Home Forums Discussions IT, Networking, PCs and more Quick hardware question- is this the right SSD?

The PC acting as my server on my P2P network with AC is doing fine. Only problem is, my backups of AC have gotten very big - each enc file is appoaching 2.5 gb. So in order to save a number of them, I would like to move from a 500gb SATA drive to a 2gb SSD drive.

The PC is a Dell Inspiron 3891 Desktop, and this is listed as a compatible option by Crucial:

Crucial P5 Plus 2TB PCIe M.2 2280SS Gaming SSD
https://www.crucial.com/ssd/p5-plus/ct2000p5pssd8/ct20420620

It is a small financial investment, but I don't want to open the machine and try to swap it out, if this is the wrong thing. Is "Gaming" just telling me that it is fast?

Please reassure me to just get this one and put it in....

Ignore tags like "gaming".. They are usually just pure marketing geared at getting the attention of a particular customer (think seeing "organic" in a grocery store)

What you want in an SSD is read/write speeds. That is going to be the key factor. The faster the speed, the quicker the system will react.

Crucial is a good brand, but the M2's read/write speed is average at 6600mb/s. Compare that to the T700 (same brand) at double that speed (but also much more expensive).

If this is just a backup drive, then I would say the M2 is good for the price. If it was going to be the main boot drive, or the drive holding the AC database, then I would say go for a faster access drive.

Good idea to go with 2TB. A lot of people underestimate the necessary size especially with virtualizing. If you want to be able to use things like snapshots/checkpoints before upgrading. You need to double the size of what you actually need.

RAID is tricky with SSD's also.

Thanks for the advice.

The speed of my current SATA drive, which is functioning fine but is too small, is a fraction of the speed of the M2, so hopefully it will work out for me. Will post my experience once I know.

Real world difference isn't that big despite M.2 SSD's on paper being 6 -7 times faster. But NVME was designed for SSDs. The big challenge is RAID if you use it.