2TB NVME Drives

Troezar · 24 May 2022 at 13:33

Which one would you go for right now for a game drive on a PCIE 4.0 capable motherboard?

StevieP · 24 May 2022 at 13:46

I'd probably just go for the cheapest - I can't imagine you will see much of a performance difference outside of benchmarking!

Personally mine is a Sabrent

Troezar · 24 May 2022 at 13:50

StevieP said:
I'd probably just go for the cheapest - I can't imagine you will see much of a performance difference outside of benchmarking!

Personally mine is a Sabrent

I did wonder about that. I don't suppose we're getting data streamed off them any time soon like the consoles?

EsaT · 24 May 2022 at 16:08

There really won't be much of difference between different NVMes, so don't see sense in paying big luxury extras.

FireCuda 520 would be 5GB/s capable Phison E16 drive.
Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB SSD PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive (ZP2000GM3A002) (SKU: HD-3BX-SE) = £229.99
(Corsair MP600 Core is overpriced for QLC)

Troezar · 24 May 2022 at 16:36

EsaT said:
There really won't be much of difference between different NVMes, so don't see sense in paying big luxury extras.

FireCuda 520 would be 5GB/s capable Phison E16 drive.
Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB SSD PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive (ZP2000GM3A002) (SKU: HD-3BX-SE) = £229.99
(Corsair MP600 Core is overpriced for QLC)

Looks decent, I see you can get the SN850 for £15 more which is tempting.

Edit:
Listening to Frank Azor it sounds like it's too soon to jump in. I'll wait to see which drives and controllers will meet the Smart Access Storage requirements. Seems just being PCIE 4 or 5 will not be enough to guarantee it will be fast enough to work.

Tetras · 25 May 2022 at 00:40

Troezar said:
Looks decent, I see you can get the SN850 for £15 more which is tempting.

Edit:
Listening to Frank Azor it sounds like it's too soon to jump in. I'll wait to see which drives and controllers will meet the Smart Access Storage requirements. Seems just being PCIE 4 or 5 will not be enough to guarantee it will be fast enough to work.

Isn't it just based on windows directstorage api? If so, I thought all you needed was a pci-e 3.0 drive, is there more to it?

Troezar · 25 May 2022 at 06:24

Tetras said:
Isn't it just based on windows directstorage api? If so, I thought all you needed was a pci-e 3.0 drive, is there more to it?

Definitely be a minimum spec but he didn't go into details. Sounded like some drives would be good whereas other similar drives with different controllers or internal configurations wouldn't. Maybe some throttle after a time with high throughput?

lsg1r · 25 May 2022 at 21:15

Honestly as said above, just go for the cheapest one with 'decent' transfer speeds.

I was originally looking for 1TB and was originally just making a choice between the wd850, samsung 980 and seagate 530's and (when looking at reviews) there was so little between them you wouldn't notice but seagate normally came out 'just' on top in reviews but also cost more....

I'd settled on WD850's as they were the cheapest 1TB at the time but got insanely lucky and spotted 2x2tb seagate 530's for less than half price (yes real and sealed)...

Honestly in the games I play though I have noticed zero real difference between them and my old sata ssd's. Part of the issue is directstorage isn't really being used by much, if anything, on pc so I'm hoping in the future I notice a difference lol.

I haven't even been able to get close to the high numbers they quote in anything I've done outside benchmarking either...even as a scratch disk