I've been experiencing frequent Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) lately, and performance benchmarks suggest that my current SSD is significantly underperforming after six years. Its write speed is now only about 10% of what it should be. I'm currently backing up my data, which is frustratingly slow, on an external hard drive to ensure I don't lose anything.
The SSD I'm using is a Crucial P1 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, and 1TB is sufficient for my needs—I tend to have around 25% of the space free since I mostly play games.
I'm looking for a similar or slightly better SSD depending on the price. I found that both the Samsung 990 Pro and Samsung 9100 Pro should be compatible with my B450 Tomahawk Max motherboard. However, I'm questioning whether I'd be overpaying for either of these options. Right now, my setup includes a Radeon RX 5700 GPU and a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, but I might upgrade the CPU soon if I discover that's what's causing the BSODs.
Thanks for any help!
3 Answers
To figure out whether you're actually overbuying, you need to think about your workload. The SSD's sequential speeds are more relevant for tasks that involve larger files, like video editing, rather than gaming. If you're mostly gaming, even a SATA SSD might provide you less latency than your current setup. Also, if your motherboard can handle it, grabbing a good PCIe 3.0 SSD could save you some cash! What speeds are you getting right now, by the way?
Your Ryzen 5 3600 should work fine with a B450 board, and you're correct that it supports PCIe 3.0. The Samsung 990 Pro and 9100 Pro are top-tier drives, but you might not fully utilize their speed unless you upgrade your motherboard, since they’re PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 respectively. Consider sticking with a good PCIe 3.0 SSD instead, which will still be a significant upgrade without overspending. The price difference is almost negligible right now.
You definitely want to watch out for cheap SSDs that use QLC NAND, as these generally have a shorter lifespan. I recommend checking out the Seagate FireCuda 540; it offers great performance at a competitive price. It's a PCIe 5.0 drive, which is slightly overkill now, but you'll appreciate it if you choose to upgrade other parts of your system down the line. That way, you get impressive endurance without sacrificing too much on the price!
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