- Oct 5, 2010
- 28
- 0
- 18,530
Hi, I'm having some serious confusion in regards to SSD drives and my upgrade options (if any exist at all).
In short, I have 2 SATA-3 SSD drives, both of these are now 4-5 years old and have started to degrade (read: bad sectors/blocks). As the data on the drives is important, I'm going to aim to simply replace them rather than attempt to repair (as far as I understand it, you can't 'repair' bad blocks on any drive, just tell the drive to avoid a bad block and use good ones instead).
The data is backed up and has a regime of it being done weekly, but since the start of the degredation and bad blocks, I've moved to doing this every other day (better to be safe than sorry).
My query is this - whilst I can simply replace the SSDs (Corsair Force GS 240GB) with an equivalent, I'd like to try and upgrade them to something faster.
I was thinking a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07CGGP7SV) - but I know for a fact my motherboard (Sabertooth X79) doesn't have an M.2 slot on it, so was going to use a PCIe card to install the SSD into, then plug the card into the board.
This is where my confusion begins, it seems that there's SATA and NVMe types of these smaller SSD drives, from what I've read, the SATA/NVMe are simply interfaces/protocols that are used to communicate with the PC itself. However, I did read somewhere that your board needs to support booting from NVMe to utilise the drive as a boot drive - from what I can determine, my BIOS does not have this support included in it (I assume this, as neither NVMe or M.2 are mentioned anywhere in any update).
Assuming I can't use NVMe and have to use a SATA version, would the SSD I picked above with this (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01FU9JS94) be a suitable pairing to enable me to use the SSD as a boot drive and give me faster throughput than SATA-3?
I suspect the Startech card is the wrong 'type', since it mentions NVMe, but I'm not certain whether what I'm wanting is possible without replacing my motherboard (something I'd not want to do as I'd only be replacing it for an M.2 slot).
Is there really a big difference between SATA-3 connected SSD and M.2/PCIe? From what I've read, there is - but this may be with having the drive connected directly on the board via an M.2 slot - which is all part of my confusion.
Any help or assistance would be very much appreciated, if you require more information (such as full PC spec) - just ask
In short, I have 2 SATA-3 SSD drives, both of these are now 4-5 years old and have started to degrade (read: bad sectors/blocks). As the data on the drives is important, I'm going to aim to simply replace them rather than attempt to repair (as far as I understand it, you can't 'repair' bad blocks on any drive, just tell the drive to avoid a bad block and use good ones instead).
The data is backed up and has a regime of it being done weekly, but since the start of the degredation and bad blocks, I've moved to doing this every other day (better to be safe than sorry).
My query is this - whilst I can simply replace the SSDs (Corsair Force GS 240GB) with an equivalent, I'd like to try and upgrade them to something faster.
I was thinking a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07CGGP7SV) - but I know for a fact my motherboard (Sabertooth X79) doesn't have an M.2 slot on it, so was going to use a PCIe card to install the SSD into, then plug the card into the board.
This is where my confusion begins, it seems that there's SATA and NVMe types of these smaller SSD drives, from what I've read, the SATA/NVMe are simply interfaces/protocols that are used to communicate with the PC itself. However, I did read somewhere that your board needs to support booting from NVMe to utilise the drive as a boot drive - from what I can determine, my BIOS does not have this support included in it (I assume this, as neither NVMe or M.2 are mentioned anywhere in any update).
Assuming I can't use NVMe and have to use a SATA version, would the SSD I picked above with this (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01FU9JS94) be a suitable pairing to enable me to use the SSD as a boot drive and give me faster throughput than SATA-3?
I suspect the Startech card is the wrong 'type', since it mentions NVMe, but I'm not certain whether what I'm wanting is possible without replacing my motherboard (something I'd not want to do as I'd only be replacing it for an M.2 slot).
Is there really a big difference between SATA-3 connected SSD and M.2/PCIe? From what I've read, there is - but this may be with having the drive connected directly on the board via an M.2 slot - which is all part of my confusion.
Any help or assistance would be very much appreciated, if you require more information (such as full PC spec) - just ask
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