need SSD suggestions 1-4TB range for desktop

[Twice_Shy]

Suggestions and maybe troubleshoot..

Hi.. so i'm currently forced to use a older than desired computer (phenom x6 with 32gigs ram) running windows 10 which I have to keep working just a bit longer because my newer computer got stolen from me by an evil roommate.

Between Adobe CC and some other apps my spinning rust 4tb C drive is the bottleneck - if I walk away awhile and return things become unresponsive like taking 5 minutes to even have the user interface respond, while using Adobe Premiere creating even just text on a 1080p video slows and chunks to a crawl until it prerenders out - I tried to set up a different scratch drive which didn't help much.

When i can get up a task manager the cpu is fine not overloaded, the memory is fine not overloaded, but C drive is just thrash thrash thrash. And Resource Monitor seems to show it's either SVCHOST or SYSTEM showing things like 3-12megabytes per SECOND when it's doing this. (its not the pagefile, ram use is like at 70%)

I'm just mentioning this in case anyone can point me to suggested temporary fixes, or insight into a problem that could wear out my future SSD if not fixed later - I dont understand enough to narrow down the problem further and i'm in college classes and can't keep fighting with it and can't afford a brand new computer til next summer at this rate.


Now it might just be the way windows tends to degrade over years of use (been awhile since a reinstall, this was meant to stay my emergency backup only) but if i'm going to reinstall it I might as well stick on a new SSD. I'm looking for something in the 1-4tb range up to $100 or so (about all I can come up with) for a SATA boot drive with reliability mattering most so not seeking offbrand china crap. I don't mean I have to spend $100 tho, a less expensive solution is fine. There's no m2 anything on something this old, this is just about the boot drive so anything should max 3gbps SATA.

I have some concern about drive lifespan - both with my problem listed above and remember articles on buying used commercial long life drives even tho the prices on ebay for those doubled after they became public knowledge so I don't know if that's the best solution anymore.

 

[nexox]

The Sandisk Cloudspeed Eco II 1.92TB drives sound like a good fit for your requirements, they generally arrive with over 1PB of lifetime writes remaining, for under $50. Performance is nothing special for an SSD, but quite a lot better than a spinning drive, and they've got all the enterprise grade reliability features. If you find that you do need a scratch drive and you have an open pci-e slot you can potentially also squeeze an older Intel NVMe drive in at the $100 budget, your old system presumably can't boot from it, but Windows can still use it.

 

[Twice_Shy]

Of lifetime writes remaining.. so I assume thats a used drive? If i'm buying one on ebay how would I verify what i'm ordering and getting (ie not on its last legs)..

I've got pcie slots so I suppose indirectly an NVMe drive can be done there, is there a recommended adapter for pcie slots (used or new) to add m2? I'd seen the local Microcenter having 1 terabyte new m2 SSD's for $25 (no clue on lifespan tho) so i know prices in general are way down from where I thought they'd be... heck if the card was cheap adding both a SATA boot SSD and an m2 drive for scratch is not out of the question if it's a notable upgrade from SATA alone performancewise... (how would I measure where my bottleneck is/being an older cpu and ram i'm not sure if the HD would still be the bottleneck above 500MB/sec I mean... I want to learn about where bottlenecks are and test, not just throw money at any problem which may not help, figure thats a good lesson for the future )

The performance i'm looking for is still mostly IOPS not throughput I mean, but how would I test for a throughput bottleneck/something an m2 would speed up as well being an Adobe scratchdrive...

 

[nexox]

Yes, the $50 SSDs are used, but there's a decent thread on here and so far I don't think anyone has received one with less than ~80% life remaining, which is still decades of desktop use. Once you plug in the drive you can query the SMART stats and see the percent lifetime is left and how many writes it has done, then compare that to the specified lifetime writes to verify that the percentage seems reasonable (these two aren't linearly related, but are still somewhat associated.) If you get a particularly bad drive you can likely negotiate with the seller for a return or discount. New SSDs in that price range are all going to be low-grade consumer parts and will almost certainly have less lifetime remaining, right out of the box.

I assume your board doesn't support pci-e bifurcation, since that's a newer/server feature, so you can likely only fit one NVMe drive per slot, unless you go for rather expensive adapters that include a pci-e switch. I would suggest something like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NHST6F2/ and any NVMe m.2 board that suits your price - there's an ebay seller unloading 960GB enterprise-grade drives with power loss protection for under $30, with an associated thread on here somewhere. I was originally thinking of skipping the adapter altogether and picking up an Intel SSD750 in pci-e slot form, but for the ~$50 price range you'll only get a 400GB model.

As far as finding bottlenecks, seems like you're already looking at the right things, and I haven't used Windows in ~15 years so whatever I do remember is hopefully out of date. I do know that it still does a whole lot of random reads for all kinds of operations, so an SSD is essential to keep it from getting sluggish, and it appears that the Sysinternals Process Explorer is still a thing (though they got acquired by MS since I last used it,) that should be more useful than the standard task manager to identify processes and services running IO that you could maybe turn off.

Edit: One other benefit of enterprise SSDs is that they will maintain their performance over time, consumer drives tend to have a small buffer to allow them to write quickly for a minute or two, then fall off to very low speeds until they're given a rest to empty the buffer.