Increasing Storage capacity on Aspire TC-1780

SNAB

Would it be better to replace the 512GB SSD with a 1TB SSD or add another 500GB SATA 2.5" SSD. I already have a 500GB 2.5" SATA SSD but just get the feeling that just one 1TB NVMe would probably be a more seamless operation.

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1246372#Comment_1246372

Your Aspire TC-1780 M.2 SSD slot is a Gen4x4 M.2 SSD slot; these are all the M.2 SSD drives that Acer fits to the TC-1780 desktop and that includes a 1TB Gen 4 M.2 SSD drive. if you want the fastest Gen4x4 M.2 SSD get the Samsung 990 Pro NVMe or the WD SN850X NVMe.

Specs: its a Micron 3400 1TB (MTFDKBA1T0TFK-1BC1) is an M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 SSD using the NVMe 1.4 protocol. It uses Micron's 176-layer triple-level cell (TLC) NAND and is specified at up to 6,600 MB/s sequential read and 5,000 MB/s write. The Endurance of the 1TB version is rated at 600TB and 2 million hours MTTF. The power consumption is specified at <5 mW in sleep, <450mW active idle and <7,5W in reading operations. It features hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption and power-loss protection.

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Alejandro_AC

Hi @SNAB is your current 512GB SSD 2.5 or NVMe?
If it is a 2.5 SSD, replacing it with an NVMe will give you more performance although the size does not matter, greater capacity does not give greater performance.
If the current disk is NVMe, my personal opinion is to add another one of equal or larger size but without replacing the current one.

Please wait for more responses that may help you.

Thank you.
All the best.

billsey

Yes, you just clone the old drive to the new drive and then swap them. That does require an external NVMe case to do the cloning, but you can use that case with your old 512GB drive afterwards for something like backup. Whether it's better to drop a bigger system drive in instead of adding a second drive is dependent on how you use your system. Second drives are best for data storage that's not the typical Documents, Videos, Music etc. that Windows wants to place on C:. I'd actually go with a 2TB drive these days rather than 1TB, the pricing model works better at that capacity.

SNAB

Thank you @Alejandro_AC .

It is NVMe 512GB, would adding another not create two drives like in the HDD days of Drive A and Drive B etc.

Would adding a SATA make any difference in access times

billsey

Yes, two separate drives would end up giving you another volume, likely D: or E:. Cloning the existing drive to a new one will resize the C: partition to match the new drive size. A SATA drive will have the same access times, very short for SSDs, but have slower data throughput than the NVMe drives will have. In general an NVMe x2 drive is twice the speed of SATA, x4 four times the speed and the new PCIe 4.0 standard double those speeds again for machines that support it. Your TC-1780 doesn't support the PCIe 4.0 speeds, so don't pay extra for a drive with those specs.

SNAB

Thank you @billsey . From what I gather it is going to be a 2TB NVMe and it looks like this computer supports a PCIe 4, The current one is WD PC SN740 SDDQNQD-512G-1014, which seems a PCIe 4 and maybe looks like a 2230 rather than a 2280 ??

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1246372#Comment_1246372

Your Aspire TC-1780 M.2 SSD slot is a Gen4x4 M.2 SSD slot; these are all the M.2 SSD drives that Acer fits to the TC-1780 desktop and that includes a 1TB Gen 4 M.2 SSD drive. if you want the fastest Gen4x4 M.2 SSD get the Samsung 990 Pro NVMe or the WD SN850X NVMe.

Specs: its a Micron 3400 1TB (MTFDKBA1T0TFK-1BC1) is an M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 SSD using the NVMe 1.4 protocol. It uses Micron's 176-layer triple-level cell (TLC) NAND and is specified at up to 6,600 MB/s sequential read and 5,000 MB/s write. The Endurance of the 1TB version is rated at 600TB and 2 million hours MTTF. The power consumption is specified at <5 mW in sleep, <450mW active idle and <7,5W in reading operations. It features hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption and power-loss protection.

If this answers your question and solved your query please "Click on Yes" or "Click on Like" if you find my answer useful👍