Which NVMe SSDs?

GoogalyMoogaly

GoogalyMoogaly

GoogalyMoogaly

Soldato
Joined
29 Aug 2010
Posts
8,159
Location
Cornwall
So I'm pretty new to the world of NVMe SSDs so apologies if my thoughts/questions are a little silly.



I'm thinking of trying to move away from HDDs and older SATA SSDs So thought I'd buy a couple of NVMe drives. I'm thinking of getting 2 drives for a couple of reasons, capacity mostly and the thought that one could be more storage based while the other is OS and other applications that would benefit from the speed (I realise with 2 NVMes neither drive will be slow). So with this in mind I'm OK if one is less performant than the other, but it doesn't matter if they're similar.

I think the 3 drives I've narrowed it down to, from most expensive to least is:
  1. Crucial P5 Plus 2TB
  2. Kingston KC3000 2TB
  3. WD Blue SN570 2TB

What would be the best combination? I don't mind different drives or 2 of the same.

My concerns with each are:
  • the P5+ is the most expensive and I think can run hot
  • the KC3000 is doubled-sided at that capacity so not sure if that causes any issues with installation or cooling
  • the SN570 is the lowest performance and the lowest endurance

My other thoughts with NVMe drives is the thermal pad used with heatsink (which often come with motherboards). It seems to make changing NVMe drives much more of a pain. Where do you get new pads from if one gets mangled when removing a drive?
I sorta wish they could just use thermal paste but I guess that would have its own issues?
 
GoogalyMoogaly said:
Yeah, I realise the WD Blue is gen 3, but I figure there probably won't be too much noticeable difference outside of benchmarks and I'd be happy to use that as the more storage based drive of the 2.
Click to expand...
I'm using 2x 2TB Seagate Firecuda 530's, one in gen4 slot, one in gen3 slot... Even in benchmarks there's literally no difference outside of max sustained read/write speed, gen3 being half the speed of gen4, all other measurements were the same when I last tested. Real world.... I'd struggle to tell the difference with a sata ssd let alone another nvme, I don't have anything with direct storage though.


I know you never mentioned my drives but I'd say they a pretty good option to consider...
 
GoogalyMoogaly said:
the KC3000 is doubled-sided at that capacity so not sure if that causes any issues with installation or cooling
Click to expand...
I don't know about your mobo, but Gigabyte Z690 Gaming X here and I have the 2TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus G which is double sided. I installed without the Sabrent heatsink and had no issues at all, using the mobo's heatsink which only contacts the top side was fine too, and I later installed the Sabrent heatsink and again, no issues with installation. Plenty of clearance in the direct to CPU M.2 slot, so there should be no worries at all with a double sided NVMe really :cool:

There is a difference of up t 10-15 degrees when under load (especially for write actions) - For example running Crystal Disk Mark I found the Sabrent could hit 67 degrees, with the mobo's heatsink and Thermal Grizzly pad the drive his around 59-65 degrees depending on the runs, and with the Sabrent double sided heatsink installed the temp has not gone above 53 degrees according to HWINFO64.

So a good heatsink is quite handy for the primary NVMe really. As a result of this the sustained Crystal Disk results are always consistent whereas they could vary before depending on the drive's temp.

This may or may not matter depending on your use case.
 
Last edited:
i have WD, Samsung and Crucial SSD`s.

never had a problem with any of them and cant tell any difference in performance.
they are very fast or very fast.

out of your list i would get the Crucial one.
 
I talked about that in my Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G review, and Sabrent were more than happy with it and accepted that this is the case right now anyway. If you have a gen 3 NVMe, that's all you need for superb speeds in basically everything. Anything faster is just really for large transfers or highly specific needs like IOPS focused workloads where the faster drives have higher IOPS and thus benefit those specific workloads.

As a comparative measure, a gen 3 Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB has:

620,000 IOPS (read)
560,000 IOPS (write)

Whilst a 980 Pro gen 4 has:
1 million IOPS (read)
1 million IOPS (write)

There is also a 3500MB/s difference in sustained read speeds, and 1600MB/s write speeds. Will anyone notice these differences in normal day to day use and gaming? Nope.

So yeah unless a specific need is there for the extra bandwidth, stick to a gen 3 drive with quality components and you'll be fine for a very long time.

Review for ref:
www.neowin.net

Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G 2TB DirectStorage SSD Review

Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus-G ships with a DirectStorage optimised firmware. I put it through its paces in Forspoken, the first game to use DirectStorage, and see how the SSD performs in normal use, too.
www.neowin.net www.neowin.net
 
Last edited:
I've got a 1TB WD SN570 and it's doing it's job brilliantly. Transferring large folders within the drive is instantaneous most of the time, load times are clearly faster than my 850 Evo.

I can't imagine there'd be much difference if I opted for a drive double the price
 
MatteRB26 said:
I've got a 1TB WD SN570 and it's doing it's job brilliantly. Transferring large folders within the drive is instantaneous most of the time, load times are clearly faster than my 850 Evo.

I can't imagine there'd be much difference if I opted for a drive double the price
Click to expand...
"Moving" data on any drive should be quick as it's only a table update really....
 
Major774 said:
There is a Samsung cashback promotion at the moment on specific SSD’s, go check it out.

I am going to change out my 980 Pro 1TB to the 2TB model.
Click to expand...
Indeed grabbed the 2TB myself. The price is excellent.

However... Have the 980 Pro drive wear issues been fully fixed now with FW updates?
 
Major774 said:
Yeah… fixed with new FW update.

Most recently purchased SSD’s are updated with the new FW.
Click to expand...
Awesome, thanks.

Would you know the size of the turbo cache on the 2TB model? For sustained writes.

Some places say 50GB before it slows down to TLC speeds and other say the cache is ~200GB.
 
Probably varies because it's a dynamic cache controlled by TurboWrite 2.0:

The drives support SLC caching technology, with a fixed buffer area of 4 or 6 GB, while the buffer capacity is dynamically adjusted, depending on the available amount of free space – for the 1 TB model, the size of the dynamic SLC cache can reach 108 GB. This fact should eliminate the main disadvantage of TLC memory – lower performance. As for the guaranteed recording capacity, it is 600 TB for the 1 TB model.
Click to expand...
So the 1TB having an up to 108GB cache, the 2TB will be up to just over 200GB
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom