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#11
First of all, it cost very little to manufacture a SSD. A M.2 is the size of a gum stick, much cheaper than any HDD.
It already dropped a lot. My first (2016) M.2 SSD cost US$ 1.0 /G. Now it cost US$ 0.09 /G.
As there are many manufactures on the market now and most people already has a SSD for his old computer, very soon there will be a ferocious competition for the market share and prices will fall vertically.
Yes it is a QLC, but for the price of a PCI Express 4.0 - 5000 MBps it is a bargain
Sorry I had already purchased the Samsung before Crucial was recommended.
My plan is to use Macrium to clone the existing M2 drive (bad or not, and it does appear to be ok) to the new Samsung giving me an extra 600GB for C:
The old one can be kept as back up.
My question is should I format to MBR or GPT and does this have to be the same on both to clone them successfully?
if you use the samsung migration tool, it should do the job with a fresh target disk.
Samsung Magician & SSD Tools & Software Update | Samsung Semiconductor Global
Samsung Data Migration software is designed to help users quickly, easily, and safely migrate all of their data – including their current operating system, application software, and user data – from their existing storage device (e.g. HDD) to their new Samsung SSD.
But do I need both drives connected? I'd like to write to a file (image?) first, remove the drive then use that after the new drive is installed. I think Macrium lets me do that.
You're very well served with the Samsung 980.
On a drive clone or drive image the initialization (GPT or MBR) and format type (NTFS or Fat32) are also replicated.
Make sure you do a drive clone or create a drive image with all partitions from the source drive.
To clone you need to have both drives connected. If you don't have a second M.2 slot, create a drive image, save on an external drive, replace the existing drive with the new one, boot from Macrium Reflect rescue drive, apply the image to the new drive expanding only the C partition and you're done.
What speed will an M2 run when fitted in an adaptor if the motherboard only has 1 M2 nvme port? Would it be better than a 2.5 SSD in SATA3?
In a pci express port:
PCIe 1.1 x4 1 Go/s
PCIe 2.0 x4 2 Go/s
PCIe 3.0 x4 and x1 4 Go/s and 1 Go/s
and more... it will be faster than a 2.5" sata ssd.
You really have to examine the motherboard manual carefully. There are a limited number of PCIe lanes available in any system. On my gaming desktop system, for example, I wanted the maximum number of PCIe lanes available to my GPU. I had to be careful which M.2 slots I used for NVMe and which PCIe slots I used for an adapter card to run an NVMe SSD because some of those slots would take away PCIe lanes from my GPU. In some cases it made more sense to install a SATA SSD in order to maintain full PCIe lanes available to the GPU.