HDD + small SSD - worthwhile?

[pcolbeck]

Oh and be careful there have been a couple of NVMe standards and they aren't cross compatible (the connections are different).

[Polar Bear]

Pretty happy with the new PC, but I have one little niggle.

It's not a problem at the moment, but the storage is a bit limited, & I've been thinking of something which would take a fair bit of it, leaving less margin than I'd really like. There's a bay for a SATA drive*, & I thought that future-proofed it: I could pop a spinning thing in if I needed it. But now I've got used to SSD speed, & especially latency. So . . .  could I put a SATA SSD in there? I know it'd not be as blisteringly fast as the NVMe one the computer came with, but it'd be faster than a rotating HDD, wouldn't it? Just for data - programs would go on the PCIe  NVMe device, alongside the OS.

Can anyone tell me why I shouldn't do it?

*Says "SATA AHCI, up to 6 Gbps" in the spec. The SSD is "PCIe Gen3.0x4 NVMe, up to 32 Gbps"

My system has an m.2/nvme drive as drive C and a 2.5 inch sata ssd as my data drive.  And I add in a further 2.5 inch sata ssd using the Akasa hot swap caddy referred to upthread. 

I had to help the FiCL recently and was mildly shocked by the noisy spinning rust.  Both of our machines and both of mllePB's work laptops are ssd and thus there is very little noise from the hardware real estate.  Bliss.

[Canardly]

An SSD as boot drive will speed things up considerably. Crucial UK has some offers on atm all of which include free cloning software.  NVME is also available of course if your mobo supports it.

[Polar Bear]

Samsung do free cloning software too.  I'd expect most brands to offer cloning software. 

I stuck a Crucial ssd into my 2012 Acer laptop well before Covid and it is still going strong.  Must be close to it's 3 year warranty now.  A friend in need has been using the machine for the past 14 months and when we last checked all was well.  I am mildly surprised but very pleased with a 2012 Intel i5 dual core with 8gb ram is still more than gutsy enough for the usual browsing, admin, social media and video conferencing demands of 2021.

[Bledlow]

An SSD as boot drive will speed things up considerably. Crucial UK has some offers on atm all of which include free cloning software.  NVME is also available of course if your mobo supports it.

It already has an NVMe SSD as boot drive, on which all the software sits. I'm thinking of a SATA SSD for data.

[philip]

Yes, you can use a SATA SSD in place of a spinning SATA disk. They have the same electrical connections and the same screw holes for mounting.

[lissotriton]

Just remember to buy a 3.5"/2.5" drive adapter, if you will be using it in a desktop PC. Can get one for a few quid on eBay.

[Bledlow]

Thanks. I hadn't thought of that (doh!). Yes, it's a desktop with space for a 3.5" HDD.

[Afasoas]

Just a note about Crucial drives. I bought a pair of their CT1000MX500SSD1 (1TB) SATA SSD drives and they constantly report "1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors"
It turns out to be an annoying firmware bug. It's transient and crops up every couple of days.

I'm cautious of some of the cheaper brands as I've seen a few interesting failure modes. I've seen about 20 transcend SSDs die within a year (100%) failure rate. Also, with some of the cheaper drives, I've found the SLC/TLC caches to be very small and when they wear out, the slower NAND is much much slower, in fact for some random accesses slower than a decent spinny disk.

Not something to cheap out on.
That said, I tend to put the smallest/cheapest/well reviewed/sufficiently benchmarked drives into my laptops and desktops as I don't store any important data on them.