[bimmer456]

Originally Posted by zx10guy

I put in an Intel P3608 1.6TB NVMe drive in my gaming box. I did some Crystal Mark benchmarks on it. From what I remember, read/write performance was around 2500 MB/s.

Also, not all SSDs are created equal. As an FYI, there are three types of flash memory used in SSDs: SLC, MLC, and TLC. SLC SSDs are stupid expensive but perform the fastest for both read and write operations. These are some times referred as write intensive drives. The others listed fall under mixed use or read intensive applications.

In addition, you all should pay attention to a durability rating which some times a manufacturer will list for a consumer grade SSD. Enterprise SSDs always report this parameter. It's called DWPD or drive writes per day. If you want some sort of reliability, you want a drive that has at least a 1 DWPD rating. What this means is if you have a 500GB SSD with a 1 DWPD, this means you can write 500GB of data to the SSD every day for I think 5 years. SSDs do fail. One of my clients tried using Samsung 840/850 EVO drives because they thought an SSD was an SSD. Why spend 2 to 3 times more for an enterprise SSD? Well, they found out as they were burning out their 840/850 drives at an alarming rate. They've since gone to enterprise level drives. I run some servers in my home network and they're using SAS SSD drives rated at 3 to 5 DWPDs with drive sizes of 1.92TB and 3.84TB.

Good to know, I'll have to check the warranty on my drives if it is just for 5 years regardless of usage or there is a usage component to the warranty as well. I've had WD and Seagate hard drives that came with a 5 year warranty but didn't have any usage stipulation in the warranty, these were just regular 5400 rpm hard drives. So far my SSD seems to be trucking along and I'm just an average user so hopefully it won't burn out any time soon as I don't read and write to the entire drive on a daily basis. I'm not a hardcore PC gamer as it's just a regular core i5 2.3 Ghz MacBook Pro from 6 years ago. The stock 320 GB 5400 rpm HDD was still working when I upgraded and I still have it, but don't plan on using it again. I brought my computer refurbished I'd say maybe 3 years ago for $799 from Apple.com and the SSD cost about $160, plus maybe $150 to upgrade to 8GB of RAM from 4GB, so I'd say a pretty good bargain.

[Obioban]

Originally Posted by bimmer456

How many of you have done this upgrade? This has made my computer 10 times faster at least. It is as fast as the new machines in the Apple store, maybe faster. I'm afraid if I get a touch bar mac it might actually be slower.

The SSD in the touch bar MacBook Pros is faster than the SSD you just put in, so no need to fear that.

But, yeah, SSD is the best upgrade you can do to any non SSD computer.

[bimmer456]

Originally Posted by Obioban

The SSD in the touch bar MacBook Pros is faster than the SSD you just put in, so no need to fear that.

But, yeah, SSD is the best upgrade you can do to any non SSD computer.

I seriously want to do a boot test at the apple store, I think I could beat at least the MacBook Air. The difference versus a touchbar Mac might be negligible and have more to do with what software is on the computer. Probably the main difference would be with games or other graphics and processor intensive apps. Though I was able to load adobe premiere in just a few seconds on my machine (2011 version) versus having to wait several minutes with the 5400 rpm HDD.

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by bimmer456

Good to know, I'll have to check the warranty on my drives if it is just for 5 years regardless of usage or there is a usage component to the warranty as well. I've had WD and Seagate hard drives that came with a 5 year warranty but didn't have any usage stipulation in the warranty, these were just regular 5400 rpm hard drives. So far my SSD seems to be trucking along and I'm just an average user so hopefully it won't burn out any time soon as I don't read and write to the entire drive on a daily basis. I'm not a hardcore PC gamer as it's just a regular core i5 2.3 Ghz MacBook Pro from 6 years ago. The stock 320 GB 5400 rpm HDD was still working when I upgraded and I still have it, but don't plan on using it again. I brought my computer refurbished I'd say maybe 3 years ago for $799 from Apple.com and the SSD cost about $160, plus maybe $150 to upgrade to 8GB of RAM from 4GB, so I'd say a pretty good bargain.

For many people, the worry of burning out an SSD is not something they should worry about. So you should be ok. I have an older Samsung 840 running in my gaming box being used for the OS. I install all my games to the NVMe drive. The warranty of these SSDs shouldn't have any stipulation on how they're used such as if you write to it 100% of the time.

But to be clear, reading from flash memory such as SSDs, SD cards, compact flash, USB thumb drives, won't wear out these mediums. It is the process of writing to flash memory which causes the wear. I remember using a 8GB thumb drive for a project which was a software build built around Linux. I had to boot from the thumb drive connected to one of my servers. Within a month, the amount of writes to the thumb drive from just OS overhead was enough to burn out the thumb drive.