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

[keef247]

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.

That makes a lot of sense mate. IIRC the drive I'm looking at is around 1.3 million yes, and 2TB and 7100mb/sec and 6800mb/sec IIRC. It's only £30ish more than something 'slower' and I get free delivery which also saves me £6-12 so in reality it's what £18-20 more so probs will go for that, also comes with a proper hardcore proven not to throttle even under constant load/mass read/writes heatsink.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-...00k-1200k-iops

[keef247]

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.

Oi I've been laughing my fookin ass off on our other hangout highly amusing teamwork bro

[Saracen999]

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.

But, as I said, horses for courses. My 'courses', for the drive in question, is much closer to a WORM drive - write once, read many - not writing tons of data. A large proportion of it would be (finished) audio and video files. My "write tons" SSD is a 1TB drive with 5th Gen TLC.

[keef247]

That's fair enough mate.

Jesus 4:47am... Bit tipsy were we mate? hahaha

[Saracen999]

That's fair enough mate.

Jesus 4:47am... Bit tipsy were we mate? hahaha

Hah! Chance would be a fine thing, pal. Nah, not these days. More like insomnia. Or an early start. Don't remember, but my 'day' normally starts at 5am, though not usually with a computer. Not 'til, typically, at least 7am if not later.

[DanceswithUnix]

The consoles use the SSDs as a form of extended VRAM buffer AFAIK.

That's the bit I'm contesting. I don't see any evidence of that in what I've read. Artists draw stuff, and that stuff sits on the SSD and needs to get loaded into the vram. So you get a fast path reading from the SSD into the GPU where the GPU can decompress it in place. That's all read operations and compute.

Agree with vram being too small though. 16GB should be mainstream by now, specially at the sorts of prices GPU are going for. I have 32GB of main ram, so half that as VRAM seems a decent mid range build. If I were building new I would probably want 64GB of DDR5, so 32GB of vram look more sensible.

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.

We get that loud and clear Cat, but you have to know that such activity isn't anywhere near normal. If someone is doing massive constant data writes, then yes they want an enterprise grade drive. I actually think mainstream PCs would do well to adopt U.3/U.2 form factors for such high end users. But I think most users don't really know what constitutes a large data write.

[ik9000]

Hah! Chance would be a fine thing, pal. Nah, not these days. More like insomnia. Or an early start. Don't remember, but my 'day' normally starts at 5am, though not usually with a computer. Not 'til, typically, at least 7am if not later.

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm struggling with bouts of insomnia myself atm. It sucks. You have my sympathies.

[Percy1983]

I suppose the discussion centers around the usual thing with storage as you get faster with less capacity or slower with more capacity.

For the same money you get a 12TB hard drive, 4TB fast SSD or 2Tb really fast SSD. The only real don't bother is sata SSDs unless you only have sata connections available.

[DanceswithUnix]

The only real don't bother is sata SSDs unless you only have sata connections available.

I did buy three 2TB SATA SSDs at work for a minimal raid 5 array. That's the only use I can think of them, given lack of PCIe lanes in a most PCs so you can't just bung in a PCIe 16 to quad NVMe in most machines.

[MrJim]

I did buy three 2TB SATA SSDs at work for a minimal raid 5 array. That's the only use I can think of them, given lack of PCIe lanes in a most PCs so you can't just bung in a PCIe 16 to quad NVMe in most machines.

For cost reasons, there are relatively few motherboards that have the switches & circuitry to support 2 16x8 PCIe slots, especially at PCIe5 speeds. Those that do tend to be right at the high-end too.

Incidentally, anyone interested in a good performing 2TB SSD might be interested in this - £121.71 seems like a fairly good deal (camel camel camel says it's the cheapest it's been in a long time).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-Plu...zcF9hdGY&psc=1

[Iota]

And I'm supposed to be able to determine which drive to buy based on spec sheets? Not a prayer.

Especially as there seems to be a lot of changing specs after the reviews come out....

price/MB

Price per GB perhaps?

Personally from my own perspective I wouldn't jump from a PCI-e 3.0 M.2 to a PCI-e 4.0 M.2 drive (5.0 would be a different story), I'd probably opt for the 3.0 in terms of price per GB and use that money saved somewhere else in the system like more RAM or a better GPU in this case (gaming PC).

[Saracen999]

Or even price/TB. I do remember the days of 20MB drives though. And yes, MB. My original 20MB Seagates, ST-120 rings a bell but it was harumph years ago. They weren't (obviously) SSDs, though. In fact, in those days, if you wanted to see tech like SSDs, you watched Star Trek.

...

Personally from my own perspective I wouldn't jump from a PCI-e 3.0 M.2 to a PCI-e 4.0 M.2 drive (5.0 would be a different story), ....

In my case, for this machine, 5.0 is pointless as the (laptop) mobo isn't, but I'm adding, into an empty 2nd slot, rather than replacing. If I did replace, it'd be about going 1TB to 4TB though, not the PCIe version involved (as long as not going backwards).

[Apex]

for pricing have a play about with

https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=hdssd&v...t=p&bl1_id=100

use the filters to narrow it down

I am due a upgrade at some point and right now am looking at a gen 3 drive thats TLC with dram; the price uplift to the gen 4 and gen 5 doesn't to me make sense right now.

direct storage might change that but thats for another day

[ik9000]

Especially as there seems to be a lot of changing specs after the reviews come out....



Price per GB perhaps?

Personally from my own perspective I wouldn't jump from a PCI-e 3.0 M.2 to a PCI-e 4.0 M.2 drive (5.0 would be a different story), I'd probably opt for the 3.0 in terms of price per GB and use that money saved somewhere else in the system like more RAM or a better GPU in this case (gaming PC).

oh the days when we all compared price per MB and a TB drive was the thing of wild fantasy or rich data centres.

Having recently swapped from pcie3 to pcie4 NVMe drives, don't bother. Waste of time. Marginal improvements in boot times, not really seen any discernible other difference in actual usage. I imagine if i sat with stop watches etc maybe I'd see it, but it's not like the days of going from HDD to SSD

[DanceswithUnix]

Personally from my own perspective I wouldn't jump from a PCI-e 3.0 M.2 to a PCI-e 4.0 M.2 drive (5.0 would be a different story), I'd probably opt for the 3.0 in terms of price per GB and use that money saved somewhere else in the system like more RAM or a better GPU in this case (gaming PC).

I think we are getting to the stage now that PCIe4 is mainstream and becoming best value. There isn't much price difference for example between a Crucial P3 on PCIe 3 and a PCIe 4 P3 Plus. They are both cheap QLC dramless designs, but one is tick-box compliant when comparing machine specs where it will say "PCIe 4 SSD"

[Saracen999]

oh the days when we all compared price per MB and a TB drive was the thing of wild fantasy or rich data centres.

Oh yeah. I remember upgrading from 2 x 40MB HDs to a "large" drive, an ESDI unit at a whopping £1500 for 338MB. I'm pretty sure TB drives didn't come close to existing, and at that cost for 338MB, I shudder to think what even a 1 GB would have been.

It's eye-opening to look back and think how far, and how fast, things have changed. Not just computers, but phones, cameras, printers and so on. I reviewed both the world's first mainstream consumer colour inkjet, and colour laser (both HP, IIRC). It wasn't that long ago, either.