Some info regarding SSD's

[sohaibrazzaq]

Hi all, i have been thinking to buy an SSD for ages (Never got one yet) but now i have made up my mind to buy one as my WD 1 TB Caviar Black is now over 6 years old and i better replace it with an SSD before it goes silent and take my OS and everything with it.

I am not considering anything less then 1 TB under any circumstances and space was and still one of the biggest reason i haven't bought an SSD yet so going below that is simply out of the question. What i want to ask is does it make sense to buy a SATA based SSD now when newer PCIE based SSD's getting more and more popular?

I am thinking Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB but my friend said that i'd be a Moron to get a sata ssd now. My motherboard is Asus Maximus VI Hero (4th gen with i7 4770k) so i don't even know if it supports the newer ssd's without some kind of extension cards.

I have a niece who loves playing The Sims 3 and 4 on my PC and the load times can get extremely long, i am talking over 3 minutes to get into the game and she complains so speeding those load times along with general OS is my goal. I have a fairly high end PC otherwise, a 4770k, 32GB DDR3 @ 2100MHz and GTX 1080.

Oh and last question, since ssd's are 2.5" will i need a new cage to convert my 3.5" drive cage to 2.5" or can they fit into any hdd bay without an issue?

[sneaker]

From what I can tell you'd need the more expensive PCIe SSD, a suitable adapter if the SSD uses the M.2 slot and maybe even a BIOS mod to support booting. Let's say 30% more costs. Is that worth it? Tough question. I think you will probably not notice. But only you can decide. That said, I haven't seen any benchmarks specifically for the Sims SATA vs PCIe.

If you buy the 2.5" SATA one you need an enclosure/adapter if your case only has free 3.5" ones. But look carefully. Some cases can take SSDs via top/bottom screws instead of from the side (see this).

PCIe lanes may also be a topic you might want to look into.

[jagabo]

I'd recommend using a 2.5 to 3.5" adapter -- but in a pinch you can simply put the 2.5" drive in a 3.5" slot and only screw in one side.

[sohaibrazzaq]

From what I can tell you'd need the more expensive PCIe SSD, a suitable adapter if the SSD uses the M.2 slot and maybe even a BIOS mod to support booting. Let's say 30% more costs. Is that worth it? Tough question. I think you will probably not notice. But only you can decide. That said, I haven't seen any benchmarks specifically for the Sims SATA vs PCIe.

If you buy the 2.5" SATA one you need an enclosure/adapter if your case only has free 3.5" ones. But look carefully. Some cases can take SSDs via top/bottom screws instead of from the side (see this).

PCIe lanes may also be a topic you might want to look into.

Yeah i have been actually reading a lot today and from what i understand games HDD access in general is 4K read/writes rather then sequential reads so i doubt the newer ssd's will make much difference. Yeah they may actually be 4-5 times faster in sequential read/writes on paper but in games difference is going to be negligible since they aren't that fast then normal ssd's when it comes to 4k.

And yeah about my case, i have Cooler Master HAF 932, old edition not the advanced edition which doesn't have any space for mounting 2.5" drives so i have already ordered this:
https://www.amazon.com/1x3-5-Device-Drive-Converter-Adapter/dp/B00IEINA7K

I think i am going to go with 850 EVO, that ssd seems solid and have best benchmark results when it comes to SATA III ssds.

[redwudz]

I've been using a 250GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2.5" in my main PC with a 3.5" adapter for a couple of years. No problems,
and it does really speed up boot operations. The PC also has four 1.5TB HDDs for data.

I have a M.2 250GB EVO in my laptop also, along with a 1TB data HDD. It also works well.

But my games are all on the hard drives, so no major speed improvements for launching games from the SSD.
I try to keep the SSDs at about 50% free space to allow the SSDs to move data around for wear leveling.
I have about 94GB of game data on my laptop, so I don't want to overload the SSD with all that.

My secondary HDD on the laptop is a 1TB drive. Load times for games from it are usually about 15 seconds or so.
I don't have any of the SIMS games at present, so not sure on their load times.
The SSD may not be a lot faster for game loads as the CPU still does a lot of processing for game setups. Depends on the game.

That adapter you ordered doesn't seem show a cover for the open 3.5" bay, so you may need something for that.