Need some advice on an upgrade to my Laptop. I've only got 128GB storage, which means that I can't store my music or video on it with the free space available (10GB). I'm looking to go up to the 500GB mark as I'm looking at taking a year sabbatical in Australia early next year and it would therefore be my main PC while I'm there - video streaming from my HTPC works for now but won't work half way round the world. It takes M.2 drives and I've found Crucial versions of the M500 and M550 available from Lambdatek - The 480GB M500 is listed at £177, the 512GB M550 at £230 - best prices I've found for either drive, even with the additional P&P. Question is pretty simple, is it really worth an extra £53/30% for the M550 version? Obviously there's an extra 32GB storage - the performance of the M550 is also supposed to be 30% faster than the M500 - for the 2.5" versions. Will I see any major difference in boot time and what would you do? Thanks
I would simply by what I could afford. How big a library of media do you have? If it means compromising because of a lack of storage space, go for the m550.
i can see the M550 for ~£215 inc delivery... Not sure if that can be beaten, but it puts them closer, & CCL have been reliable in the past in my experience. As to whether it's worth the difference... it obviously won't make things slower, however, other than feeling a little bit snappier, 'if' all you're doing is watching videos & listening to music (plus a bit of browsing & whatnot), it's really quite debateable. Well, if you were doing reasonably heavy multi-tasking (ie so that the pagefile's being more heavily used) or had some usage that was actually disk bound (though on smaller i/os, not sequential ones) then the 550 would certainly be better... ...but it will make no difference to watching/listening to stuff. There's then a marginally higher capacity (<30GB), but that's only really of benefit in helping to maintain a decent amount of free space. (447.13GB vs 476.94GB formatted capacities - the difference d.t. the amount used for parity data not total nand) & it's your call as to whether it's worth spending the extra for boot speeds - as it will be faster, but is your time that precious & are you rebooting that often that you need to save maybe a second or two? Yeah, so they're all marginal improvements for a low level use, but if you're also going to be doing clever things (& just haven't mentioned them) then it would be worth it. if things are that tight that the OP *needs* an extra <30GB, they're trying to put too much onto it. Yeah, i'm not saying that it's not an advantage at all, as it then becomes marginally easier to maintain a reasonable amount of free space... ...but paying the extra solely on the basis that they can store more just isn't cost effective - there's got to be another reason. (i've not price checked the M500, but assuming that the difference is now £38 then that's ~£1.27 per GB for the extra little bit) So, if things are that tight, it would be much better to accept that taking a large HDD or two in a portable case to swap what's stored on the laptop itself is necessary, than stick way too much stuff on there. *****Edit***** Stupidly, i forgot that the Crucial m.2 drives are sata based, not pcie based. Now, 'if' the SSD in your flip thing is a Samsung XP941 (which is very likely), this is a 4x pcie based SSD &, even with the much lower capacity, it should be inherently faster than the 512GB M550 overall. i can then find nothing that states that a sata based m.2 SSD will not work with a pcie slot (indeed the Z97 Extreme6, which is pcie, states that it will work with a sata one), however it may be worthwhile double checking by using Crucial's system scanner with the exact model of your flip thing. Obviously, if you're only so so about the current performance, you'd then want to at least go for the M550... As the XP491s aren't available retail (you'd have to ask Sony or someone), if you can't use a M500/M550 for some reason, the other option atm becomes the Plextor M6e. Whilst this is a pcie drive, it's 2x rather than the XP491's 4x, & is nearer in performance to the M550... ...though still faster. it's not cheap though, as the cheapest i can see the 512GB (part no PX-G512M6E) is £323. (i've used micom before as well & they've been perfectly fine) Anyway, clearly my mind went somewhere, so sorry about that. Edit 2. Oh, the one place the XP491 is available retail is Australia... Though, atm it'd set you back almost £370. Simply that you 'could' buy one over there & it'd be much faster than any of the other options available atm.
m.2 drives on an m.2 slot is a beast. you're looking at 700+MBps.... So in the end it's between speed vs capacity. For OP's case of mostly media (not so much gaming), then i say capacity.
This simply isn't true - & this was part of the reason for editing my last post. You're only looking at that with pcie m.2 drives - so, using AS SSD to test sequentials, the 2x pcie M6e tops out at ~705/640, whilst the 4x XP491 at ~1125/910. The sata m.2 ones, like the M500 & M550, are much more limited... ...the former topping out at ~455/405 & the latter at ~515 (i can't immediately see a sequential write speed, but i believe it's around 440-450)... ...& are otherwise notably slower with non-sequential data. Simply as an additional thought, 'if' you (the OP) were to end up thinking about spending >=£330 to get the speed, it might be worth seeing if the new Samsung SM951 either appears in retail or can be gotten (in probably a few weeks) from Sony or whoever. Simply that, along with the overall improvements (i believe, though am not 100%, that it's got the same consistency enhancements as the 850 Pro & uses their new v-nand which significantly enhances longevity), it's a NVMe drive... ...which is inherently much faster that ahci as a protocol & supports a version of trim with Win8. i got distracted in the middle of typing & didn't notice that you'd posted that. +1
