Crucial’s MX300 1TB for Gaming hard drive with 256GB 960 EVO

Iam currently running my system only with a 7200RPM mech hard drive.

I plan to get a fast NVME SSD (probably 256 960 EVO) for OS and a cheap SATA SSD for gaming/photos to go along with the existing mech hard drive where i can stores movies/videos and such.

Initially i was thinking to get a 850 EVO (1TB) to be the gaming/photo hard drive but I have fond crucial MX300 to be cheaper and they do have 3D NAND. So my question is how inferior Crucial MX300 series is compared to a samsung 850 EVO?

The other option is to have a single large capcity fast NVME (1TB) drive and use it for both OS and games e.t.c. This will cost similar to my original plan but i will get me lesser storage but faster speed overall. But will the speed difference be noticeable in games and such.

Which one do you think is the right course of action.

 

@PrimeTimeAction get a 1TB NVME drive now and SATA 1TB+ SSD later.

 

I suspect the 850 EVO to be the inferior one if you use the Crucial Storage Executive's Momentum Cache feature.

See:
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-storage-executive

 

Thanks for the reply.
Is the difference between NVME and SATA noticeable in game loading times (for example for a game like Fallout 4).
Also what about the first part of the my post, Crucial MX300 vs Samsung 850 EVO, are both comparable in terms of performance/quality.

 

other than in Benchmarks, I never felt my NVMe SSD is any faster than my previous 840 PRO SSDs to be honest. They're all snappy

 

@Phoenix is right, lot of misinformation. Buying a 1TB nvme is extremely poor value. I wouldn't even buy an pcie ssd. What do you want it for? Boot times? It isn't faster, they take longer to post. Game load times? Identical, something else is the bottleneck there. I would buy a 1TB MX300, or Sandisk X400. You can't tell the difference between not only that and and 850, but also that and a 950 pro.

I've used a bunch of different pcie ssds, but all my personal ones are still SATA (I own 850 Evos, Ultra IIs, an X400, and an MX300) because I can't feel a difference. They all wreck hard drives, but PCIe I really only felt the difference when video editing, which I don't do a lot of. Or unzipping huge files... It makes a few situations that don't come up that often faster, so I think it's not worth it when you can get a much much large SATA ssd which you'll benefit from in a much more real way with that larger size.

Edit: I'm gonna reemphasize that game load times are identical. 0% difference.

Check this out: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-ssd,4313-5.html

 

Thanks for the info guys. I really appreciate it.
Suddenly that 2TB Crucial MX300 is looking far more attractive then it was before starting this thread. Because as per the feed back i got, the difference between SATA and NVME SSDS may not be that noticeable in real life, but that 1TB of extra space will definitely be noticeable.

 

Again, 100% what I would do. You'll have a ton of snappy storage and your not losing out on game load times. Win win.

 

I don't think you'd notice much of a difference between the MX300 and the 850EVO. If you were to get an 850PRO, there might be more of a difference.

The NVMe 960 EVO certainly benchmarks much better than a 2.5" SATA SSD, but in practice, the difference in performance, while noticeable between an NVMe drive and a SATA SSD drive is not nearly as big as the benchmarks would suggest and certainly not nearly as big as the boost in performance you get going from a 7200RPM drive to even a 2.5" SATA SSD. I wouldn't get a 1TB NVMe drive right now, at least not the 960EVO. You could get that Crucial MX300 1TB AND a 256GB NVMe for the same price as the 1TB 960 EVO (which you can only pre-order right now).

First thing I did with my new AW 17 is swap out the 1TB 7200RPM drive with a 1TB WD Blue SSD. BIG improvement in speed. Then I got a deal on a 256GB Samsung PM961 (the OEM equivalent of the 960 EVO). Once I got the Samsung drivers installed (you need to be in AHCI mode, instead of RAID) there was some improvement over the WD, but not a whole heck of a lot. Your biggest difference is going to be going from a 7200rpm HD to an SSD, any SSD, even a 2.5" SATA SSD. It's a "what am I going to do with all this free time?" improvement.

Some other things I noticed withe the NVMe drive over the 2.5" SSD. Yes POST does take slightly longer, but the end of POST to login feels darn near instantaneous, whereas the WD took a handful of seconds. Overall, at least for me, the NVMe drive boots slightly faster and the applications that load once you log in for the first time after boot do load slightly faster. If I were to do it again, I'd just stick with the 2.5" SSD or get a cheaper M.2 SSD.

 

Between getting much more capacity than you 'need' right now, using the Momentum Cache feature and OP'ing by 33% or more (yeah; sorry, I just made your nominal 2TB SSD become a true and effective ~1.25TB*** SSD the MX300 will give you more real world productivity improvements than any BM 'scores' king you can buy and put into an notebook today.

***

• 2TB** x 1000,000,000 = 2,000,000,000 MB equivalent
• 2,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 1.8626 TB actual capacity
• 1.8626 x 0.67 = 1.2479 TB actual, usable capacity with 33% OP'ing

**

• In the Windows Advanced Setup Screen, substitute the actual MB's available for 'your' specific SSD (this is different for each HDD/SSD I've ever owned - even identical models from the same batch run)
• Now, multiply that by 0.67 to get the maximum partitioned space/capacity you should use if you want the fastest, most responsive, sustained, over time, storage subsystem you can have today.

Remember that leaving 33% or more 'unallocated' is not the same thing as leaving free space on the SSD.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/why-over-provision.760922/#post-9766709


Don't forget that you haven't 'lost' this capacity either... you can always go 'Expand' the volume to use as much of the unallocated space as you need (with the understanding that the storage subsystems performance will diminish - whether you 'feel' it or not (I sure can) ).

Good luck.

 

So i went ahead and ordered the 2TB Crucial SSD. Seemed like a pretty good deal.

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01KKZLX46/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1