News Sabrent Launches 5 GB/s SSDs For The Steam Deck

[Admin]

Sabrent has announced the Rocket 2230 SSDs with capacities spanning from 256GB up to 1TB.

Sabrent Launches 5 GB/s SSDs For The Steam Deck : Read more

 

[cyrusfox]

Cool yes, but what is the minimum sustained write speed??? This is the key handicap of these drives, where you get 2-5GB/s until your have written 140GB and then you get fluctuating 50-200MB/s because the psuedo SLC cache has ran out and your are exposed to the raw NAND write capability...
These 2230s are hard to keep cool when you are trying to do a rapid drive fill. Best out there I think is the SN740 for that purpose. Micron drives can't compete at min sustain write. I'll look for reviews (Toms Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery is really good, so is serve the home, nobody else seems to document this part of the drive performance).

Nice to have a speedy gen4 drive, doubt it makes any difference in steamdeck performance.

 

[junglist724]

Steam deck doesn't even have the cpu power to decompress game installs faster than 80 MB/s

 

[eric79xxl]

All the other issues mentioned so far aside; it's good that someone is releasing some new 2230 SSDs. The current market is scarce, and prices are way up, compared to other form factors. Hopefully these won't all get scalped.

 

[RedBear87]

Nice to have a speedy gen4 drive, doubt it makes any difference in steamdeck performance.

Yeah, I guess they used a Gen 4 interface because it makes little difference for them right now, but the Steam Deck is limited to PCIe Gen 3 speed and without a Linux equivalent of DirectStorage even that speed isn't really useful for anything (Valve has been even using PCIe Gen 3x2 drives for some Steam Deck without any measurable loss in gaming performance) .

 

[-Fran-]

More than the speed, I think the Steam Deck required is more capacity and writing cycles. As most have already mentioned, the Deck just doesn't have the horsepower to make full use of the bandwidth anyway, but I have to say load times are not terrible with it. They're absolutely comparable to a regular laptop, even with the anemic (in comparison) hardware.

Also, curious to see how such a drive would impact battery life which is, by far, the weakest point of the Deck.

Regards.

 

[bp_968]

Cool yes, but what is the minimum sustained write speed??? This is the key handicap of these drives, where you get 2-5GB/s until your have written 140GB and then you get fluctuating 50-200MB/s because the psuedo SLC cache has ran out and your are exposed to the raw NAND write capability...
These 2230s are hard to keep cool when you are trying to do a rapid drive fill. Best out there I think is the SN740 for that purpose. Micron drives can't compete at min sustain write. I'll look for reviews (Toms Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery is really good, so is serve the home, nobody else seems to document this part of the drive performance).

Nice to have a speedy gen4 drive, doubt it makes any difference in steamdeck performance.

Write speed is great but its rarely relevant in a consumer workload, especially a steamdeck. Honestly id prefer a drive half as fast but cheaper. Id seriously consider 100$ for a 1TB SSD swap in my deck since im a digital packrat. But you and I both know it won't be 100$.

As for SLC cache, etc. Its a minor issue. My first NVME drive was a 2TB intel 660p with QLC nand. I make sure I leave 200GB or so of free space at all times. When I bought it it was nearly 50% cheaper then a comparable TLC drive so $ per GB was still much better than the alternatives even if i considered it a 1.5-1.7TB drive instead of a 2TB drive. A year and a half later that wasn't the case and TLC had gotten so cheap QLC just couldn't compete (they were price parity at best and often I saw them for more money per GB then a good TLC drive).

I'm currently waiting for someone to get a 4TB NVMe drive down to 250$ or less and then ill grab one of those and give the wife my other 2TB NVMe (since i only have two slots, though i have a 4x PCIe slot open so i could always toss a adapter card in I guess).

EDIT: Well I couldn't help myself and went and checked just now. Best Buy has a crucial P3 PCIe 3.0 NVMe for 249.99$. LOL 😆

I don't need the space badly enough at the moment so ill wait until we see the PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 sticks hit the 250$ price range in a couple years.

I dug through my email and found an invoice from newegg for a 4TB 7200rpm HGST deskstar NAS hard drive for 160$ in 2016. Now in 2022 you can get a budget QLC NVMe 3000mb/s drive for 250$. The hard drive was 4 cents per GB and the NVMe is 6.25 cents per GB. Crazy.

Of course I bought 4 18TB drives for a new NAS last year for 320$ each, or 1.8 cents per GB, so onward and upward I guess. Even in a raid 10 its still 3.6 cents per GB so still cheaper then the old 4TB drive. But how many of us really need a 72TB array (36TB usable) anyway? If it wasn't for my wifes business (wedding photography) I would probably just use a pair of 8TB external drives to store a backup of my photos and personal data, etc. Im too lazy to do the plex thing and I stopped with piracy almost 2 decades ago thanks to endless game bundles and steam sales.

 

[bp_968]

More than the speed, I think the Steam Deck required is more capacity and writing cycles. As most have already mentioned, the Deck just doesn't have the horsepower to make full use of the bandwidth anyway, but I have to say load times are not terrible with it. They're absolutely comparable to a regular laptop, even with the anemic (in comparison) hardware.

Also, curious to see how such a drive would impact battery life which is, by far, the weakest point of the Deck.

Regards.

Mine has the 256gb SSD and a 1TB mSD card and honestly i can hardly tell the difference. 90% of games load so fast its not really a relevant issue. Some gamer like RDR2 are a bit pokey and slow to start but its honestly stretching things a bit to play rdr2 on it anyway (that said, it plays great IMO. My desktop has a 3080 and about the only thing i miss on the deck is Gsync and 90hz+ frame rates. my monitor is a 32" 160hz 1440p with Gsync and it was honestly the best PC upgrade ive bought in years. About the only way Id consider swapping it put would be for an OLED for HDR compatability and maybe ultrawide. The problem thats kept me from an ultrawide is the significant framerate impact. 3440x1600 is about 55% more pixels, 5120x1440 (basically two 1440p panels without a seam) is over twice the pixel density. So if i get 100fps with 1440p it will do 60-70 fps on a 3440x1600 and with a 5120x1440 it will sit around 40-50fps (so your cutting down settings, turning off RTX, etc) or your spending another 1400$+ on a overpriced 4090.

For gamings its just tough to beat 2560x1440.

Ugg, its late and am writing novel length comments that are barely on topic. I think its time for sleep.