Humour me, 'Fast' PCI-E 4.0 M.2 Drives...

[keef247]

Yep you've sold me on the aforementioned crucial Percy found me.

Cheers guys!

[DanceswithUnix]

Yep you've sold me on the aforementioned crucial Percy found me.

Cheers guys!

Looks a decent drive for gaming.

Someone will now turn up to warn that it's a dramless design with QLC flash and hence a low write endurance. But the maths works out as:
800TBW specified for 5 year warranty
That's 800000GB over about 1826 days
So about 440 GB per day. That's a lot of downloads and patching, so I think you're good
£193 direct from Crucial? Seems a good deal to me.

[cptwhite_uk]

Exactly, we're well past the point of deminishing returns for general use.

From HDD to 2.5" SSD was like going from a 60hz to 144Hz monitor , 2.5" SSD to 1st gen NVME (say 2000Mbs), like going from 120Hz to 240Hz monitor, and anything above that has very niche benefits to the vast majority of gamers. Obviously people dealing with large data files (video editors etc.) will see benefits to compiling / data transfer times but for the majority of users. Anything above 3500Mbps is largely irrelevant I would expect.

[DanceswithUnix]

Exactly, we're well past the point of deminishing returns for general use.

I know technology always gets cheaper, but sometimes I still do a double take.

I recently needed an external hard drive. Last time I bought one it was something like £30 for a 500GB disk, but this time I couldn't find anything in that price range that I felt I could trust. I've seen the pictures of external drives that are really a USB to micro SD card reader hot glued into a case so was a bit nervous on what to buy.

Rather than spend £60 on a slow HDD, I ended up getting an NVMe drive and a USB-C to NVMe adaptor and making my own for about £80. The speed for a USB drive bonkers

Things seem to have improved on the HDD front now, but at current pricing a branded hdd is down to £40 (from about £60 at the time) : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-HDT.../dp/B07997KKSK

Vs I got a 1TB Crucial P3 : https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0B25LZGGW/
and one of these: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08RVC6F9Y/

The P3 has since gone down in price, but the USB adaptor has gone up. There are USB adaptors around half that price though, but as a backup solution I paid a bit more for a brand I recognised.
Edit: One of these with a cheap SSD would probably work fine: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07TSBR114/

[keef247]

Looks a decent drive for gaming.

Someone will now turn up to warn that it's a dramless design with QLC flash and hence a low write endurance. But the maths works out as:
800TBW specified for 5 year warranty
That's 800000GB over about 1826 days
So about 440 GB per day. That's a lot of downloads and patching, so I think you're good
£193 direct from Crucial? Seems a good deal to me.

Ah damn I download 441 GB of porn a day. I'll have to find something else then

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I really think it is a false economy buying a QLC DRAMless drive when TLC drives with DRAM are not that much more.Also,with NAND pricing collapsing its not worth the saving if you intend to keep the drive for over 5 years.

It's not just the fact they can have better endurance,but more importantly TLC drives with DRAM have just more consistent performance,especially if writing data onto them. As they get filled QLC write speeds start to degrade quite a bit too.

So if you are building PC to last a long time between upgrades I would get a decent TLC drive with DRAM.

You have to appreciate,that in the next few years we might be seeing DirectStorage being pushed more and more. Its quite clear consoles use their SSDs as some sort of VRAM cache of sorts,hence why we are seeing some newer PC games use a lot of VRAM.

Both Nvidia/AMD have not increased VRAM enough since 2016 and its quite clear even 12GB/16GB might have issues. The problem is we are only seeing 8GB on most sub £500 cards even now.

With late generation UE4 games really hammering VRAM,UE5 might really push things even more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYk7byKHSRw

Unreal really wants to push next generation texturing with UE5. I really think this is going to be more problematic with slower drives. So I can see PCs over the next few years also using SSDs to help out with VRAM too.

To put in context,the PS5 uses a TLC drive and so does the XBox Series X. Both don't use DRAMless designs. Considering consoles are made to a cost,its telling both have avoided using QLC drives and DRAMless designs. It's is probably down to write consistency,because if the SSD is being used as VRAM cache,its writing too. Also as the drive fills up,the write speeds will degrade less.

Mark Cerny literally said he would get a WD SN850 or Seagate FireCuda 530. The officially branded Sony PS5 expansion drive is an rebranded SN850(uses TLC and DRAM cache). The XBox Series X has slower storage,ie,an SN530(uses TLC and DRAM cache).

So that means you need to aim for between 2400MB/S to 5500MB/S read speeds ideally.

Its why when I saw a deal for the older version of the Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB I went for it. It's sort of halfway between the two.

Edit!!

To put in context,a 2TB SN850,SN850X,FireCuda 530,980 Pro or KC3000 can be had for between £120~£150. So for as low as £240 if you want 4TB of storage.

[Percy1983]

I don't disagree as dram is better but we are getting to the point of what use cases will notice. With the crucial P3 plus you need to hit it with 500gb+ of sustained full speed writes to get it to trip up, so yes using a dram drive you won't need to worry about this, but in the real world 99.9% of people don't need to worry about this either.

I guess we are now hitting the point where before you had an SSD boot with mechanical mass storage, we are now in the realms of 'slow' nvme drives as mass storage and general use.

[DanceswithUnix]

It's is probably down to write consistency,because if the SSD is being used as VRAM cache,its writing too.

I suspect it's down to lack of system dram. In a PC it is expected that you have some to spare for the ssd, in a console you just don't.

Directstorage isn't a cache afaics. You are using the low latency of the SSD to read textures directly into the gpu where the gpu decompresses them.

[keef247]

I really think it is a false economy buying a QLC DRAMless drive when TLC drives with DRAM are not that much more.Also,with NAND pricing collapsing its not worth the saving if you intend to keep the drive for over 5 years.

It's not just the fact they can have better endurance,but more importantly TLC drives with DRAM have just more consistent performance,especially if writing data onto them. As they get filled QLC write speeds start to degrade quite a bit too.

So if you are building PC to last a long time between upgrades I would get a decent TLC drive with DRAM.

You have to appreciate,that in the next few years we might be seeing DirectStorage being pushed more and more. Its quite clear consoles use their SSDs as some sort of VRAM cache of sorts,hence why we are seeing some newer PC games use a lot of VRAM.

Both Nvidia/AMD have not increased VRAM enough since 2016 and its quite clear even 12GB/16GB might have issues. The problem is we are only seeing 8GB on most sub £500 cards even now.

With late generation UE4 games really hammering VRAM,UE5 might really push things even more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYk7byKHSRw

Unreal really wants to push next generation texturing with UE5. I really think this is going to be more problematic with slower drives. So I can see PCs over the next few years also using SSDs to help out with VRAM too.

To put in context,the PS5 uses a TLC drive and so does the XBox Series X. Both don't use DRAMless designs. Considering consoles are made to a cost,its telling both have avoided using QLC drives and DRAMless designs. It's is probably down to write consistency,because if the SSD is being used as VRAM cache,its writing too. Also as the drive fills up,the write speeds will degrade less.

Mark Cerny literally said he would get a WD SN850 or Seagate FireCuda 530. The officially branded Sony PS5 expansion drive is an rebranded SN850(uses TLC and DRAM cache). The XBox Series X has slower storage,ie,an SN530(uses TLC and DRAM cache).

So that means you need to aim for between 2400MB/S to 5500MB/S read speeds ideally.

Its why when I saw a deal for the older version of the Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB I went for it. It's sort of halfway between the two.

Edit!!

To put in context,a 2TB SN850,SN850X,FireCuda 530,980 Pro or KC3000 can be had for between £120~£150. So for as low as £240 if you want 4TB of storage.

Yeah tbf longevity was a major plan in making this decision, as it's the first rig I'll have built since a q stepping first gen quad core... So I wanna squeeze as much life out of it as pos... So I might just settle for a 2tb for now as it's only for gaming and get a posh ott spec m.2 with loadsa lifespan as the price doesn't bother me too much tbh for a 2tb anyway.

[Saracen999]

....

To put in context,a 2TB SN850,SN850X,FireCuda 530,980 Pro or KC3000 can be had for between £120~£150. So for as low as £240 if you want 4TB of storage.

I've only looked on Amazon so far, but the 4TB versions of both those (seems to require the SN850X variant, not the non-X) were over £400. Something like £420-430.

The Crucial QLC 4TB, for all the limits of QLC, were £192. Bit of a difference.

I haven't hunted elsewhere, though. Yet.

[keef247]

We are stirring the pot elsewhere

Oh the fun we're having elsewhere right now #if you know you know

[DanceswithUnix]

So I might just settle for a 2tb for now as it's only for gaming and get a posh ott spec m.2 with loadsa lifespan as the price doesn't bother me too much tbh for a 2tb anyway.

Do bear in mind, that halving the capacity of the drive you are getting doubles the stress on the flash chips of the drive, as the amount you are writing isn't really going to change. It's the large capacity of cheaper QLC drives that makes them usable, as well as technology improvements. The writes are spread over more flash layers in more chips, so the fact individual cells are more delicate than tlc cells gets diluted out.

So for example, the P3 Plus 4TB is rated as 800TB total writes. If you swap to the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB to keep it a similar sort of drive, then the total written rating goes up to 1200TB. Now, if they did a 4TB version of that drive it would no doubt be 2400TB written which would be a nice upgrade, but they don't, so thanks to the drive being half the size your total writes go up an unimpressive 50%. But in reality you just aren't even going to hit 800TB.

That maths I showed earlier, if you keep the drive for 10 years rather than 5 that's still 220GB per day of writes.

I would be interested to see what sort of write load people have on here. This is a working machine, and I recently replaced the 1TB Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD as it was full. As I am running Linux I can look at the old drive with "smartctl -a /dev/sda" to tell me the ssd stats, but I'm sure Windows will have something similar to get SMART stats out of drives.

This device is hosting a Linux development environment that does heavy compiles including hosting the swap partition, Docker container creation, Linux kernel builds etc hence the drive has more writes than reads. I often had a Windows VM running on it. The critical lines here are:

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   092   092   000    Old_age   Always       -       35452
177 Wear_Leveling_Count     0x0013   096   096   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       47
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       45561381816

Thats a lot of LBAs, but then an LBA is only 512 bytes on this drive. So, 2 of those to 1K, about 2000 to a Megabyte. Dividing it down, I make it about 22.8TB written. That number of power on hours, that's 4 years. So 5.7TB per year. It's actually a bit less than that, as when I got the drive the first thing I did was copy the old 500GB drive onto it so it did 0.5TB on day one so I'm actually doing about 5.6TB per year, so an 800TB written drive would last me about 143 years.

[Percy1983]

This is the reality now most drives will be obsolete before dying, my 64gb Crucial m4 is waving (now in my htpc the live tv buffer).

I can see in the server world to TB numbers are very important but to the average user it won't be a problem. As a photographer I do have days of dumping 200GB+ of data but that isn't every day so even in this heavy use it will be fine.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I don't disagree as dram is better but we are getting to the point of what use cases will notice. With the crucial P3 plus you need to hit it with 500gb+ of sustained full speed writes to get it to trip up, so yes using a dram drive you won't need to worry about this, but in the real world 99.9% of people don't need to worry about this either.

I guess we are now hitting the point where before you had an SSD boot with mechanical mass storage, we are now in the realms of 'slow' nvme drives as mass storage and general use.

I suspect it's down to lack of system dram. In a PC it is expected that you have some to spare for the ssd, in a console you just don't.

Directstorage isn't a cache afaics. You are using the low latency of the SSD to read textures directly into the gpu where the gpu decompresses them.

My main concern is we have now exited the inter-console generation. Games are being developed with the newer consoles in mind,about a year earlier than I expected. Also UE5 is coming.

The issue is that from 2009 to 2016,with mainstream dGPUs we went from 768MB/1GB VRAM to 6GB/8GB VRAM in 2016. That was an 8X increase in VRAM. From 2016 to 2023,we barely had two models increase the VRAM by 50% in the RTX3060 and RX6700XT. We should have been at 48GB/64GB VRAM by now.

This is despite dGPUs becoming more powerful,several console releases and RT. RT actually puts more demand on VRAM requirements.

Consoles have gotten around this by integrating SSDs more effectively into the workflow. The fact is they went for certain types of SSDs too.

The consoles use the SSDs as a form of extended VRAM buffer AFAIK. For example the PS5 SSD might be only 5500MB/S,but with compression can read/write upto 10000MB/S. I expect the effective speed on the SN530 in the XBox Series X is higher too.

PC still treats SSDs as basically faster HDDs....consoles don't. I think MS will be forced to get DirectStorage working better,and it will be needed.

This is what people are missing with the insane VRAM usage of a whole spate of recent late generation UE4 titles. It isn't just "bad optimisation". The effective VRAM pool is much larger than people think,because of the SSDs. It must be between 16GB~24GB looking at some of the VRAM usage. Have people not noticed the RX7900XTX and RTX4090 have 24GB of VRAM?

What happens when the console refreshes happen in the next year or so? It is going to get worse. Or UE5?

This is compounded by Nvidia and even AMD not wanting to increase VRAM too,despite GDDR6/GDDR6X prices collapsing. The RTX4060TI is an 8GB card.

The OP does not built PCs often....so if they are intending to keep the system for years they should try and get the best SSD they can afford ATM.

The PCI-E 5.0 ones are just too overpriced,but especially in the 2TB capacities the higher end PCI-E 4.0 drives are decent value for money. Also nothing stopping the OP getting a 4TB QLC drive as bulk storage.

I've only looked on Amazon so far, but the 4TB versions of both those (seems to require the SN850X variant, not the non-X) were over £400. Something like £420-430.

The Crucial QLC 4TB, for all the limits of QLC, were £192. Bit of a difference.

I haven't hunted elsewhere, though. Yet.

But you are looking at DRAMless models. There are also TLC DRAMless models which cost a bit more too.

The 2TB models tend to be £120~£150. The 4GB models haven't dropped as much compared to the QLC models. So dual 2TB drives can be around the £250.

If you run legacy games it might be enough.

But the OP intends to keep their rig for years,and probably might want to run newer games in a few years.

But since I also keep SSDs,for years and years I always went for better drives,even SATA ones. That one I won on Hexus in 2012,I used for 8~9 years IIRC. Two of my SATA drives are ex-enterprise drives.

Yeah tbf longevity was a major plan in making this decision, as it's the first rig I'll have built since a q stepping first gen quad core... So I wanna squeeze as much life out of it as pos... So I might just settle for a 2tb for now as it's only for gaming and get a posh ott spec m.2 with loadsa lifespan as the price doesn't bother me too much tbh for a 2tb anyway.

10+ years is a long time.

NAND prices have collapsed inwards. Samsung,Micron are making losses or very little money. There is a glut of NAND now. What I think will happen is they will cut production,so the future PCI-E 5.0 SSDs in a year or two they might not be cheap IMHO(I could be wrong). The current PCI-E 5.0 SSDs do seem to have issues,so not sure they can be recommended.

Just look on HUKD - £120~£150 will get you a higher end 2TB PCI-E 4.0 SSD.

There is also nothing stopping you getting a cheap 4TB QLC drive for bulk storage.

Edit!!

Another thing. Make sure you get a motherboard with PCI-E 5.0 for the main graphics slot.

Don't get conned into the B650 chipset which is a AMD cash grab. If Intel can offer PCI-E 5.0 under £200,so can AMD.

With VRAM not increasing enough with mainsteam dGPUs,and more and more of them being 8X cards,I can foresee potential issues.

Oh the fun we're having elsewhere right now #if you know you know

Oh,yes at the other overclocking plaice! The low VRAM crew with their eternal defence of DLSS!

This is the reality now most drives will be obsolete before dying, my 64gb Crucial m4 is waving (now in my htpc the live tv buffer).

I can see in the server world to TB numbers are very important but to the average user it won't be a problem. As a photographer I do have days of dumping 200GB+ of data but that isn't every day so even in this heavy use it will be fine.

QLC drives also get progressive slower in writes as they get filled too. There was a Polish website which did a whole lot of those kinds of tests.

I have had to move 100s of GBs of photo/video files and large game files and honestly over a few years,at the time it was only £40 more for my SSD over the QLC DRAMless drives last year. I think at £8/year over the 5 year warranty period it isn't much more.

I also got three years of free data recovery included too.

[Saracen999]

This is the reality now most drives will be obsolete before dying, my 64gb Crucial m4 is waving (now in my htpc the live tv buffer).

I can see in the server world to TB numbers are very important but to the average user it won't be a problem. As a photographer I do have days of dumping 200GB+ of data but that isn't every day so even in this heavy use it will be fine.

Interesting thread, this.

I remember, very distinctly, the days when Photoshop RAW files from what then was high res SLRs (but a LOT less than today's hi-res cameras, and frankly, less than a decent phone's JPG) were big enough to be a storage challenge. Now, it's pretty easy, but 4k, or even 8k (not convinced the latter actually is or will be worth it) at high video at colour depth and frame rate .... that might be a challenge to an SSDs TBW in a heavily-used editing system, or an ingress machine for a group of editors. But then, really, we're well into sever territorry.

This fairly high end Asus laptop has an Intel SSD that is actually a lower spec (if I read it correcty) than that Crucial P3, and Asus are happy to sell, and up to a point, warranty it.

I was planning on adding a 4TB P3 to this machine, but it makes me wonder, add one still, but replace the 1TB Intel with a second P3?

Hmmm.

/ wanders off to cogitate.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting thread, this.

I remember, very distinctly, the days when Photoshop RAW files from what then was high res SLRs (but a LOT less than today's hi-res cameras, and frankly, less than a decent phone's JPG) were big enough to be a storage challenge. Now, it's pretty easy, but 4k, or even 8k (not convinced the latter actually is or will be worth it) at high video at colour depth and frame rate .... that might be a challenge to an SSDs TBW in a heavily-used editing system, or an ingress machine for a group of editors. But then, really, we're well into sever territorry.

This fairly high end Asus laptop has an Intel SSD that is actually a lower spec (if I read it correcty) than that Crucial P3, and Asus are happy to sell, and up to a point, warranty it.

I was planning on adding a 4TB P3 to this machine, but it makes me wonder, add one still, but replace the 1TB Intel with a second P3?

Hmmm.

/ wanders off to cogitate.

Mate who does lots of astrowork(which involves tons of data writing),went with a QLC DRAMless drive....now has replaced it with a higher end PCI-E 4.0 TLC drive. He noticed the difference...internet says you won't. Oh well.