I have ordered a Roon Nucleus with no hard drive. Which SSD brand and model should i buy?
I’ve always done well with Crucial as a reliable brand.
Samsung 870 QVO - various sizes available (1, 2 & 4 TB), I have 3 and no problems to date but all “big name” manufacturers should be fine…
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Depends where you are how easy you can get it, but Samsung is always a good choice. Take the more expensive QVO and not the EVO. The QVO models last much longer.
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I used XPG series from ADATA several years for my CAS. It’s stable and good.
You could also just use an external USB drive, that way you can actually use it for Roon Database backups, you can’t with an internal storage drive.
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Huh, is there a source for that? The EVO uses NAND storage with fewer bits per cell, while the QVO encodes more bits per cell. Not surprisingly, if you encode more bits per cell it gets less reliable. This is also why the QVO is available in larger size and it’s usually cheaper.
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I think you mean the opposite: QVO models are cheaper than the EVO models, and have a lower figure for guaranteed write cycles, so they don’t last as long in situations where a higher number of write cycles occur.
And actually, this means that for music storage, it’s a better strategy to use the QVO models; because a) they’re cheaper and b) music files are usually written once and read many times.
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Sorry Gentlemen, mea culpa. You are all right. EVO is better than the QVO.
In my case I use the PM893 Data Center model in my servers. But for storing music the QVO is perfectly ok, because you have mostly reads and no writes.
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TL;DR
Both Samsung QVO and EVO drives are great drives and are basicly bulletproof.
EVO drives offer even longer lifespan than their QVO counterparts*, but are more expensive.
*the lifespan of an SSD is measured in terabytes written (TBW), which tells you how many terabytes of data you can write to the SSD before it reaches the end of its lifespan and eventually breaks down.
That said, since all SSDs are write limited (not read limited) and TBW in most server applications is basicly zero (you write sth once or twice and then listen to it over and over again), the TBW doesn’t really matter and both drives should be good for years (they are rated at 1.5MHR - Million Hours Reliability - which is sth like 170 years …).
As a system SSD in a PC I would recommend the EVO over the QVO. However, as a music storage drive - QVO will be just as good.