Need advise on SSD upgrade...

geneo said:

That's good if you have USB-C

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Well my laptop has USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 (10 GB/s) Type-C, but if I buy an enclosure that meets this spec it will only hold my 980 Pro back even more than the M.2 PCIe Gen 1×4 socket does, so at these current SSD prices I don't think it would really be worth going for a 2TB model if it's going to only support SATA, let alone only support SATA and only be used to upgrade a laptop from the stone age (sorry for the fact that I did it on purpose..).

hdmi said:

That's a lot of money to be spending on a slow SSD even if it's still a tad faster than that 512GB Phison that I threw out of my laptop four days ago. Especially in light of the fact that it can't turn a HP laptop from 2013 into a new one.

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I agree, just sayin that's just the way it is.

hdmi said:

Well my laptop has USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 (10 GB/s) Type-C, but if I buy an enclosure that meets this spec it will only hold my 980 Pro back even more than the M.2 PCIe Gen 1×4 socket does, so at these current SSD prices I don't think it would really be worth going for a 2TB model if it's going to only support SATA, let alone only support SATA and only be used to upgrade a laptop from the stone age (sorry for the fact that I did it on purpose..).

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My comments were in the context of the OP, who does not have USB-C or nvme capabilities.

geneo said:

My comments were in the context of the OP, who does not have USB-C or nvme capabilities.

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I know. Just saying, I would fix that particular part of the problem, by simply getting a half decent laptop with NVMe and go from there.

What ever drive you decide to buy plan on using it as an external drive on the new laptop. It is next to impossible to find a laptop that is easy for the user to get the back off of.

geneo said:

That's good if you have USB-C

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It also works on regular USB ports as well, they just have to be the 10Gbps 3.2 Gen 2's. My Rog Strix X570-E has 7 of these USB ports on the back I/O panel. I get just over 1000MB/sec on this combo using either my standard USB ports or my USB type c ports.

Winuser said:

What ever drive you decide to buy plan on using it as an external drive on the new laptop. It is next to impossible to find a laptop that is easy for the user to get the back off of.

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It was extremely easy to get the back off of my laptop. All I had to do was use the tip of a potato knife to remove the small rubber paddings from the holes to uncover the screws before I could remove the screws with a precision screwdriver, and, after that, take an old credit card and slide it through the groove starting at the front moving toward the back along either side. I didn't have to apply that much force to get the edge of the credit card in. Once it was in, sliding it from the front toward the back was just a piece of cake. I could hear and feel the tabs on the inside pop out of the crevices, properly one by one, and without having to be afraid of breaking anything. By the weekend I am going to have to open my laptop again, as I have a 2×8GB G.Skill Ripjaws kit on order, and will be replacing my 2×4GB Hynix kit with it.

hdmi said:

It was extremely easy to get the back off of my laptop. All I had to do was use the tip of a potato knife to remove the small rubber paddings from the holes to uncover the screws before I could remove the screws with a precision screwdriver, and, after that, take an old credit card and slide it through the groove starting at the front moving toward the back along either side. I didn't have to apply that much force to get the edge of the credit card in. Once it was in, sliding it from the front toward the back was just a piece of cake. I could hear and feel the tabs on the inside pop out of the crevices, properly one by one, and without having to be afraid of breaking anything. By the weekend I am going to have to open my laptop again, as I have a 2×8GB G.Skill Ripjaws kit on order, and will be replacing my 2×4GB Hynix kit with it.

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Do you really think it's a good idea to suggest to an average user to take the back off of their laptop? I have done several for myself and family. It's not a job I would recommend to just anyone.

Winuser said:

Do you really think it's a good idea to suggest to an average user to take the back off of their laptop? I have done several for myself and family. It's not a job I would recommend to just anyone.

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No, and, in fact I didn't say that it was a good idea to suggest to anyone, average user or not. Just saying, it was easy as pie─just how it always should be. But yeah... I know full well that there will always be someone who will break stuff, inevitably so, and regardless of how easy it is made to be. The same also applies to installing an SSD into an external enclosure BTW. I mean, although it isn't rocket science, like so many other things that exist in the galaxy, it takes a basic skill or two for one to not jinx it. That's only logical of course.

hdmi said:

my laptop's M.2 socket is actually holding back the read speed of this SSD, as this SSD can do 7,000MB/s theroretical read speed via PCIe 4.0 (PCIe Gen4 ×4) whereas my laptop is limited to PCIe 3.0 (PCIe Gen1 ×4) so I am getting only 3,500MB/s out of this thing.

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Honestly, would not lose any sleep over that. Aside from benchmarks, and timing a file copy with a stopwatch, you won't see any appreciable change from windows, or launching apps, or playing games between read speeds of 3500 versus 7000. I have a WD Sn850 2tb in my desktop which benchmarks at 7GB/sec, so I am speaking from experience. I recently added a standard 2.5" sata 2tb SSD (as my SN 850 was filling up) which only comes in around 500MB/sec to hold my games. I expected to see some difference in load times considering the drive is 14x slower....but it's like 13 seconds rather than 11.8. Only noticeable with a stopwatch.

pparks1 said:

Honestly, would not lose any sleep over that. Aside from benchmarks, and timing a file copy with a stopwatch, you won't see any appreciable change from windows, or launching apps, or playing games between read speeds of 3500 versus 7000. I have a WD Sn850 2tb in my desktop which benchmarks at 7GB/sec, so I am speaking from experience. I recently added a standard 2.5" sata 2tb SSD (as my SN 850 was filling up) which only comes in around 500MB/sec to hold my games. I expected to see some difference in load times considering the drive is 14x slower....but it's like 13 seconds rather than 11.8. Only noticeable with a stopwatch.

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While I agree that 7000 is overkill for anything I do, the difference between 3500 and 500 was still very noticeable nevertheless, when I extracted a 45GB RAR archive with WinRAR.

cereberus said:

Rrplace internal hdd with ssd for best performance. Put hdd in a usb3 caddy fir use as backup drive where performance is not really important.

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I agree with @cereberus here. Get an internal SSD for best performance and get a SSD enclosure for your current HDD so you'll have an external storage drive. (Not sure if anyone else advised that. It's kind of early in the morning, and I've been up since 4AM. So, I just built on what immediately jumped out at me...)

hdmi said:

While I agree that 7000 is overkill for anything I do, the difference between 3500 and 500 was still very noticeable nevertheless, when I extracted a 45GB RAR archive with WinRAR.

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Well, of course it goes without saying, if you spend a lot of time copying files, or extracting very large files....having the fasted I/O possible will make it quicker. The question becomes is it worth the extra cost for the frequency in which you are going to do these operations. And I certainly understand how frustrating it seems when you hardware can go faster, but another component is holding it back. It just seems like such a waste.

I'm not trying to say that 7,000 is overkill, but for the typical user, who is booting windows, launching apps, playing some games, surfing the web, reading email, running office apps, editing some pictures, etc.....it's not like going from a 3500 drive to a 7000 drive is going to make your computer seem 2x faster. I'd almost believe most people would wonder if the new drive was even working as their experience is mostly going to be the same.

pparks1 said:

Well, of course it goes without saying, if you spend a lot of time copying files, or extracting very large files....having the fasted I/O possible will make it quicker. The question becomes is it worth the extra cost for the frequency in which you are going to do these operations. And I certainly understand how frustrating it seems when you hardware can go faster, but another component is holding it back. It just seems like such a waste.

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Well it's not really that big of a waste to me, as the 2TB 970 Evo Plus barely was cheaper than my 2TB 980 Pro anyway after all. But that's just because I had found a golden deal on Cyber Monday of course.

pparks1 said:

I'm not trying to say that 7,000 is overkill, but for the typical user, who is booting windows, launching apps, playing some games, surfing the web, reading email, running office apps, editing some pictures, etc.....it's not like going from a 3500 drive to a 7000 drive is going to make your computer seem 2x faster. I'd almost believe most people would wonder if the new drive was even working as their experience is mostly going to be the same.

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Yeah, the biggest difference is that I now have 2TB for playing my Hi Rez FLAC files instead of only 512GB.

hdmi said:

I know. Just saying, I would fix that particular part of the problem, by simply getting a half decent laptop with NVMe and go from there.

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It is okay for you to call this a laptop from the 'stone age'.

But it is NOT okay to say you'll get a half decent laptop with NVME.

This laptop may not be blazing fast by today's standards, but it is fast enough, especially for the work I do. How often do you make use of NVME speeds and how much time does that save in actual day-to-day use?

I don't think it makes nearly the same difference as an SSD makes over an HDD. I'm talking of real world use, not just benchmark tests. SATA SSDs are fast enough for routine use, even by today's standards.

jvickers said:

I agree with @cereberus here. Get an internal SSD for best performance and get a SSD enclosure for your current HDD so you'll have an external storage drive. (Not sure if anyone else advised that. It's kind of early in the morning, and I've been up since 4AM. So, I just built on what immediately jumped out at me...)

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There are 2 disks inside, of which one is an SSD and Windows boots from there.

The SSD is only 250 GB in size. Although it is manageable, I was thinking of buying a high capacity and modern one that can also be used as an internal disk in a future laptop.

But as glasskuter suggested, since the future here is possibly a distant one, it is best to stick with something that meets current requirements best and let the future take care of itself.

TheMystic said:

It is okay for you to call this a laptop from the 'stone age'.

But it is NOT okay to say you'll get a half decent laptop with NVME.

This laptop may not be blazing fast by today's standards, but it is fast enough, especially for the work I do. How often do you make use of NVME speeds and how much time does that save in actual day-to-day use?

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I wasn't trying to argue against that. The point is that you might not be able to transfer a 2.5 inch SATA SSD to your new laptop that you probably will end up buying sooner or later, especially if it will be later rather than sooner, excepting only if you can live with using this SSD externally later. That's right... "good" laptops with internal 2.5 inch drive bays are already slowly but surely getting harder to come by, or at least you will have limited choices if you decide to wait too long, possibly you will need to pay extra, like, for example, if you will be forced (in a certain sense) to buy one that, while still being new and unused (or maybe), uses older tech so that the total value for money may in fact be lower as opposed to be higher. But your current laptop has no M.2 socket, so as a result from that, if you can NOT live with the potential problem described above, then you will be forced to look for an external solution, in which case it will be possible to opt for an M.2 NVMe USB enclosure (that can already be had for less than $20), i.e. with an NVMe SSD in it. And that can later be transferred to a newer laptop, either externally or internally, and without having to worry as much about any performance related factors so you'll gain the advantage of a wider flexibility in pure terms of future upgrade possibilities─and at a relatively small extra cost, also in addition to that. Like it or not... trying to squeeze several more years out of a 2013 laptop will be always a big gamble, and that is putting it mildly. But hey, it isn't MY money to burn. People should buy whatever it is that they want to buy, so if you really feel like doing an internal 2.5 inch upgrade anyway after all, then by all means go for it. I am just saying I would never do that, and why.

TheMystic said:

I don't think it makes nearly the same difference as an SSD makes over an HDD. I'm talking of real world use, not just benchmark tests. SATA SSDs are fast enough for routine use, even by today's standards.

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Up until the beginning of 2018, I didn't even own an SSD, and that is in spite of the fact that people on Sevenforums had been saying for more than 8 years that it is impossile to live without one. So how did I do it, then? Simple. For the most part, putting the laptop to sleep instead of shutting it down, and using Diskeeper in concert with Romex Software Primo Ramdisk (with the Dynamic Memory Management option enabled) was how.

TheMystic said:

I'm talking of real world use, not just benchmark tests. SATA SSDs are fast enough for routine use, even by today's standards.

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Hi,
I've pretty much gone back to 2.5" sata ssd's
m.2's just aren't worth the hype/ hassle and heat seeing I dual boot with different os's 7-10-11 a lot, including linux and grub sludge sucks on other disks lol

Benchmark wise I can tell you 100% only disk benches can tell the difference
All other benchmark utilities don't care at all if it's m.2 or sata.

Future wise all will be pci-e 4.

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
I've pretty much gone back to 2.5" sata ssd's
m.2's just aren't worth the hype/ hassle and heat seeing I dual boot with different os's 7-10-11 a lot, including linux and grub sludge sucks on other disks lol

Benchmark wise I can tell you 100% only disk benches can tell the difference
All other benchmark utilities don't care at all if it's m.2 or sata.

Future wise all will be pci-e 4.

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I don't see any heat coming from my 2TB 980 Pro, dual boot is not a problem with it either, and, the 2TB version of the 980 Pro has 1,200 TBW, just like the 1TB / 2TB version of the 970 Evo Plus.

Hi,
If you don't look you'd never see the heat lol
HWinfo64 clearly shows temp-1 & 2 on sammy m.2's and even these sensors are 10c apart.
HWiNFO - Download

970 evo or evo plus run at 60c+- I sure don't like hot spots.
850-860 pro sata's run at 30+- for daily activities these are fine even for storage.