Nvme vs ssd?

Zeebedy · Wednesday at 18:40

I currently have two nvme drives in my pc.. a 500gb boot drive and a 1tb games drive.

I’m considering more space and was wondering if getting a sata ssd as well would be fast enough for gaming?

Or am I best looking at a bigger nvme drive to use for games?

BUDFORCE · Wednesday at 18:46

For games it basically doesn't make any difference.

Tetras · Wednesday at 18:46

For the most part, it doesn't matter, but games are slowly starting to use a lot more of the speed available to them.

If I was playing lots of old Steam games, no problem there, but planning to use it for AAA games in the longer-term? Perhaps not such a great investment.

Ofc, you could use it to move games that don't care onto the SATA SSD and push the ones that do onto your 1TB drive.

The other issue with SATA is that it is getting hard to find good ones.

Zeebedy · Wednesday at 18:49

Any in particular you would recommend? Looking at the either 2-4tb drives.

Tetras · Wednesday at 19:02

Zeebedy said:
Any in particular you would recommend? Looking at the either 2-4tb drives.

870 Evo is believed to be fixed now (haven't seen any evidence either way) and to my knowledge has never been downgraded.

Kingston's KC600 has fixed components (guaranteed controller & TLC memory), hardware encryption and seems to be decently reliable.

WD Red SA500 uses a very reliable Marvell controller and decent endurance figures, so should always be TLC.

Avoid: WD's Blue (SA510, the original 3D version is fine), it has been downgraded and no longer has DRAM with a lot of failure reports online.

MX500 seems to be in-and-out as a good/bad drive, with firmware issues and a lot of reported failures in certain batches.

Zeebedy · Wednesday at 19:04

Thank you. Will have a look into them!

Philtor · Wednesday at 19:15

Tetras said:
Avoid: WD's Blue (SA510, the original 3D version is fine), it has been downgraded and no longer has DRAM with a lot of failure reports online.

I picked up the WD 1TB SN580 quite recently and it’s really good with excellent reviews on the usual sites.

Are you saying I have bought a lemon then?

Tetras · Wednesday at 19:17

Philtor said:
Are you saying I have bought a lemon then?

No, I'm referring to SATA drives.

Philtor · Wednesday at 19:18

Oh I see

dave28 · Wednesday at 19:19

even the oldest slowest SSD i ever owned was lightning fast with gaming.

it was a massive leap over hard drives, even the fastest 10,000 rpm hard drives were made to look very very slow.

GoogalyMoogaly · Thursday at 17:04

Tetras said:
870 Evo is believed to be fixed now (haven't seen any evidence either way) and to my knowledge has never been downgraded.

What is/was wrong with the 870 EVOs? I think I bought one not too long ago and didn't realise there might be an issue.

Tetras · Thursday at 17:19

GoogalyMoogaly said:
What is/was wrong with the 870 EVOs? I think I bought one not too long ago and didn't realise there might be an issue.

There were many failures on the earlier drives, mainly those manufactured in 2020 or 2021, where around 5-10TB written they'd end up with loads of bad blocks and corrupted files, until eventually they were unreadable and/or brick themselves.

In some cases, formatting the drive and updating the firmware seemed to fix the issue (though the bad blocks remain forever), but this didn't work on all the drives, maybe it would depend how much damage had been done.

To my knowledge, Samsung never acknowledged it, or made any official statement and the newer drives are not manufactured the same way (not sure what has changed exactly, but there's a note on their website about it) and have a firmware that is not backwards compatible with the older drives.

GoogalyMoogaly · Thursday at 18:29

Tetras said:
There were many failures on the earlier drives, mainly those manufactured in 2020 or 2021, where around 5-10TB written they'd end up with loads of bad blocks and corrupted files, until eventually they were unreadable and/or brick themselves.

In some cases, formatting the drive and updating the firmware seemed to fix the issue (though the bad blocks remain forever), but this didn't work on all the drives, maybe it would depend how much damage had been done.

To my knowledge, Samsung never acknowledged it, or made any official statement and the newer drives are not manufactured the same way (not sure what has changed exactly, but there's a note on their website about it) and have a firmware that is not backwards compatible with the older drives.

So without wanting to seem horribly selfish, if I bought it March this year there's a good chance it's probably OK?

Tetras · Thursday at 18:39

GoogalyMoogaly said:
So without wanting to seem horribly selfish, if I bought it March this year there's a good chance it's probably OK?

Yeah. I think they're totally different drives at this point, since they don't use the same flash and have different firmware, so any problems are likely to be unrelated.

ttaskmaster · Thursday at 19:39

Zeebedy said:
Or am I best looking at a bigger nvme drive to use for games?

As others have said, it depends on the game.

Playing something like Starfield or Star Citizen, an SSD will usually be fine.
Playing DCS or MSFS, you will notice the difference and an M.2 NVME will be far superior.