Does anyone have any insight they could share on choosing a SSD for their Framework? In my case, specifically the i5-1135G7 spec.
Trying to take into account real-word results, power consumption, and bragging rights. I had initially been planning on picking up a Sabrent Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0, but I’m not sure if that’s overkill/a waste of money for the i5. The other alternative I’ve been thinking about as well would be the SK Hynix P31 for its notable power efficiency (however little battery life gains it would afford me) and cheaper price.
I have a Sabrent Rocket 4.0 in my desktop, an early PCIe 4.0 SSD. It’s quite fast.
When the second generation of PCIe 4.0 drives became available which max out PCIe 4.0, I was all set to upgrade it to a Sabrent Rocket Plus…until I read reviews of the SN850, which not only beats it in most benchmarks but is cheaper. I’m talking about the 1TB versions here, due to IC density and controller lanes, these are the highest performing drives at the moment.
So naturally when I bought my Framework I got a 1TB SN850 to go with it.
I know it runs hot and I know it’s not very power efficient, but for what I use it for, I love it.
People are raving about the SK Hynix P31 though, but mostly for its power efficiency. It runs cool and maximizes battery life. Obviously it doesn’t perform as well as the SN850, but it’s still quite fast and if efficiency, cool running and battery life are more important to you, this would be the way to go.
I’d argue that for many users, SATA is quite enough, for those doing professional work dealing with large file sizes, then yeah, faster speeds are always welcome
The Framework laptop doesn’t take SATA SSDs anyways so I’d go for the most power-efficient drive, PCIe 5.0 is part of Alder Lake and while that’s just for graphics on desktop, we don’t know if it will be for storage on mobile
There will always be faster drives but power efficiency you can really feel even if you don’t take advantage of the screaming speeds
Anything faster than the good old SATA drives are faster than most of us will need.
Personally I’d be putting in something like a Samsung 970 Evo. (Any good PCI-E 3.0 drives)
A lot also depends on what capacity you want and how much you want to spend.
I chose an Western Digital WD BLACK SN750 (PCI-E 3.0, 1TB). Even with an i5 you could justify a more expensive SSD that makes more heat & uses more power, if you’d appreciably benefit from face-melting storage performance. You almost certainly won’t, though.
Thanks for all the input, everyone. I’m mostly going to be using this for casual browsing, web development, and tinkering, so I don’t necessarily need blistering speed. I guess I was just trying to balance the “get the best of the best because I want to” vs realistic needs, so your responses are really encouraging about just getting the P31. The 500GB model is even going to be more than I really need anyway since I ordered a 1TB expansion module to store my home folder on.
Just curious, why not go with a bigger SSD and skip the expansion module altogether? I understand you may want to keep your home folder separate, but couldn’t the same be achieved by just partitioning the SSD? The price difference between a 500GB SSD and a 2TB SSD has to be something similar to the cost of a 1TB card (I picked up a Hynix 2TB P31 for a little over $200) and you free up an expansion port. I’d imagine the internal SSD would also be faster than the expansion module storage.
Good question. Over the last year on my XPS 15 I’ve been hopping through many Linux distributions and got really tired of having to back up all my data every time I wanted to change partitions or start fresh, so I figured if I keep all my data on an encrypted 1TB expansion card instead, not only is it kept physically separate from my OS install, but in an emergency I could totally just move the card (i.e. USB drive) to a different computer to access the data.
So all in all, yes it would have been cheaper and faster storage to just have a large M.2 drive instead, but I wanted the peace of mind of keeping my personal data on a separate physical drive and the flexibility of the expansion module sounded awesome.
