Sagers with different SSD drive help.

It has been 5 years since i purchased a laptop. Definitely going with Sager. I like the idea of a solid state drive as the OS, and more if possible. Can someone explain the differences in the SSD's available. I will only need 500GB total of hard drive space anyways, but want to ensure the OS is covered. Prefer to stick with W7 too.
Do I need a separate OS hard drive, or can you have one ssd.
Currently have a Sager NP5160 and am looking at the NP7256 and noticed it may already have a SSD for OS, and a 1TB for all other stuff.

 

Hi Steve, what kind of tasks are you doing on the machine? If it's nothing super intensive and for day to day style tasks the 850 evo is the drive I recommend for people. Yes the PCI-E based are super fast but a lot of people wont notice the difference and it saves a lot of cash.

 

Hello there @Steve40th !

The differences are not far and wide. Some are faster than others, but you pay a premium for cutting-edge, blistering performance. I'm with Meaker about the 850 EVO: Fast drive at a great value.

 

Any newer SSD is still going to be a significant increase from having a standard mechanical hard drive. I would also agree on something like an 850 Evo as a solid option.

 

Gonna throw in for the 850 Evo as well, it's what I use at home.

 

I will be moving to PCI-E drives because I am just that sort of person but I had a pair of 850 Evo drives in raid 0 for the last year and a bit and they have been solid.

 

Gonna stay with my Evos until they die I think, I imagine they will last me quite a while.

 

Or you know, when Samsung comes out with a new firmware that bricks it.

 

I never flash firmware as soon as it comes out.

 

As a rule I only flash my firmware if I'm doing so to solve a problem that the firmware is confirmed to solve.

 

Agree on the EVOs... I have three 1TB EVO SSDs that have never given me a lick of trouble.

Another recommendation, and a recent discovery for me... Best bang for the buck I have found anywhere is the Sandisk X400. I have four M.2 versions of the X400 (2 x 512GB in RAID0 in each of the machines in my signature) and they're excellent. Performance is rock solid and I cannot find anything in the same capacity that isn't at least 50-100% more costly.

Side note: If you prefer to stick with W7 (smart man) you will want to avoid NVMe SSD as well. It is a pain in the butt to get Windows 7 installed correctly on NVMe. I had two Samsung NVMe in the Eurocom Sky X9 review unit. I made a conscientious decision to avoid NVMe on my own systems after having the opportunity to tinker with NVMe for a good long while. As mentioned, you pay a premium and get almost nothing in return for it except a hassle. Impressively fast, yes... definitely. Extremely unimpressive pricing and extra rigmarole, to the extent I was ready to ignore the faster performance.

Agree with the comments on firmware. Do not treat it like drivers or you'll regret it eventually. Something will go wrong sooner or later. Use the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to firmware. Unless you are unlocking features or performance with a @Prema mod, or fixing a well documented problem, you're better off ignoring firmware updates.

Some firmware updates actually introduce a reduction in features or performance. An example is how Alienware crippled the BIOS on the M17xR4 and M18xR2 midway through their life cycles, but conveniently mentioned nothing about their evil plans in the release notes. You did not find out it would make your beast suck until it was too late. And, the new cancer firmware introduced the addition of firmware signature enforcement to make correcting the problem extremely difficult.

Bottom line: NEVER flash a BIOS or firmware update from any OEM until you do your homework to find out precisely what gets changed and whether or not customers that have already flashed it have any regrets. If everything seems positive from customer feedback, wait 60 days and see if their opinions have changed before flashing your own hardware. If there is any question about what gets changed or whether you will like the outcome, ignore the firmware update.

 

NVMe SSDs are only faster in benchmarks and in certain workloads which don't apply to the average or even power user as they only give you crazy sequential read/write. BUT, their boot time is much slower than standard SATA SSDs and even if one does figure out how to install Windows 7 on an NVMe SSD. The boot time goes up to 35+ seconds like a freakin' old HDD and the performance is extremely crippled. Not buying NVMe crap SSDs anymore. I don't feel it one bit faster than my 5 year old LiteOn 128GB SSD in my usage workflow which is playing games, surfing the net, and watching movies.

 

I hear they're great to use for things with a lot of read/write like live databases and staging large files, but the number of potential bottlenecks are pretty high and it's not always worth it.

 

exactly, live databases, large video file editing, copying lots of data, but to me and average users, we probably won't see that benefit.

 

For cases when that is mission critical, you could always use the NVMe volume for data to address those specific purposes and have the OS on a normal SSD. Then it does not negatively impact boot time and make things unnecessarily complicated in the ways already mentioned.

 

that could be an option I might consider if it wasn't for the fact that we are limited to 512GB size. It's like an expensive scratch disk. If I could turn back time, I'd order two SanDisk X400 1TB SSDs with two 4TB EVOs and RAID them all together to get 2 partitions. C: (100GB for the OS) and one large partition to throw everything I have there rather than having to manage multiple partitions. I like it sweet and simple.

 

Yeah, that would be a better plan for NVMe if they made them at least 1TB and did not require the soul of your first born for payment.

 

Actually, the DC-P3700 series goes up to 2TB. I have one in my workstation as a scratch drive, we did have to offer Intel our cute secretary as payment though, but it was worth it.

 

I bought a SanDisk Plus 480 GB 2-3 months ago and I feel it's competitive with any standard SSD for the money.

I think the X400 is worth a hard look as well.

My mSATA Evo 840 1TB has performed very well for the past 2 1/2 years. I hear the 2.5" version has/had some issues.

Overall I think I would stick with 2.5" drives as I can repurpose those more readily. But as Meaker pointed out I can get an adapter for my mSATA and use it as a 2.5".

Sent from my overpriced Galaxy S6 Edge +

 

Being electrically the same the adapters are cheap and simple.