Question Why is this NVME CHEAPER

[rage690]

can i ask why is this NVME 1TB cheaper than the 980 SSD ?
and can i also ask if my motherboard can support this NV2 1TB ?

my motherboard is ASUS PRIME B365M-A and i got this from the specs under "Storage"

Intel® B365 Chipset :
1 x M.2 Socket 3, , with M key, type 2242/2260/2280 storage devices support (SATA & PCIE 3.0 x 4 mode)
1 x M.2 Socket 3, , with M key, type 2242/2260/2280 storage devices support (PCIE 3.0 x 4 mode)
6 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), gray
Support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10
Intel® Rapid Storage Technology supports
Intel® Optane™ Memory Ready

 

[Lafong]

The Samsung name alone is worth something to some people. "You get what you pay for". Etc. That may or may not apply to you. Like any other outfit, Samsung has made a judgement on how to maximize revenue through marketing tactics as well as technology.

That's part of the reason. The 2 drives may have differences in their specification sheets. Those differences may or may not be noticeable in actual use. I didn't check specs on the 980.

That particular gen 4 Kingston drive will not run at 4.0 speeds on your motherboard. It appears to be compatible otherwise.

 

[logainofhades]

I think you meant 960, not 980, going by the picture. Both are terrible drives, but the NV2 uses cheaper QLC nand, and the SA400 uses more expensive TLC nand. I wouldn't recommend either of them.

https://www.tomshardware.com/review...l, especially,inefficient in our testing, too.

 

[USAFRet]

1TB Kingston NV2 (NVMe) vs 960 GB Kingston SA400 (SATA III)

Price does not always reflect speed or quality.
Retailers sometimes reduce the price on something that is not selling well, just to get it out of the warehouse.

Personally, I wouldn't buy either.

 

[rage690]

I think you meant 960, not 980, going by the picture. Both are terrible drives, but the NV2 uses cheaper QLC nand, and the SA400 uses more expensive TLC nand. I wouldn't recommend either of them.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kingston-nv2-ssd#:~:text=The price is exceptional, especially,inefficient in our testing, too.

1TB Kingston NV2 (NVMe) vs 960 GB Kingston SA400 (SATA III)

Price does not always reflect speed or quality.
Retailers sometimes reduce the price on something that is not selling well, just to get it out of the warehouse.

Personally, I wouldn't buy either.

oh dang why not guys ? these are the only ones i can afford. they dont last long ?

 

[Lafong]

oh dang why not guys ? these are the only ones i can afford. they dont last long ?

The so-called best ones can and do fail. When is anyone's guess.

Any SSD is a lot faster than a spinning hard drive. Buy what you can afford and enjoy it. If it fails, worry about it at that time.

 

[Jason H.]

Just get Samsung. Its not just the product your paying for. Its also peace of mind.

 

[logainofhades]

oh dang why not guys ? these are the only ones i can afford. they dont last long ?

What budget and country?

 

[drea.drechsler]

oh dang why not guys ? these are the only ones i can afford. they dont last long ?

The only one worth considering is the NVME drive, mainly because of it's lower price. BUT ONLY if it's a secondary or data drive in a PC and definitely not in a laptop or gaming console because it runs very hot. Here's a review of that drive if you care to read it:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kingston-nv2-ssd

The most you can say for why it's not a good drive is because it's a DRAM-less QLC drive done poorly. The reason you can't really say much more is because Kingston doesn't provide full performance specifications since they use various controllers on the drives. When you don't know what you're going to get saying anything specific about an individual sample is pretty well meaningless anyway.

The good news is it should work OK for a data (secondary) drive in a PC for storing games. That's because game data access is random and doesn't rely on long sequential data reads that would test the bandwidth of a PCIe x 4 data path. And since most of it's use with game storage is reading and not writing data the low TBW spec (typical of all QLC drives, not just this one) isn't an issue as you're not likely to approach it even in 10 years of use.

Do not use this for your system drive since they see a lot of write activity and that's where it's low TBW spec might become an issue. If you do get it, also get a heatsink to limit the thermal throttling it's probably prone to (should do that with any NVME that doesn't have one, to be honest). Be sure to visit the Kingston support site and download/install custom drivers and control panels for it. They will quite likely be needed to enable a Host Memory Buffer (HMB) cache to take the place of the DRAM cache it's missing as well as set up over-provisioning.

 

[geofelt]

There is a risk/reward equation.
Cheaper ssd makers buy their parts elsewhere and use them in their own brand name products.
Makers like Samsung make not only the nand chips but also the control chips giving them full control over integration.
It makes sense that they will keep the best chips for their own products before selling extras to others.

Intel used to make nand chips but sold the nand production to hynix.
Here is an interesting chart on who makes what.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solid-state_drive_manufacturers

Puget systems has a report on hardware reliability:

Most Reliable PC Hardware of 2021

Here at Puget Systems, our goal is not only to provide the fastest workstations possible, but the most reliable as well. As a part of our constant drive to offer only the highest quality components possible, we track and regularly review the failure rates for each part we carry. Today, we want...

www.pugetsystems.com

Samsung SSD devices had no in field failures.

Pcie m.2 devices will have faster sequential performance vs. 2.5" devices.
Yet, they are comparably priced or even cheaper. Perhaps because there is much less material involved.

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.

It is probably more important to buy sufficient capacity than to overthink performance.

I would buy quality in a ssd. flaky ssd performance on the C drive is not something you can tolerate easily.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

As others have pointed out, it's a cheap PCie Gen 4 NVME.

It's actually quite slow speeds for PCIe 4. Is DRAM-less, so will use some part of the SSD as a buffer.

This review on Tom's pretty much covers everything: Kingston NV2 SSD Review: Cheap But Risky | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

Samsung SSD, are traditionally (arguably) better, with much faster write/read and random IOPS too.

Defo only use this as a game drive. I wouldn't have my OS on it.

 

[drea.drechsler]

...
Samsung SSD, are traditionally (arguably) better, with much faster write/read and random IOPS too.
...

I think you have to get the PRO models in their lines to be sure of getting one with DRAM to get the top end performance. Not that it really matters since very few use cases come anywhere close to maxing out even DRAM-less NVME bandwidth unless running benchmarks.

Also, in the case of 980 PRO and 990 PRO models, be absolutely certain to download Samsung Magician and check that the drives have the latest firmware. They recently fixed a bug that degrades SMART data very rapidly but it's fixed with the latest firmware. It should be the latest firmware by now but it's always possible to get 'old stock' in some markets.

 

[rage690]

What budget and country?

thanks. for a drive i could go as high as $60 but could probably squeeze a little more if there is a better option a little higher in the tier ... Philippines

The only one worth considering is the NVME drive, mainly because of it's lower price. BUT ONLY if it's a secondary or data drive in a PC and definitely not in a laptop or gaming console

thanks. that explains A LOT. i think i understand these marketing strategies now. i just recently transitioned from using HDD to SDD about 2 years ago and im new to the trend.
i have always heard that SSDs have much lesser capacity than HDD but much faster like 10x. so i decided to sacrifice capacity for speed. but i never knew that these SSDs may have issues with speeds themselves and our suppliers in the local area would not care to explain the difference or they themselves does not know.

I would buy quality in a ssd. flaky ssd performance on the C drive is not something you can tolerate easily.

OMG i have a KINGSTON 480GB SA400 just like the 960 in the picture AS my DRIVE C ( OS system )
i had it split 150GB for C and the rest for D.
it was almost full so i needed a second SSD to install more games.

i was hoping i could dedicate the 480GB as Drive C and the new 1TB as my Drive D >_<

 

[drea.drechsler]

...
i have always heard that SSDs have much lesser capacity than HDD but much faster like 10x. so i decided to sacrifice capacity for speed. but i never knew that these SSDs may have issues with speeds themselves and our suppliers in the local area would not care to explain the difference or they themselves does not know.
...

SSD's are catching up but HDD can still outclass them in capacity. I know of 20TB HDD's but not aware of any SATA SSD's in that range. You can find 8TB NVME's.

Make no mistake about it, even this Kingston NVME will outclass any SATA HDD or SSD in sequential data throughput; it's an NVME and capable of moving 3GB per sec (according to the review) which SATA is not capable of coming close to. And it shares the advantage of all SSD's with almost instantaneous seek times so random access latency will also be an order of magnitude better than the fastest HDD's. It's really only a poor NVME, not poor compared to a SATA SSD and definitely not when compared to a SATA HDD.

The limiter isn't the drive or the interface but the way Windows and most Windows apps work: lots of small reads/writes, rarely any long sequential reads to test the measure of the PCIe interface. That's why most people find a really good SATA SSD (such/as Samsung 870 PRO) as speedy in typical Windows work as even the best NVME. But for games storage that may be changing with Direct Storage: moving data across the PCIe bus directly from the NVME to the GPU. It makes game startup and level loading incredibly fast with Forspoken, the only game currently using it. I'd love to see more games use it.