Question Picking SSD from the list(NVMe)

[zapuxas098]

Hello everyone,

I'd like to get some advice among a few choices.
I was about to buy Patriot Scorch but flips out that it's not available at the moment in my country and I am quite in a rush.

I'll post these few examples of what I can buy right now, looking for the answer which one of those below would be equal or better than Patriot Scorch or overall.

1.HP EX900 500GB M.2 Gen 3 2100/1500 MB/s(3D NAND TLC)
2.Intel 660p Series 512 GB M.2 80mm PCI.e 3.0 (1500/1000 MB/s(3D2 QLC)
3. Transcend 110S 512 GB 3D NAND Flash PCI.e gen 3 M.2 2280 1700/1500 MB/s R/W


Thanks in advance!

 

[AngelTech]

Do you have the Crucial MX500 in your country?

 

[zapuxas098]

Seems like we do but it's also taking a while to arrive... Yet it's just 510 read speed?

 

[AngelTech]

Seems like we do, not sure about the ordering time again. But it's not NVMe M.2 as I see

What do you need an NVME drive for? yes, they are faster but unless you get a good deal on one it isn't that worth it.

 

[zapuxas098]

For gaming, loading times overall. Nothing good of those I've mentioned?

 

[King_V]

The MX500 runs SATA protocol, so caps out at max SATA speeds.

I've been seeing the Intel 660p going for some pretty good prices, with the 1TB version dipping under $100 every so often.

 

[zapuxas098]

But is Intel 660p any good?

 

[cryoburner]

The 660p seems like a decent value from the reviews I've seen, though due to the caching method it uses (combined with slower QLC flash memory), large multi-gigabyte writes to the drive can potentially perform quite slow when the drive becomes mostly full, so I'm not sure I would consider a 512GB version. For most read-heavy usage scenarios like loading games it would likely work fine, though it seems like some situations involving things like game updates could potentially encounter performance issues on occasion.

The Mushkin Pilot 500GB is another drive that might be worth considering in this price range. It should perform slightly better, and apparently doesn't have any notable issues with sustained writes...

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mushkin-pilot-m.2-nvme-ssd,6123-2.html

Of course, for loading games, the added performance of an NVMe drive isn't going to help all that much compared to a SATA SSD. While the drives may feature much higher maximum transfer speeds, in most real-world scenarios those are not going to make that much of a difference. In terms of game load times, NVMe will typically only be around 10% faster than SATA, at most. Most current SSDs will offer rather similar performance when it comes to loading games.

 

[zapuxas098]

Just looked at Mushkin Pilot, isn't available here... Meanwhile, if I take Intel 660P of 1TB, the main issue of over-loaded drive should be gone?(The obvious reason as I'd mainly use around 500GB).
So specifically, out of the 3 M.2 drives, the intel one is the most worthy? In price they're all the same here

 

[USAFRet]

What motherboard is this going on?
What other drives are in this system?

 

[popatim]

The 660p is a QLC drive and uses a chunk of the flash in SLC mode to cache itself (Most SSD's do). As long as you don't exceed the size of the cache, 100gb I think it was, then it will perform great. If you fill the cache then you get reduced to it's native speed, which is approximately 100mb/s, until the buffer flushes and returns to normal high speeds.

For a gamer, this huge buffer means you will probably never be able to fill it and hit the reduced speed.

The HP ex920 Also uses QLC with a large SLC buffer but thanks to a better controller it's native speed after filling the smaller buffer, ~75gb, is roughly 550mb/s.

I don't know anything about the Transcend unfortunately

ps - you also need to not fill the entire drive. It needs empty space to perform it's internal work. This is usually 10 - 20% of the drive size. You can either format the full drive and then don't fill it or you can leave a chunk of the drive unformatted.
If you do fill the die, you usually take large hit in performance.

 

[zapuxas098]

I am going to use Aorus Elite X570, G.Skill Trident Z 3600 CL16 2x8GB, Corsair RM650x, Ryzen 3700x and 5700 XT (Once custom cooler comes out)

So in conclusion, HP one should be a bit better than 660P?
Anyone knows something about transcendent?

 

[prophet51]

But is Intel 660p any good?

yeah that's what I'd go for, mainly because I trust intel more. QLC is a non concern for me I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[cryoburner]

The 660p is a QLC drive and uses a chunk of the flash in SLC mode to cache itself (Most SSD's do). As long as you don't exceed the size of the cache, 100gb I think it was, then it will perform great. If you fill the cache then you get reduced to it's native speed, which is approximately 100mb/s, until the buffer flushes and returns to normal high speeds.

For a gamer, this huge buffer means you will probably never be able to fill it and hit the reduced speed.

The 660p's SLC write cache is quite large when the drive is mostly empty, but shrinks as the drive fills up. AnandTech outlined how the size of the cache varies based on free space in their review (scroll about halfway down the page for the relevant chart)...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-review-qlc-nand-arrives

For the 512GB drive, the write cache is apparently around 76GB when the drive is less than 25% full, but at 65-75% full the cache is just 13GB, and at over 75% drops to just 6GB. The 1TB drive doubles the size of this cache at any given fill percentage, starting around 140GB and working it's way down to 12GB, and since there's more space to work with, you might also be less likely to fill the drive near capacity compared to the 512GB model. The 2TB drive doubles the size of the cache yet again.

The cached write speed of the drive is quite fast, but considering how slow write performance can get when the cache is full, having as little as 6GB of cache on the 512GB model seems a bit iffy to me. The 1TB model's cache sizes would probably be more comfortable to work with.

As far as game load times go, that shouldn't affect much, since a game will be primarily reading files from the drive, not writing to it. However, if you were to transfer a large game or directory of games from another drive, you might notice the write speed drop to hard drive-like performance when the cache is filled, until the copy procedure has completed. I could see that also slowing down game updates or installations, if the game extracts many gigabytes of files at once during the installation process. So, it's not like it would be something that would negatively affect the in-game experience, but it could potentially affect the out-of-game experience. It might not be much of an issue in practice, but it is something worth noting.

 

[USAFRet]

Intel 660p cache filling up test:

Copying from a 1TB Samsung 860 EVO to the 1TB 660p.
32 files, 112GB, just Windows ISO files.

660p was ~50GB at the start.

Feeding from the 860 EVO, cache never filled up and copy speed never slowed down.

Unless you're copying large data from another NVMe drive, you may never notice the cache speed filling up.

 

[prophet51]

On my bx500 240Gb drive the only time I've noticed the slc fill up was copying a 60Gb vmdisk file which went full speed until 50Gb, and also installing gta5 which writes out 80Gb when you start the installation.