Upgrading Your Laptop with PCIe 4.0 Storage: Which SSD is the best?

[Admin]

We dive deep to see if upgrading a Tiger Lake laptop with a PCIe 4.0 SSD is worth the high cost.

Upgrading Your Laptop with PCIe 4.0 Storage: Which SSD is the best? : Read more

 

[JamesSneed]

I find it really odd you included an engineering sample in such a real world storage review.

 

[seanwebster]

I find it really odd you included an engineering sample in such a real world storage review.

Drives operating at full speed like our engineering sample will be coming to market soon. I know Kingston has stated such.

 

[JamesSneed]

Drives operating at full speed like our engineering sample will be coming to market soon. I know Kingston has stated such.

Yes and Samsung is supposed to have a refresh as well. I guess I'm saying for a practical guide like this I would only use products people can actually buy.

 

[vinay2070]

I would simply buy the most reliable drive based on user reviews on amazon/newegg and such. Reliability is more important than any little speed variation. Even if I am backing up data regularly somewhere, its not worth reinstalling another warranty replaced drive and install OS/ setup everything from scratch. Not worth the hassle.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

The SK Hynix P31 or the Samsung 980 should have been included as a baseline comparison products as fast, reliable, power efficient PCIe 3.0 drives.

 

[jpe1701]

Did you guys try that engineering sample on the playstation 5?

 

[escksu]

I don't believe its due to PCIE 4.0..... PCIE 3.0 is jsut as fast.

 

[Johnpombrio]

I really don't care that much about which one is faster as I will never notice the difference. I went with Samsung as I like Drive Magician and all of my NVME and SSDs are Samsung. I also got a $313 price on the 980 Pro 2TB on an Amazon sale. Now I just need a PCI 4.0 CPU and mobo, heh.

 

[kyzarvs]

My Laptop is a Medion Beast (yeah - awful name) i7 / 32GB / 2070 max-p. I have the oem Samsung 1tb NVME it came with as boot and a Sabrent Rocket 2TB in the second slot. I use it for work, gaming and video transcoding.

The Samsung took a 500MB/s drop when I enabled Bitlocker and the Sabrent is about 1500MB/s faster - it properly blazes along. I checked the performance sats out of interest - but day to day I can't tell the difference between pre-post Bitlocker and the Samsung oem vs Sabrent 99% of the time, so I go by warranty capacity / length vs cost.

 

[derekullo]

I would simply buy the most reliable drive based on user reviews on amazon/newegg and such. Reliability is more important than any little speed variation. Even if I am backing up data regularly somewhere, its not worth reinstalling another warranty replaced drive and install OS/ setup everything from scratch. Not worth the hassle.

Buy 2 drives and put them in a raid 1.

Would give you twice the read speed along with peace of mind.

 

[USAFRet]

Buy 2 drives and put them in a raid 1.

Would give you twice the read speed along with peace of mind.

Peace of mind?

RAID 1 is a false sense of security.
Helps only if you need actual uninterrupted uptime. Which most people do not.

Does nothing for all the more common forms of data loss.
You need an actual backup routine for that.

 

[derekullo]

Peace of mind?

RAID 1 is a false sense of security.
Helps only if you need actual uninterrupted uptime. Which most people do not.

Does nothing for all the more common forms of data loss.

The previous post was about ssd reliability and having to make a warranty claim and reinstall windows.

I would imagine a single storage device dying and taking all of its data with it would be a common form of data loss.

CTI is Now New Era Technology - Managed Services - Networking - Voice

Consolidated Technologies is now operating as New Era Technology. Locations in New York and Pittsburgh. Managed IT and UC Services.

consoltech.com

Ranks hard drive damage as the #3 cause of data loss.

https://www.unitrends.com/blog/backup-what-causes-data-loss
Ranks hardware failure as 40% of all incidents of data loss.

Everyone should backup their data with a minimum 3-2-1 backup strategy, but it would be ludicrous to believe that everybody does so.

Most people would love to have uninterrupted uptime which in this case would be Windows booting and saying that their raid 1 is in a degraded state versus a non-booting system.

In conclusion, raid 1 won't help you with a virus or any software deletion of data but does help protect against a leading form of data loss ... hardware failures.

Having double the read speed is just the icing on the cake!

 

[USAFRet]

a leading form of data loss ... hardware failures.

And yet, most of the issues we see here about 'data loss' are not from physical drive fail, but something else.
Ransomware, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong drive, installing an OS to the wrong drive, etc, etc.

Sure, a RAID 1 protects against physical drive fail.
But so does a real backup routine. I've experienced that personally.

RAID 1 can be great, IF you need that actual 100% uptime. Say if you were running a webstore, and unscheduled downtime == lost sales.
For the rest of us, not so much.
And any company utilizing a RAID 1 for the uptime consideration also has (or should have) a good backup routine.

And if you can suffer through a whole hour of recovering from the backup Image, then the RAID 1 is not needed.
Far far too many people hear about a RAID 1 and assume it is a "backup". It is not.

 

[Starry Dynamo]

I don't believe its due to PCIE 4.0..... PCIE 3.0 is jsut as fast.

Um, no. PCIe 4 has TWICE the bandwidth of PCIe 3.

 

[vinay2070]

Buy 2 drives and put them in a raid 1.

Would give you twice the read speed along with peace of mind.

Twice the cost, and you would need 2 nvme interfaces of the same speed. You would probably need something like an X570 for that?

I am sorry, I meant most reliable of the 2 drives if they are of the same price and speed does not matter between them. Not the most expensive.

 

[vinay2070]

Sure, a RAID 1 protects against physical drive fail.
But so does a real backup routine. I've experienced that personally.

Pretty much figured that out after seeing your signature. Thats a lot of drives, lol.

 

[Angstromm]

We dive deep to see if upgrading a Tiger Lake laptop with a PCIe 4.0 SSD is worth the high cost.

Upgrading Your Laptop with PCIe 4.0 Storage: Which SSD is the best? : Read more

So far, all the laptops I've looked at only support 1 M.2 Gen4 slot, the other M.2 slot being Gen3. This of course nullifies any benefit to running RAID-0. Bummer. Is anyone aware of any laptops that support 2 Gen4 slots? Or is this situation a result of current limits in the technology?

 

[USAFRet]

So far, all the laptops I've looked at only support 1 M.2 Gen4 slot, the other M.2 slot being Gen3. This of course nullifies any benefit to running RAID-0. Bummer. Is anyone aware of any laptops that support 2 Gen4 slots? Or is this situation a result of current limits in the technology?

Backing up several generations....solid state drives of any type mostly nullifies any benefit of a RAID 0.
Apart from artificial benchmarks, of course.

 

[branislavm]

We dive deep to see if upgrading a Tiger Lake laptop with a PCIe 4.0 SSD is worth the high cost.

Upgrading Your Laptop with PCIe 4.0 Storage: Which SSD is the best? : Read more

Hi,
I have bought similar laptop to the one you have tested, Dell Vostro 5510, i5-11300H + MX450 with two nvme ssd ports. Primary 2280 and secondary 2230.
I have upgraded 2230 ssd that came with laptop (moving it to secondary slot) with Samsung 980 PRO 1TB. Unfortunately I got half the speeds, because laptops shows nvme primary port is nvme3.0 x4, and secondary is nvme3.0 x2.
In the manual it is stated that primary port uses nvme gen 4.0 drives.

Is there an option to unlock it somehow?
How did you achieve nvme 4.0 speeds?
It is same gen cpu and laptop.

any suggestion is welcome
thank you
regards
Branislav