I recently built a new PC but kept using my roughly 10-year-old Samsung 960 EVO. After comparing it with newer NVMe drives, I'm considering an upgrade, mainly for faster large-file transfers and creating or extracting very large RAR archives—some around 50GB. Gaming performance isn't important to me. My motherboard is an ASUS ROG B850-I Mini-ITX board with an integrated M.2 heatsink, and I'm looking for a 1TB drive without needing to stick to a strict budget. Which SSD would be a good upgrade?
3 Answers
The best choice depends on local pricing, but your board’s built-in M.2 heatsink means thermal compatibility shouldn’t be a major issue. Look for a good 1TB TLC drive with strong sustained-write performance rather than choosing purely by advertised peak speed.
A Black Opal NV7400 could be a reasonable value option if you want a TLC, DRAM-less drive. It should still be a significant upgrade over the 960 EVO, especially for sequential transfers.
For everyday use and gaming, moving from a 960 EVO to a drive advertised at 7GB/s probably won’t feel dramatically different. Those headline speeds matter most when moving large files, so your 50GB archive workflow is one of the cases where a newer drive can actually help.
That’s mainly what I’m trying to improve. Creating and extracting 50GB RAR files currently takes a couple of minutes, so sustained performance matters more to me than game loading times.
I’m not really shopping on a tight budget, and I only need 1TB, so I’m open to a better option if it’s worthwhile.