So, I bought the Surface Studio, which is a really nice machine, particularly, the monitor, not s...

[G+_Scott Robinson]

So, I bought the Surface Studio, which is a really nice machine, particularly, the monitor, not so much the speed. I fully intended to do the upgrade that padresj did, but am wondering about level of SSD's that I want to go with. In his upgrade, it was strictly about SSD. I am wondering about which SSD to choose. I'm looking at Samsung EVOs, but am getting lost as to where to go. I see 850, 860, 960, 970 as well as EVO and PRO. I don't have money to throw away, but budget isn't the only thing I'm worried about.

 

My question is: Do I spend $350+ on the 9XX series, for the m.2? Do I need 1TB to replace the existing SSD(which I think is only 64GB)? Do I get any benefit from the larger dirve? For the 2.5" drive, should I go for the EVO/PRO as well.

 

Am I overkilling by going with the Samsungs, as they seem a bit more costly than Crucial, Kingston, etc? My first SSD replacement was a Crucial, in a Vista, turned Windows 7 laptop, and it was fine.

 

I'm using computer for 20+ tabbed spreadsheets (this seems to be the reason I want to upgrade, as these seem really slow), photos, documents, etc. so I don't have real heavy demands. I am thinking about a drone with 4K camera, as soon as I learn how to fly a lesser one, so may be wanting to render videos, so future-proofing is not out of the question.

[G+_Scott Robinson]

oh, yeah, I've got i7, 16 GB RAM

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

You only need to go with a PRO if you're worried about losing data sure to a power outage. They're the ones with onboard capacitors that let them finish any writes still in cache when power goes out. I have a Samsung 450PRO that was on sale at Microcenter for less than the newer generation EVO.

 

The other major brands are good as well, just a tiny bit slower, but not enough that you'd notice in actual use.

 

Believe it or not, rendering video 99.9% of the time depends exclusively on CPU. Even the slowest HDD can keep up. For that, you'd be just as well of getting a massive external drive.

 

TLDNR: Get the biggest one you can afford from a major name brand. Samsung, Kingston, Intel, etc.

[G+_George Fromtulsa]

According to iFixit: "The M.2 socket is compatible with most SATA III, PCIe ACHI, and PCIe NVMe in the M.2 2280 form factor"

 

Fr. Robert doesn't mention that the system has a "Rapid Hybrid Drive." Apparently not so rapid?

 

From other posts the out of the box setup uses the slow HDD as the boot drive and the 128GB SSD as a caching drive, similar to Apple's Fusion setup that's a performance bottleneck.

 

In Apple-land it was discovered early that De-Fusing the Fusion setup resulted in a great speed improvement. That worked by using the 128GB SSD component for MacOS and applications (and work in progress) and the slow HDD for bulk storage.

 

It is possible you could do that on your Studio and get by with no $ needed. The link here discusses how to set the Studio to use the m.2 slot as Windows/Boot.

 

You could experiment with having Win on the existing m.2 before deciding what, if anything, to do next.

 

It's clearly more difficult - and dangerous - to dig deep and replace the SATA spinner.

 

That's an argument - if using the existing 128 to boot doesn't satisfy - for replacing the m.2 with a large NVMe drive and keeping the slow spinner for storage. PCPer.com is a good source for drive reviews. WD Black is mentioned as a cheaper alternative to Samsung's.

 

Intel has just introduced the 660p line of NVMe SSDs. The MSRP price point (1TB, $200, 2TB, $400) is very appealing, but they're just entering the supply chain and the few on offer so far seem to be marked up by "third-party" resellers.

 

Pretty sure you would be happy with the WD Black. Yet when I just checked Amazon the 1TB Black is $330, $30 more than the $300 960 EVO but notably less than the 960 PRO at $462. The 1TB 970 is $335, so prices seem to fluctuate!

 

According to reviews, the difference in throughput of these drives is minimal and not detectable by human senses, just in synthetic benchmarks. Same for "traditional" SATA connected 2.5" SSDs. Read the reviews, and buy from comparable drives based on price. None of these drives have been in production long enough to leave a junkyard record of despair. Samsung has been the market leader quite some time, and since the 840 series (fixed with firmware) has a good track record. At my workplace (and home) are both WD and Samsungs (and some others), and only one's failed, an OEM in ASUS laptop and neither WD nor Samsung.

 

[G+_Scott Robinson]

Travis Hershberger OK, so I've got a UPS, so I should be OK regarding power outages. The 970 EVO - 500 GB vs 970 PRO 512 GB is $75 difference ($168 v $242). That almost covers the $100 UPS, so maybe the EVO gets the call. Looking at Belarc, the 64 GB SSD is Drive 3, a couple of external WD SSD's are Drive 1 + 2, while the Seagate 1 TB drive is Drive 0. I was thinking that the m.2 drive was OS, and HDD spinning drive was just data. That is apparently wrong, so now I see why my speed expectations are not being met! I've been SSD for several years, and rightfully so. Can I put an m.2 SSD in where the mSATA drive is with some sort of adapter, and realize the faster read/write? Or is that even necessary? As said, video rendering is on being future-proofed, but sounds like my i7 will help there.

[G+_Scott Robinson]

Scott Robinson So, you are correct, in that this is not "rapid"! The spreadsheet(s) I mentioned can take a second or two to respond to tabbing to next field for data entry. On my Surface Book, it's tab, and type, while on Studio it's tab and wait, then type :(

 

Mine is a 64 GB SSD (I think the 2 TB i7 has the 128 GB). I had that backwards, and now realize that my bottleneck is the spinning HDD. Since I'm in there, I'll replace both drives. I was thinking that the Samsungs were the way to go, but being cache drives, may not need the larger size I was targeting. Googling the process, I saw that folks were going with 1 TB SDD replacement for cache and 2 TB for spinning drive replacement. Samsung does seem to have the most confidence level for drives, in general.

 

I'll have to check on whether Windows 10 and apps will fit on the 64 GB drive. I'm thinking that might be a little bit limiting.

 

All of my external drives are WD, and I've had good luck with them, so you're probably right about the WD Black. Having spent almost $4K on computer, obviously I'm not budget conscious, so a couple hundred bucks, either way will not be an issue :)

 

You said "According to iFixit: "The M.2 socket is compatible with most SATA III, PCIe ACHI, and PCIe NVMe in the M.2 2280 form factor" Can I get the m.2 and then adapt it to the 2.5" mSATA connection and realize the higher read/writes is my next point of ignorance?

 

I'm comfortable enough with the mechanics of replacement, as I can turn a screwdriver with the best of them, I'm just unsure of the technical end of this move.

 

[G+_Scott Robinson]

Scott Robinson cesardelatorre.azurewebsites.net - Cesar de la Torre - Blog | Installing Windows 10 on a PCIe M.2 SSD drive in the Surface Studio seems to be a good link for the process. I will probably give that a go. Thinking 500 GB EVO 960 m.2 for OS and 1 TB EVO 860 2.5" mSATA for data.

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

Scott Robinson Yep. The hybrid small SSD and large HDD never really satisfied in most use cases. It does improve on the speed of the HDD, but not by a whole lot and only when the software guesses right about what to load into the SDD cache.