Storage Decisions

Looking at adding some extra storage to my PC. Mostly looking for speed (e-peen) rather than amount.

Currently looking at NVMe M.2's and have come down to either the Samsung 960 PRO or Samsung 970 EVO.

I saw someone in another thread mention an ADATA 8200 which does also look like a good option.

If there are any others that are worth looking at feel free to suggest them.

Looking at a budget of between £150 and £250.

As my mobo doesn't have an M.2 slot on it I need to get a PCI-E adaptor card to put it in.

Anyone got any suggestions, used one? Don't want to be spending on a fast drive only to cripple it with an adaptor that gimps it.

The only other consideration is I am not looking at booting from the M.2 as I know my motherboard doesn't support this without hacking the bios around. (There were some guides online but when they involve popping the flash chip off the mobo and flashing it in USB adaptor I think that is a few steps too far for me.)

Unless you *need* disk I/O over 550MB/s, you'd be much better off by going with a 860 evo or pro depending on how much writing you're going to do. If you must have an NVMe drive and especially if you'll be booting from it, make sure your motherboard supports the NVMe protocol, it might not if it doesn't have an m.2 socket, and you may have to update your motherboard's firmware. Asus' Hyper M.2 adaptor works well, but generally m.2 adaptors are pretty much just mechanical adaptors that wires the m.2 to the PCIe slot. They don't have to do any clever signal processing to work since m.2 PCIe/NVMe drives are essentially pure PCIe devices.

Based on what you have said, I would recommend you go with the Samsung 970 EVO. The TBW is twice that of the previous generation, you get a 5-year warranty and it copes well with prolonged usage without throttling.

However, you refer to the XPG ADATA 8200. You may well have seen my comments on a previous thread about this drive. For value : performance, it smashes Samsung all over the place, but that's up to you.

I'm using a Samsung 970 PRO 1TB. It's epic.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/lyco...r-pc-mac-linux + the M.2 of your choice, you will not be able to boot from it if you motherboard does not support it but for speed it does the trick
I was getting 800MB/s off one with a samsung ... I'm not sure on which one now - it may be a day or two before I can get the info back

[this was for a old dell that needed something special for a particular task]

Do you *really* need that performance?
You can get a 1TB SATA drive for the cost of a 500GB Samsung 970 evo. Then you can boast girth rather than speed.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077SF8KMG

Don't *really* need the speed just want it. :) I already have a 960GB and 240GB SSD's in the rig.

As already stated not looking to boot from it as my motherboard doesn't support it and don't fancy the bios hackery to make it work like that.

Learning towards the 970 EVO at the moment.

I was considering the previously posted XPG ADATA 8200. 480gb of NVME with performance 'pretty close' to the Samsung devices (and I saw a result where random IOPS were actually better), for just over £130 is quite tempting but then I remembered that these don't really improve things like game load times over a SATA SSD and since the bottleneck seems to mainly lie elsewhere I'm going to just keep my money for now and maybe get a bigger SATA SSD in future if I really have to :)

But thanks for bringing it to our attention posters!

Well in the end I went for an aqua computer m.2 to pcie adapter card, mainly as it had fairly big heat sinks top and bottom and went for the 960GB ADATA 8200 in the end.

Ran a CrystalDiskMark on it and the results are below in case anyone is interested.

Read:
Seq Q32T1 - 3019.6
4KiB Q8T8 - 1321.7
4KiB Q32T1 - 337.7
4KiB Q1T1 - 35.67

Write:
Seq Q32T1 - 1729.0
4KiB Q8T8 - 1139.7
4KiB Q32T1 - 214.8
4KiB Q1T1 - 121.0