New SSD/M,2 For Games & Backups

Hi All
Long time lurker first time poster. I've read a lot of useful information in the past so thanks for that.
Basically I currently have a Samsung 840 Evo 250gb which is used for OS, applications & games however with install sizes getting larger I'm looking to get a dedicated game drive and wondered if anybody has any suggestions?
My budget is ideally less that £90 and I was almost ready to push the button on a 860 Evo 500gb for £75 however someone at work suggested M.2.
I'd read into them before when I built my machine in 2014-2015 but it was suggested that yes they are faster but in the real world it doesn't make much difference so you were better saving the money and getting an SSD.
However he pointed me in the direction of a Corsair MP510 480gb on Scan for £70, seems too good to be true, M.2 cheaper than an SSD and hence why I'm here.
Does anybody have a opinion on the 2 drives above or alternatives to suggest? Also I've looked into it an it seems like my MB will support the MP510 however will somebody please confirm it for me? I have a Asus Z97-a.

Thanks in advance
Tom

In that price range I would be trying to get the biggest reputable SSD I could find.

Can you really not push tour budget a little further? Another £10 gets you a 1TB SATA SSD: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077SF8KMG

Thanks for the quick reply. I was looking at the crucial drive however I've heard a lot or bad things about them regarding reliability, does anybody have any experience using them?

If you're trying to reduce cost is also say not to use an SSD to store backups. They don't need to be on storage that fast. Also some games will have more noticeable differences than others. Online games when loading for example are far more likely to be slowed by the remote server than local storage. The biggest improvement will be in single player games that load levels and assets dynamically rather than as individual levels.

Thanks for your reply. It would be for single player games, I'm one of the few people that doesnt like online multiplayer lol. As for the OS backups they are currently being created onto a HDD but I just though to speed up the process I would move it to the SSD.

M.2 is a physical connector, not a communication protocol - drives plugged into the M.2 slot can talk using the SATA or NVMe protocols (only one or the other, depending on the drive - NVMe is the fast one, and SATA slower). Z97 might not be able to boot off of NVMe drives, but AFAIK will happily talk to one as a second system drive so it should work fine with a NVMe drive (and the asus Z97-A does seem to have a M.2 connector).

Back in 2014 NVMe drives were silly money, but these days the price difference has almost vanished so it's a better value proposition - it's a very small price difference for a big (if hard to notice in everyday use) increase in speed

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

In that price range I would be trying to get the biggest reputable SSD I could find.

Can you really not push tour budget a little further? Another £10 gets you a 1TB SATA SSD: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077SF8KMG

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£1 less gets a 1TB NVMe SSD: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/1tb-...b-s-write-150k

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Originally Posted by Xlucine

£1 less gets a 1TB NVMe SSD: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/1tb-...b-s-write-150k

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Good price! Should be OK for storing games on as level loading times should be very good.

Those are quad level cell devices though, the sustained write performance drops below the older SATA models with three level cells. I was tempted to buy one recently until I realised that in my usage it would be slower than my existing SATA drive, but most people don't clone and compile gigabytes of stuff on a daily basis.

Samsung Evo series has a good rep and is high-quality in general. I'd go with it, especially if you're looking to decrease load times on new titles.

Thanks all I didn't realise that NVMe had such a drop off in performance, I think I might stick with what I know for now and go for the largest SSD I can afford.
Any suggestions other than the Crucial MX500 and the 860 Evo, or brands that I should definitely avoid?

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Originally Posted by CodeMonkey23

Thanks all I didn't realise that NVMe had such a drop off in performance,

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That isn't NVMe, that's the QLC flash chips that some of the latest SSDs are using, and you have to hit the drive quite hard with constant writes for it to run out of buffer space and slow down. As I said above, for storing games it looks like a good choice. It will easily keep up with any broadband connection for downloading games which is the only big writes it will really see. Perhaps patching a big game will take another second, you won't notice. Level loading times will get the full 1800MB/s.

I mentioned for my work use they aren't ideal as my compile job will typically do a 2GB write and then compile thousands of files which needs good write IOPs which looks like about the worst case usage for those drives. To be honest, I was still really tempted by the price :D

This QLC NVMe drive has now dropped to £95, the longer you procrastinate the lower the prices: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-CT5...dp/B07J2Q4SWZ/

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Good price! Should be OK for storing games on as level loading times should be very good.

Those are quad level cell devices though, the sustained write performance drops below the older SATA models with three level cells. I was tempted to buy one recently until I realised that in my usage it would be slower than my existing SATA drive, but most people don't clone and compile gigabytes of stuff on a daily basis.

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The performance of the Intel 660p NVMe SSD is pretty poor - under certain conditions it can be slower than a conventional HDD!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OffzVc7ZB-o

thanks all for the replies. Looking at the specs the Intel has a much lower TBW and apparently my MB doesn't support PCIE 4x so I would need a mount but I have a vertically mounted GPU.
I think I'm still leaning towards the 860 evo, it's more expensive than other drives but has better specs.

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Originally Posted by CodeMonkey23

thanks all for the replies. Looking at the specs the Intel has a much lower TBW and apparently my MB doesn't support PCIE 4x so I would need a mount but I have a vertically mounted GPU.

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Your motherboard has several options:
You have an M.2 socket which supports 2260/2280 form SSDs, running PCIe x2 speed.
You have 2xPCIe x16 which can run x8 lanes each, one PCIe x16 which runs at x2 speed and two PCIe x2s that run at x1 speed.
You have four SATA 6gbps connectors and one SATA express connector.

So buy one of the following, in rough order of theroetical speed:
PCIe M.2 adaptor and stick it in your spare PCIe x16 running at x8 speed. Stick a PCIe M.2 card in this.
M.2 2280/60 form NVMe or PCie SSD
SATA SSD.

Frankly, there's probably no noticeable realworld difference even if you went for a SATA SSD, and the ease of connection for the latter might give you fewer headaches.

Thanks Kalniel that explains it perfectly. As I currently have a vertical GPU mount option 1 isn't an option, I will have a look at price differences between M.2 2280/60 and a SATA SSD. Thanks again

What does anyone think about SSDs for backups generally?
I know the advice was traditional HDD for backups but TBs written now seems to be huge - so if you're only doing deltas is it still a problem?
I guess for me I'm looking to mirror my (approx) 1.2 TB of photos onto my SSD - for now Lightroom goes to my NAS via a Gigabyte network port, so I guess for that I'll still use the NAS as backup
R

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Originally Posted by Retne

What does anyone think about SSDs for backups generally?
I know the advice was traditional HDD for backups but TBs written now seems to be huge - so if you're only doing deltas is it still a problem?
I guess for me I'm looking to mirror my (approx) 1.2 TB of photos onto my SSD - for now Lightroom goes to my NAS via a Gigabyte network port, so I guess for that I'll still use the NAS as backup
R

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It's more a question of why would you use an SSD when a HDD is not a bottleneck for backup anyway so you're spending money/GB for no reason.

Mirroring is another matter, which isn't backup, but failover. Mirroring an SSD isn't unheard of, but given that most SSD failure is due to write time, you're not actually gaining much spare production time because you'll wear your mirror drive at the same rate as your working drive.

For LR there's a fairly obvious workflow - store your RAW photos on HDD, backed up to NAS. Put the LR cache on an SSD at the very least, and you might as well put the catalogue there too (this is your deltas to the raw files as you process), but again back up the catalogue to a NAS. That way you have both your originals and the changes backed up, but you get the advantage of the working speed of an SSD (bar initial import, which you only do once per photo anyway)