Question Similarities of high-end Gen 4 NVMe SSDs ?

[Scar Mountain]

Take such SSDs as the Samsung 990 Pro, WD Black SN850X, SK Hynix P41, Solidigm P44, Crucial T500, or even the Samsung 990 Evo Plus for the DRAM-less top tier. They've all been on sale for $150 or less at various times during the past few months.

One can argue about which one offers the best balance of measurable speed and consistency in areas like regular file/folder access, search, small copy, sustained write, browser caching, online gaming, and other criteria. But wouldn't the subjective experience for the user in common home computing scenarios (that is, not certain specialized or professional use cases) be essentially the same across all of them, for the 1-2TB class? Even when there are multiple high-end Gen 4 NVMe present in the same system, finding out which would be bottlenecking the other seems like a largely academic goal.

In that case, wouldn't it make sense to discriminate between them almost exclusively on the grounds of price?

 

[Lafong]

I tend to agree with you assuming there were no differences regarding warranty, return privileges, customer service, etc. And your googling didn't lead to significantly more horror stories about one than the other. Significantly more, that might point to a design or quality control issue. That happens very occasionally.

But....you may be prone to second-guessing yourself relentlessly after the fact. "Gee--I wonder if I shoulda bought the WD instead of this Samsung?" I'm not sure there is any cure for that.

And a lot of people just can't get by benchmark data. If you are one of them, I guess you have to scratch that itch rather than regret the "wrong" purchase. You've got to live with yourself.

 

[USAFRet]

In that case, wouldn't it make sense to discriminate between them almost exclusively on the grounds of price?

I look more at reliability, and warranty potential.

User facing performance is pretty much the same. But if something does go wrong, the company that actually stands by the product is priceless.

I say this because I had a SATA III SSD die suddenly.
Even though it was 33 days past the 3 year warranty, SanDisk replaced it anyway. I knew it was past, they knew it was past.
Unlikely that would happen with a second rate company.

 

[dwd999]

Note that Solidigm has exited the consumer m.2 business so no more P44.

 

[Maxxify]

In that case, wouldn't it make sense to discriminate between them almost exclusively on the grounds of price?

Arguably, yes, although with my resources I try to split drives by category of utilization (e.g. purpose) rather than performance tiers. For example, larger QLC drives make more sense as HDD replacement, write-few read-many, games, archival, backups and storage, etc, while a TLC drive can be more responsive if you're doing larger operations and/or have a fuller drive. In general I think brand support is a key factor, too, as no-name brands are more likely to swap hardware and have poor user/consumer support systems.