# SSD boot drive choice



## Deleted member 9563 (May 19, 2019)

I recently did a major upgrade and re-install. It was a disaster and has taken me on a longer journey than I really have time and energy for. (Does this sound familiar?) However, now I have some more clarity on where I might want to go with a new setup and it seems prudent to replace my SSD boot drive before moving on. The original one was only a 128GB cheapie and the / partition was only 48G, which might have been a mistake since it's now almost full, and that might have caused me some problems. However, that is all really a secondary topic since the drive seems to have about 3% errors after running fsck. Any problems in that setup can be either avoided or re-visited after the installation of a new drive. I am now ordering a 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus. If anybody has any comments regarding that choice I'd be interested in hearing them.

The big question in my mind is now theoretical but has gotten me thinking and worried. *Are there some SSDs that cannot be used for FreeBSD?*

I ask that question specifically because I was going to get a WD Black SN750, but found out that (according to this thread) it apparently won't boot Linux. Perhaps it will be OK for FreeBSD, but that whole thread gave me cold feet. 

PS: I note that there is a new and improved version of the SN750 this year and that issue (whatever it is) my be resolved. It is also not always clear which one of the two very different versions someone is talked about.


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## trev (May 20, 2019)

> I am now ordering a 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus.

To use the Samsung 970 EVO Plus to best adavantage you need PCIe 3.0 - I'm sure you know, but just in case..


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## tingo (May 25, 2019)

Anything to do with the physical M.2 slot is unknown waters if you haven't sailed there before. First hurdle is the  interfaces that sits on top of the M.2: PCI Express 3.0 (AHCI and NVMe), SATA, USB. That being said, it is easy enough to research the alternatives.

FWIW, I run a machine with a NVMe SSD in:

```
root@kg-core2# uname -a
FreeBSD kg-core2.kg4.no 11.2-RELEASE-p9 FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE-p9 #0: Tue Feb  5 15:30:36 UTC 2019
     root@amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
root@kg-core2# nvmecontrol devlist
 nvme0: INTEL SSDPEKNW010T8
    nvme0ns1 (976762MB)
```


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## Deleted member 9563 (May 26, 2019)

Thanks for the heads-up tingo. I just got the part and haven't had time to deal with it yet. I'm putting it on an older mother board (ASRock Z77 Extreme4) which has an available PCIe 3.0 slot. I'll upgrade that when I have a little more time. There's a straight through adapter which goes from x16 to M.2. We'll see .....


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