Question Help with understanding SSD/NVME

[rcsverige]

Currently I have a Samsung 750evo 250gb.... Its old and I need to upgrade. The problem I am having is finding a middle ground without spending a bunch of money. There are two NVMEs that I am looking at.
The first is a an Kingston NV2 NVME PCIe 2TB SSD with a read/write speed of 3,500/2,800MB/s
The second is a Kingston Fury Renegade NVME PCIe 1TB SSD with a read/write speed of 7,300/6,000MB/s

While I realize that the Fury Renegade will be significantly faster than the first Kingston, I am not sure whether I should get it seeing as how the price is 100kr less than the Kingston 2TB which is on campaign at the moment. I think a little context is in order.... I need to remove my storage bay for, well physical storage issues. So I plan on mounting my current SSD to the back of my Chassis and removing the HDD altogether which will allow me to remove the storage bay entirely. My HDD is 2TB but I am only using 100gb on it and those are basically garbage files that I just havent deleted yet. If you were in my shoes, would you go for a 2TB or the 1TB. I do play a lot of video games if you are wondering. Really I am just wondering if the 2TB is actually worth it or would I be better off with just going with a 1TB with significantly faster read/write speeds. I really dont know much AT ALL about SSDs so I would love some opinions! Thank you all!

 

[USAFRet]

Firstly....what motherboard is this going on?

 

[randyh121]

Currently I have a Samsung 750evo 250gb.... Its old and I need to upgrade. The problem I am having is finding a middle ground without spending a bunch of money. There are two NVMEs that I am looking at.
The first is a an Kingston NV2 NVME PCIe 2TB SSD with a read/write speed of 3,500/2,800MB/s
The second is a Kingston Fury Renegade NVME PCIe 1TB SSD with a read/write speed of 7,300/6,000MB/s

While I realize that the Fury Renegade will be significantly faster than the first Kingston, I am not sure whether I should get it seeing as how the price is 100kr less than the Kingston 2TB which is on campaign at the moment. I think a little context is in order.... I need to remove my storage bay for, well physical storage issues. So I plan on mounting my current SSD to the back of my Chassis and removing the HDD altogether which will allow me to remove the storage bay entirely. My HDD is 2TB but I am only using 100gb on it and those are basically garbage files that I just havent deleted yet. If you were in my shoes, would you go for a 2TB or the 1TB. I do play a lot of video games if you are wondering. Really I am just wondering if the 2TB is actually worth it or would I be better off with just going with a 1TB with significantly faster read/write speeds. I really dont know much AT ALL about SSDs so I would love some opinions! Thank you all!

go for the 2tb
1tb fills up very quick with how big games are getting

 

[geofelt]

Do not be much swayed by vendor synthetic SSD benchmarks.
They are done with apps that push the SSD to it's maximum using queue lengths of 30 or so.
Most desktop users will do one or two things at a time, so they will see queue lengths of one or two.
What really counts is the response times, particularly for small random I/O. That is what the os does mostly.
For that, the response times of current SSD's are remarkably similar. And quick. They will be 50X faster than a hard drive.
In sequential operations, they will be 2x faster than a hard drive, perhaps 3x if you have a sata3 interface.
6X with a pcie interface.
Larger SSD's are preferable. They have more nand chips that can be accessed in parallel. Sort of an internal raid-0 if you will.
Also, a SSD will slow down as it approaches full. That is because it will have a harder time finding free nand blocks
to do an update without a read/write operation.
Larger ssd devices have more endurance.

These experts could not tell the difference between:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA

 

[rcsverige]

Firstly....what motherboard is this going on?

ASUS prime b550m-a
It has two M.2 4 slots. One being 64mbps and the other 32mbps

 

[USAFRet]

ASUS prime b550m-a
It has two M.2 4 slots. One being 64mbps and the other 32mbps

PRIME B550M-A - Tech Specs｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global

Discover the PRIME B550M-A: an AMD B550 Ryzen AM4 motherboard. Transforms your everyday tech use with cutting-edge features. Upgrade today!

www.asus.com

So, it has a PCIe 4.0 port and PCIe 3.0.

As noted above, the actual difference in a game system is NOT noticeable.
Go for the larger 2TB PCIe 3.0 drive.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YoRKQy-UO4

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9LyNXpsOo

 

[rcsverige]

PRIME B550M-A - Tech Specs｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global

Discover the PRIME B550M-A: an AMD B550 Ryzen AM4 motherboard. Transforms your everyday tech use with cutting-edge features. Upgrade today!

www.asus.com

So, it has a PCIe 4.0 port and PCIe 3.0.

As noted above, the actual difference in a game system is NOT noticeable.
Go for the larger 2TB PCIe 3.0 drive.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YoRKQy-UO4

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9LyNXpsOo

Thanks you so much!

 

[drea.drechsler]

...
There are two NVMEs that I am looking at.
The first is a an Kingston NV2 NVME PCIe 2TB SSD with a read/write speed of 3,500/2,800MB/s
...

Not objecting to the suggestions others have provided, but you should maybe look at the review Tomshardware has posted of that particular drive. In summary: while it does come out worst of all the drives in the comparison that's probably not the reason I avoided it while looking for a budget 2TB. The comments that mainly turned me off are the ones about how unpredictable the model is in terms of components it might come with. In other words, you really don't know what you're going to get.

Also be sure to get a heatsink for it as, according to the review, this is a very hot-running drive. That's pretty surprising to me since most of the newer gen 4 drives have been optimizing for efficiency and run much cooler.

As noted, really big, gee-whiz, performance metrics are probably not that important if it's being used for a drive for storing games, I made the same trade-off choosing my data NVME. But if you ever plan on tasks that entail sequential reading and writing of extremely large files (video editing/rendering for instance) you should plan on another NVME in the future.

Toms' Review; just skip to the end and read his conclusions if you don't want to wade through the details:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kingston-nv2-ssd

 

[rcsverige]

Not objecting to the suggestions others have provided, but you should maybe look at the review Tomshardware has posted of that particular drive. In summary: while it does come out worst of all the drives in the comparison that's probably not the reason I avoided it while looking for a budget 2TB. The comments that mainly turned me off are the ones about how unpredictable the model is in terms of components it might come with. In other words, you really don't know what you're going to get.

Also be sure to get a heatsink for it as, according to the review, this is a very hot-running drive. That's pretty surprising to me since most of the newer gen 4 drives have been optimizing for efficiency and run much cooler.

As noted, really big, gee-whiz, performance metrics are probably not that important if it's being used for a drive for storing games, I made the same trade-off choosing my data NVME. But if you ever plan on tasks that entail sequential reading and writing of extremely large files (video editing/rendering for instance) you should plan on another NVME in the future.

Toms' Review; just skip to the end and read his conclusions if you don't want to wade through the details:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kingston-nv2-ssd

so funny enough, I bought a SATA SSD. I began learning more and more about the NVMEs and I kinda got turned off by the amount of heat they produce right next to my GPU. So I thought, ok, well I cant get an NVME to game but I can get a small NVME later on to install JUST my OS on. Until then Ill remove my HDD and replace it with a Samsung EVO870 and Ill buy the chords necessary to attach both SSDs to the back of my PC behind the MOBO. So that is what I did lol.

 

[drea.drechsler]

... I can get a small NVME later on to install JUST my OS on...

That's what I did. I got a gen 4 NVME (500GB, relatively small) to put the OS and user files on. It's a Samsung 980 PRO and very well reviewed.

I installed it in the gen 4 slot and being the 'bare' drive (Samsung also sells one with a heatsink) it does run a bit hot when being used (60-65C). But don't confuse "hot" with heat output. It's like a lighter flame and a gas furnace: they both run at about the same temperature but the furnace puts out several orders of magnitude more heat. The drive simply doesn't put out much heat, in fact a $9 NVME heatsink I got on Amazon pulled temp down to barely above idling even when being heavily used. Also, because heat output is so low it's a drop in the bucket for the GPU; it simply won't notice it.

I'm moving my games store to a 2TB NVME I have on order that will go in the gen 3 socket (I also have a B550 with 2 M.2 sockets). I do not expect it to matter much for "speed" compared to the 1TB SATA SSD the games are on now. I do like the convenience and neatness by getting rid of the cables to the SSD though.

 

[USAFRet]

but I can get a small NVME later on to install JUST my OS on.

Don't go too small.
It never ends up as "just the OS". You want all your applications (apart from games) on it as well.

 

[sonofjesse]

Prices are a lot better now, I suggest a good NVME 2TB drive.

If you can get it get something with a SLC and DRAM caches.


I like the sabrent rocket, 850, 980 pro, inland express, mp600.

budget options:

atom 50
adata 8200 (I know I know lot of controller changes)
Cruical p3


Super budget something like a silcon power 2TB SSD
teamgroup 2TB SSD
mx500

 

[KyaraM]

Not objecting to the suggestions others have provided, but you should maybe look at the review Tomshardware has posted of that particular drive. In summary: while it does come out worst of all the drives in the comparison that's probably not the reason I avoided it while looking for a budget 2TB. The comments that mainly turned me off are the ones about how unpredictable the model is in terms of components it might come with. In other words, you really don't know what you're going to get.

Also be sure to get a heatsink for it as, according to the review, this is a very hot-running drive. That's pretty surprising to me since most of the newer gen 4 drives have been optimizing for efficiency and run much cooler.

As noted, really big, gee-whiz, performance metrics are probably not that important if it's being used for a drive for storing games, I made the same trade-off choosing my data NVME. But if you ever plan on tasks that entail sequential reading and writing of extremely large files (video editing/rendering for instance) you should plan on another NVME in the future.

Toms' Review; just skip to the end and read his conclusions if you don't want to wade through the details:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kingston-nv2-ssd

To add to this, the Kingston drive is also QLC, which is less reliable than TLC. Personally, I own that drive in 1 TB, and use it as a game drive with a 500 GB OS drive in my secondary system. It works well enough for that, but I wouldn't entrust it with data I don't want to lose, or an OS. Games can be re-downloaded, and a drive replaced. Data might be lost permanently, and while there is never a guarantee and you always have to make backups, quality and reliability are important.

Edit:
How about this drive? Looks decent.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-blue-sn570-review/2

Currently ~125€ in Germany for the 2 TB version. I think that's reasonable.

 

[CountMike]

Don't go too small.
It never ends up as "just the OS". You want all your applications (apart from games) on it as well.

Murphy's law of warehousing: "Whatever free space will be overfilled"

 

[drea.drechsler]

To add to this, the Kingston drive is also QLC, which is less reliable than TLC...

More correctly it's less durable, not less reliable. QLC TBW spec's indeed are much lower than a similar TLC drive, the main reason it's considered less durable. For instance, the 2 TB Crucial QLC drive I just got is warranted for 5 years or 440 TBW while anotherTLC 2 TB drive might have a write durability of 1200 TBW. I'm not too worried about that because my useage doesn't involve a lot of writing out extremely large files.

When considering this I looked at the two older SSD's this one replaces, which were also used as game stores. I have had them for over 2 years and I only wrote a total of 13TB to both of them. At that rate (6.5TBW per year) of write useage I don't expect to exceed the 440TBW rating of the new drive for over 65 years. I'm perfectly content with that since my practice was to uninstall games I don't play often to make space. That does mean I have go back and download them again to play, meaning writing an entire game to the drive multiple times in some cases. That's a practice I might change for a while at least with more space available but even if I didn't I'm sure the drive will be replaced/upgraded far before it gets to its 440TBW endurance limit.

As with most things paying only for what you really need, or can use, makes for the best value proposition. There ARE use cases where this type of NVME drive simply won't work out. Someone who does daily renderings of long/large videos, for instance, might find this drive intolerable both for write speed once the SLC cache is filled (another huge factor with QLC) and it's TBW endurance limits. If I needed to do that I could also use my 980 PRO system drive, another good reason to not go too small for that.

I was considering the SN570, but went with the Crucial P3 Plus. Largely because of it's SLC cache scheme but also because I just wanted a Gen 4 drive. It was only a slight bit more than the SN570 in the US.