SSD's with upgrade path to Intel NUC's

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Henri108

Limp Gawd
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Dec 6, 2013
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I started a topic about 2 months ago about upgrading our 10 office pc's (2 workstations) to SSD's. The decision was made to wait for the deployment of Windows 10. With this being fairly close now, I thought I ask my question again with the new info I have.

We are 90% sure going to upgrade the 5-year+ old systems within a year or two to Intel NUC's for the office pc's.

If we would go with regular SSD's, the bigger 2.5"-supporting NUC will be chosen.
But would it also be possible to already buy the right SSD's for the smaller NUC's (M.2 I suppose, need to do some more research) and use an M.2 to SATA adapter.

What adapters would you use?
Is it worth the extra hassle to go M.2 istead of SATA?

We would go for Samsung 850, 128GB for the office pc's. (also availible in M.2 for 10$ more)
 
You could do that or, many new desktops have M.2 built into the motherboard. To be honest, the SSD cost should be rather minimal compared to the workstation cost. I would order the hardware that you plan on using for the next 5 years, and budget for the complete replacement of this gear in 5 years. I personally would not mess with the adapters.

The computer equipment you company uses is a tool. If your company makes money using these tools, they need to invest in them, and keep them running optimally. /soapbox
 
Since you're only talking about using a very slightly larger NUC, I would go with the SATA SSD. Unless for some reason you need the absolute smallest NUC possible.
 
I would only go M.2 for 1 of 2 reasons. Space savings, or PCI-E based M.2 for increased speed.
 
I'd 2nd the regular SSD. Going with NUC's already mean you don't care about top performance, and really they aren't that much bigger than the non 2.5" models. Maybe half an inch taller?
 
It's really not about size, but just the fact that we can upgrade the HDD's of our current (out of warranty) Dell's to SSD's and be able to use them again in our next systems (Dell doesn't allow changing the configuration of the systems by yourself). A NUC is meant to have the SSD's put in and warranty is still valid.
If there would be other fairly small (mini ITX size) systems with drop in SSD and good warranty I would also consider them.

Will be going for regular SSD's, adapters are indeed an unnescessary hassle.
Systems are mainly used for email and program's on server. So the most important is that these systems boot really fast and open programs in a blink. The current systems (for this application) are first gen i7 processors, so still pretty good performance after those 5 years. But recently the first one failed, so we should upgrade within a year or 2.

Thanks for the help, more opinions are always welcome!
 
Ordered 128GB 850EVO's for the office-pc's and 500GB 850EVO's for the workstations.
Will be switching them out this weekend.
Any benchmarks or performance tests someone wants me to run and post?
 
Good choice to go with 2.5" SSD capable NUC over M.2 and great choice on the SSDs themselves.
 
Eh, for office work, just about any SSD will do. It's the loading and writing of large files where high performance SSDs make a difference.
 
Your office workers are going to shit themselves over how fast those "dinky little machines" are going to run.
 
I use a spinner computer at work. Even though it has a 4790, I hate using that thing.
 
Tsumi said:
I use a spinner computer at work. Even though it has a 4790, I hate using that thing.
Click to expand...

I used to. Got to the point of frustration and bought a 256GB MX100, took it work, swapped out the spindle drive, reimaged my laptop, and now life at work is much better.

Hmmm...I might mention the NUC to our PC Engineering team and get their thoughts on them for a future rollout.
 
The NUC's are not really good price/performance, but it's great for an office enviroment. You can buy relatively cheap NUC's (i5's are under 500$) and add your own SSD and ram for under 100$.
If you would want a Dell/HP/Lenovo you have to go north of 1000$ to get pure SSD storage (the cheaper ones will have 32GB SSD which is fairly useless imo).
In office enviroments I only see 2 things important: Up-Time and responsiveness.

Intel made a study to check productivitity with and without SSD's and came to the conclusion that for designers, you could pay back a 500GB SSD within a month. For normal office pc's a 120GB one would be paid back within 3-6months.
It's even worth it just making employees be more happy about their computers.
We'll just buy 1 spare NUC in case one fails. It will be up in a matter of minutes compared to going through warranty and such (this is thinking years down the road).
 
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