Solved Is Upgrading Mechanical Storage Drive to SSD a good idea?

[Brandon Byrnes]

I am thinking of upgrading my mechanical 5400 rpm drive in my laptop to a 1TB SSD. The only problem is, I have heard that SDD's aren't really good for storage becuase of wear and tear. I already have a SSD as my boot drive, and figured I'd get better read and write speeds by upgrading from my hybrid 5400 rpm storage drive to an SSD, what do you guys think, is the whole wear and tear thing not really an issue anymore? Do you guys have any suggestions for a good 1TB sata III SSD, or maybe a mid-tier 2TB sata III SSD? TBH i'm not really looking to spend $300-$400 on a SSD (maybe $200 if that's possible) so maybe 2TB isn't a good option, but I'm not sure, that's why i'm asking the experts.

 

[veeg]

Hello Brandon

I don't own one,so i will tag.

@phillpower2 @jmarket @Bruce

 

[Bruce]

In my experience, the whole wear and tear thing with SSDs is no longer relevant.
NAND cells and the wearing algorithms are much better.
But still, each one has a finite number of reads/writes.
I have used them for about 5 years now, still have some original 64gb units in use.
So go crazy and upgrade to whatever size the budget allows. The speed improvement is simply awesome.

Mind you, it still doesn’t hurt to help out the SSD as mush as possible. Move files and folders with high I/O to another drive if available. Reduce pagefile size, turn off hibernation file, turn off services as recommended by the SSDs software and setup up a 10% Over Provision partition.

For example, I prodominately use Samsung units and the supplied Samsung Magician does all that for you.

 

[Evan Omo]

Hi Brandon.

I would absolutely upgrade to this SSD, Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD.

As Bruce stated, all SSD's will eventually wear out but with the Samsung 860 SSD's its not even an issue because by the time the drive starts to wear out, it would already be outdated anyway. This was an issue a few years ago but nowadays with modern SSD's its not something I would be concerned with.

At 1TB the TBW is an impressive 600TB, and the 4TB mechanism has an incredible 2,400TB or 2.4 Petabytes TBW.
Yes, we’ve got to the P-word. So long terabyte, hello petabyte!


To put that in perspective; if you wrote the entire contents of a 50GB Blu-ray to the 4TB 860 Evo every single day it would take 131 years to hit the predicted failure point of the 4TB unit.
This isn’t a claim we can practically test given deadlines, but it would strongly suggest that even with the smaller mechanisms the Samsung 860 Evo is highly unlikely to fail within the typical lifespan of a modern computer.


The most popular size is likely to be the 860 Evo 500GB, and with that you get 300TB TBW, or the equivalent of writing a 50GB Blu-ray each day for roughly 16 years, and that is plenty unless you’re editing 4K video for a living. Those that have that sort of write level should probably go for the larger models where even their excessive use seems well within the longevity of their new design.

Samsung 860 Evo review.

 

[Brandon Byrnes]

Well I think that's' good enough for me. Thanks guys. I think I'll go ahead and upgrade. I was planning on getting that Samsung 860 Evo, so I think I'll go ahead and do that. Thanks for the info guys.

 

[veeg]

Mark your thread as solved?

 

[Evan Omo]

Thanks for letting us know.