experience with Samsung Evo 870?
I have no experience with them or others, I am still plodding along on WD black HDD’s
A saw a, I think, an OK deal on the 1Tb drives. I thought yep I’l transfer
both my HDD’s (boot and slave) on to those.
Cheers 
My Cantabile live machine and studio machine are all SSDs. I do like the Samsung 870 and 9xx SSDs
I have a 1TB 870 Evo on my spare pc, never had issues. Another good low-cost SATA SSD is the Crucial MX500 series, while the cheaper BX500 is unreliable.
Samsung EVOs in everything over here. Never had an issue.
Don’t use their magician software or whatever it’s called. Use a low level format tool. Takes longer but the drive will be more reliable in the longterm.
Go for it
Thankyou everyone seems Evo’s are the way to go.
I’ll order the first pair next week and see what a difference it makes.
Cheers
+1 on Samsung Evo’s. I also have bought quite a few Crucial MX500 1TB and 2TB drives. Recently one just delivered was defective. While researching its problems I discovered that there have been enough defective SSDs from Crucial the past year for me to move back to only using EVO’s.
Anyway, my main gig PC has a M.2 970 Evo-plus and a Crucial P5. I never lost a bit…
I’ve got 3 music laptops with 2TB crucials MX500 that are working fine. I think the quality problems are more recent
Going by manufacturers own “TBW” (Terabytes Written) figures, Western Digital Red drives had the highest among the ones I looked at.
That’s a measure of durability in terms of how much you can write to a drive before you expect to see problems, including overwriting old files with new ones when you save changes to a file.
In the same series of drives, TBW increases with drive capacity so that’s a good reason to buy a bigger one than you think you’ll need. The controller chip on the drive gets to spread the load of writing to it by using the extra space. It’s also best to not fill one up, for the same reason - leave room and consider getting a bigger one when it starts to fill up, rather than treating it like a HDD.
The M.2 NVMe WD Red drives have a higher TBW figure than the 2.5" ones. IIRC, it’s something like 1,000 for a 1TB NVMe vs around 600 for the 2.5". Other 1TB drives I looked at had a TBW figure of 300 or lower.
WD Red are advertised as server or NAS drives but they work fine as a normal drive. The same goes for their Red HDDs.
The 2.5" ones have the advantage of being able to be used with a cheap USB3 to 2.5" SATA adapter cable, which costs £5-£6 ($10 or less) and just clips on, turning it into a big thumb drive. 2.5" ones are slower than M.2 NVMe drives, of course (by a factor of about 5), and slower still with a USB3 adapter but still very usable.
I’ve never experienced any failures on SSD’s having never used them.
Drive failures, is why ever since the days of windows 95,
I’ve put documents and operating system on separate drives.
C:\windows D:\my documents etc … it has saved me several times
now since having 6 or 8 sata ports to a motherboard, the OS is on one drive, the documents (in this case the samples for vsts esp kontakt) is on the second drive, song files on a third drive, page/swap file and temporary files on the fourth drive and a windows cache chucked on to a cheap usb3 thumb drive, all that done with HDD’s. Adopting the same idea with SSD’s should extend the life of them considerably, I would imagine (and hope).
Hi @Laura, one point for consideration, more “moving parts” in a system decreases reliability. The probability of a failure increases as you add more things that can fail.
Now, in the case of mirrored drives adding a second drive decreases the chance of system failure, but still increases the chance of a hardware failure. Your system would continue to run even though one drive failed.
Something to think about as you have more ports and cost of drives decreases.
Richard
This is a good point, this was very much a problem in earlier computers,
and still is now sometimes.
I’ve usually kept an offline back up copy of a drive, making a clone of the entire partition.
Spare motherboards as well. After I’ve cloned C and D drives on to SSD’s I’ll do the other
two later.
If your motherboard will support M.2 NVMe, I would get any of the Samsung M.2 SSDs (960-990 Pro). As previously mentioned, the larger the capacity the faster the drive response. If you go the M.2 route make sure that it matches the performance of the motherboard. The EVO route is a good second choice and also cheaper but not as good on rewrite capacity generally. I use the M.2 NVMe format exclusively and it is absolutely the fastest thing out there IMO.
I’ve been using 1TB Samsung 970 NVMe m.2 drives in SSK USB 3 enclosures to record with a Soundcraft Ui24R which can record 20 tracks of 24 bit wav audio. That combination must be fairly low in power draw because the Ui24R is rated for 40mw of draw.
When I take the above drive and plug it into a Dell Precision T5810 USB 3 port it copies at around 450mbs.
Thanks for the tip, i wasn’t aware of M2 NVM drives,
my motherboard doesn’t have support for these types of drive, it has given
me an idea. i looked up a few sites with 970 nvm listed. they’re not much more
than the evo’s I saw on a deal.
Hi Laura,
Thumbs up on the Evo’s, I have an 860 and 2-870’s, never a problem.
If you have a slot, the nvme m.2 drive is the way to go. Be aware, if you are not already, nvme m.2 is the form factor, it may support SATA or pcie depending on your motherboard. The Evo 970 is a pcie 3X4 which is what you want.
If you do not have a slot on your motherboard, I would not worry about it too much. The increase in speed from an SATA hard disk to an SATA 2.5 inch SSD (EVO 870) is very noticeable. From there the incremental increase to an nvme not so much. I have not done extensive testing, but, I have a Windows 10 partition with the 870 EVO and another with an HK Hynix pcie nvme that specs 4 times faster. They boot in exactly the same time.
Also, be aware that if you put the nvme pcie drive in an USB enclosure that you will be slowed down to whatever USB spec your motherboard supports, so you will probably not see much difference compared to slipping the 870 into an open 2.5 in drive slot.
Having said all of the above, the good news is that there is no bad news, they are all good choices as a replacement for the spinning rust.
BTW, I love your music.
John
Hi, thanks
While looking up these Evo’s and the NVM’s, I did come across adapters for NVM to be put
into 2.5" drive encloses or adapter boards, which allow them to be used on sata connectors to the motherboard. I didn’t know any of these existed.
I don’t know how much sata III will slow nvm’s down by, should i want to upgrade
the motherboard in the future I wont need to find NVM’s, they’re already there.
I am playing catch up to these drives and the changes in PC tech.
Hi,
If you put the 970 into the 2.5 inch SATA adapter, you will get 870 speed. The 870 already maxes out the SATA interface. The incremental cost for the drive enclosure plus the 970 is probably not worth it because when you replace your motherboard it will probably have the newer nvme pcie 4X4 interface or even the latest nvme pcie 5X4, so will require another device anyway.
I would recomend that your best price/performance would be to get the 870 now, plug it in, and enjoy. When you upgrade your motherboard put in whatever is the nvme flavor is at that time, which will be faster and cheaper than it is now. Plug in the 870 as a second drive, which is what I did.
Have fun
good point, Hard to keep up with the advances
the only constant is change