Looking to upgrade the VCS... storage / RAM...

[Goochman]

Anyone have some recent suggestions on SSD drives that work?  I bought a Silicon Power drive a little over a year ago and its dead already - not crossing my fingers they will warranty it.  I could buy another for $60 but would rather another brand which seems to last.

[+Neon Wraith]

7 hours ago, Goochman said:

Anyone have some recent suggestions on SSD drives that work?  I bought a Silicon Power drive a little over a year ago and its dead already - not crossing my fingers they will warranty it.  I could buy another for $60 but would rather another brand which seems to last.

I have a WD Blue 500 GB and it's been working for about 3 years now.  I have heard good things about Samsung drives.  If you're into keeping it all Atari all the time, they have an Atari branded Kingston drive on the Atari website for purchase.  You pay a premium for it, but it's nice that they offer one now.

[MikeM_]

Western Digital (WD) and Samsung are going to have good build quality and longevity. It’s been a while since I’ve bought anything that wasn’t one or the other. 
 

For my setup, I am using a WD 2TB m.2 and a Samsung 1TB external SSD. Both are performing as I would expect. 

[zzip]

21 hours ago, Goochman said:

Anyone have some recent suggestions on SSD drives that work?  I bought a Silicon Power drive a little over a year ago and its dead already - not crossing my fingers they will warranty it.  I could buy another for $60 but would rather another brand which seems to last.

I've had a WD Blue in my VCS for almost 3 years.   I've had Crucial MX SATA SSD in another for almost 7 years.   Dead in a year should not be the norm, but stick with quality brands and you should be good.

[Goochman]

Ive been using SSD drives for over 10 years and in the last 2 years Ive had a Sumsung, SP and another off brand die within a year.  All were warrantied but thats little consoliation when you lose your data or have to rebuild an OS.  All of them have been these M.2 drives

[+adamchevy]

Any noticeable performance difference going from 2400mhz to 3200mhz?  16GB vs 32GB?

[Deeluna]

The performance difference between 2400 and 3200 mhz would be dependent on the task at hand. Basic Web browsing, Not much different. Playing a game, especially one that has to load a lot of textures, You will see some loading speed differences. It's important for emulation where you need to be able to load and unload textures quickly, especially with integrated graphics devices such as the VCS.

The thing you need to remember is that you have to make sure you take care of the thermals before you overclock (Which is what this functionally is). This is important to do whether it's the VCS or any computer that uses integrated graphics. It's why dedicated graphics cards/chips are usually paired with faster than system memory.

Edited December 6 by Deeluna
missed something in proofreading

[Deeluna]

Something that I forgot to say, for Memory amount, That's mainly dependent on what you are running. Between 16 to 32GB, I can't imagine it making that much of a difference unless you are running something like a heavily modded Minecraft in PC mode or other similar memory heavy programs (higher end emulation mostly). Which if that is the case, I would be worried more about the processing cores limitations than the memory buffer size. The VCS isn't exactly the most powerful computer nor a graphics powerhouse, The games that are available in the store are capable of running on the VCS's stock configuration, even Yar's Uprising. The only time you would need more is if you are taking advantage of Emulation for textures and the emulation programming, and PC mode games through other sources such as Steam.

In short, RAM speed matters more than Memory amount in most cases. It's all a matter of what you are using the computational power for.