Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SATA III SSD vs 950 Pro 512GB M.2 SSD

[apalio]

Hello everyone, I'm in a conundrum of which SSD to buy. Recently, my 2TB HDD failed (bought in 2012, now showing as RAW when I run CHKDSK in the CMD), so I'm looking to replace it. I figured I would just get an SSD instead of another HDD.

I currently have only two drives in my rig now, both SSD, and I'm running out of space, since I lost the HDD (was only half full). One is a SATA III SanDisk 256GB, and the other is a HyperX Predator PCIe 480GB. I am running my OS (Windows 10) on the HyperX drive.

Other components of my rig:

• 
  -Intel Core i7-6700K 8M Skylake Quad-Core 4.0 GHz CPU
  -EVGA 980Ti 1102MHz Core Clock GPU
  -HyperX Fury 32GB 2666MHz DDR4 RAM
  -ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Formula LGA 1151 Intel Z170 MOBO

I use my PC for mostly gaming and video editing. I do like having fast transfer speed, as I sometimes move large amounts of data on and off the computer, but I suppose I would be limited by the USB 3.0 anyway, since it caps at like 640MB/s, if I recall correctly. I'm not expecting much of a performance difference in load times with games, but my main question, is what about a software bottleneck? Can Windows 10 even take advantage of M.2 speeds that high? At what speed would the OS not be able to keep up with? Would my MOBO be able to take advantage of the 950 Pro's M.2 speeds? And would the 950 Pro be a noticeable upgrade from the HyperX Predator I have now, which is 1400 MBps read / 1000 MBps write?

So, which drive should I get? Both are close to the same price. But is having half the storage space worth the gain in speed?

SAMSUNG 850 EVO 2.5" 1TB SATA III

• 
  Max Sequential Read
  Up to 540 MBps
  Max Sequential Write
  Up to 520 MBps
  4KB Random Read
  Random read (QD1) [IOPS]: up to 10,000 IOPS
  Random read (QD32) [IOPS]: up to 98,000 IOPS
  4KB Random Write
  Random Write (QD1) [IOPS]: up to 40,000 IOPS
  Random Write (QD32) [IOPS]: up to 90,000 IOPS
  MTBF
  2,000,000 hours

SAMSUNG 950 PRO M.2 512GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4

• 
  Max Sequential Read
  Up to 2500 MBps
  Max Sequential Write
  Up to 1500 MBps
  4KB Random Read
  Up to 300,000 IOPS (4KB, QD32)
  Up to 12,000 IOPS (4KB, QD1)
  4KB Random Write
  Up to 110,000 IOPS (4KB, QD32)
  Up to 43,000 IOPS (4KB, QD1)
  MTBF
  1,500,000 hours

Thanks in advance. I know it's a lot, but I like to be able to maximize performance in everything I use my PC for (within reason). Please let me know if you have any questions.

 

[drtweak]

Don't get the NVMe. You won't see a difference except on transfering large files TO and FROM a NVMe drive.

Also just because your HDD is RAW doesn't mean it is bad. that means something happened to the file system it self. Download and run Crystal Disk Info. See if it says Caution or Bad on the HDD. If it says Good it is fine and you can either 1) try some software to recovery the partition or 2) delete it and reformat it.

Otherwise I would go with Size on a SSD over Speed for the stuff you do.

 

[apalio]

comment

Thank you for the response. I suppose I'll get the 850 EVO then.

Another quick question. I used UserBenchMark to benchmark my PC. My HyperX Predator PCIe SSD performed "way below expectations. Here are the results: http://i.imgur.com/cy2hqlK.png

I see the 'Deep queue 4k' is a bad score, however, to my understanding I won't be needing that very much anyway, as I'm not running a heavily loaded database server.

My sequential read and write were pretty below the advertised performance. Almost half the advertised read, and a little more than half the advertised write. Is this because the drive is on a PCI card, and not in the M.2 slot? In the product description, it says:

• 
  "It features a PCIe Gen 2.0 x4 interface for high performance and an M.2 form factor to fit the next generation of desktops with an M.2 PCIe slot."

Does this mean I would see better performance using the M.2 slot, instead of the PCIe 3.0 x4 slot it is currently in?

The SSD is advertised as:

• 
  Max Sequential Read
  1400MB/s (ATTO)
  1100MB/s (AS-SSD and CrystalDiskMark)
  Max Sequential Write
  1000MB/s (ATTO)
  910MB/s (AS-SSD and CrystalDiskMark)
  4KB Random Read
  Up to 117,000 IOPS
  4KB Random Write
  Up to 70,000 IOPS

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104545

 

[drtweak]

No PCIe slot or M.2 slot makes no difference. Now if the drive is a PCIe 3.0 NVMe and is in a 2.0 slot then yes half your bandwith would be gone.