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

[Iota]

It wasn't that long ago, either.

Time probably seems different as we get older due to more experience....

I do however miss my old WD Raptor drives, which was also my first foray into running a Raid setup....

[Saracen999]

Time probably seems different as we get older due to more experience....

I do however miss my old WD Raptor drives, which was also my first foray into running a Raid setup....

I don't miss the noise, though.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

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.



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.

My concern is also the consoles refreshes which we might see in the next year or so too. Things might change very quickly like we are starting to see that 8GB of VRAM is starting to become an issue with newer titles. The evidence is also the console ports needing to allocate far more than 16GB of VRAM in many instances. But the consoles only really can use 10GB(just look at the segmented setup of the XBox Series X),so something is not adding up here. One port was trying to mirror the whole unified RAM into VRAM,but it was only one of them.

Plus lots of those PC test systems have 32GB~64GB of high speed DDR5,and it's not helping. The OP might be keeping their build for over 5 years.

Plus are you really trying to say the only choice is DRAMless QLC drives or an enterprise drive? If that was the case then no TLC drives or TLC drives with DRAM would be sold to consumers.One of my mates has a load of different SSDs,including QLC ones,TLC ones,etc. They do astro work,so seem to like mucking around with SSDs.

But the glut of NAND and DRAM is so much even TLC is being sold for QLC level pricing. Its why I would be taking this chance now - soon TLC pricing will rise again.

I even saw a Netac NV7000 2TB for under £90(has NAND flash). Even yesterday you could get a Kingston KC3000 2TB for under £120:
https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/kin...s-ebay-4134202

That is at the top tier of PCI-E 4.0 drives AFAIK.

The OP's last build was over 10 years ago,so like me probably keeps stuff for years. Its why I always try and get something better(within reasonable levels). Just like a £80 motherboard might be fine,doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to spend more on a better motherboard,which has more options. Or why I paid more for CMR HDDs over SMR ones(but not much more as I shopped around).

The OP was looking at 2TB drives too and the difference is not that high anymore. It's not like a 2TB QLC drive is £200 cheaper than a higher end 2TB TLC drive.

Also as I mentioned before,there is nothing stopping the OP getting one faster 2TB drive and a slower 4TB drive for secondary storage.

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

The version with the slimmer heatsink is £130:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09Q2NCFS7

[DanceswithUnix]

They do astro work,so seem to like mucking around with SSDs.

That's nice, but the OP didn't mention astro work

But the thing with consoles is simply that there is stuff on SSD that at some point needs to be in VRAM. You wouldn't use an SSD as VRAM swap, I really can't see how that makes any sense. There is stuff that is calculated on the GPU like lighting and shadows, and that's used for the current frame so there isn't time to write it out onto even the fastest SSD and then read it back again. But if you need some space, you should be able to throw away some texture or model data that isn't in active use because you can read it back quickly (that's just a read, not a write then a read, so at least twice as fast).

My point is simply that QLC drives shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Go look at some old SSD reviews. Here's one for an MLC drive so should be faster than TLC right? The 1TB model can't quite keep up with SATA write speeds, and has a TBW rating of just 320TB. Why? Because technology moves on, MLC got better, TLC got better, and now QLC is getting better.

https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/stora...l-mx200-500gb/

So yes, 2TB TLC is probably worth the extra cost over a 2TB QLC, but we were throwing in a 4TB QLC drive and for me having twice the capacity is what I would want for machine longevity.

[Iota]

I would be interested to see what sort of write load people have on here.

Fairly negligible in reality, this is the OS Drive on the PC I play games on (excuse format it's direct from SMART);

Model Name, Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB
Drive Type, NVMe
Result,Byte End,Byte Start,Description,Raw Data,Status
,47,32,Data Units Read,74672430,OK
,63,48,Data Units Written,91629034,OK
,79,64,Host Read Commands,759052693,OK
,95,80,Host Write Commands,733119268,OK
,111,96,Controller Busy Time,2015,OK
,127,112,Power Cycles,3275,OK
,143,128,Power On Hours,4872,OK

I added another later on purely for Steam games;

Model Name, Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB
Drive Type, NVMe
Result,Byte End,Byte Start,Description,Raw Data,Status
,47,32,Data Units Read,52819558,OK
,63,48,Data Units Written,29035454,OK
,79,64,Host Read Commands,233588237,OK
,95,80,Host Write Commands,55278597,OK
,111,96,Controller Busy Time,477,OK
,127,112,Power Cycles,1928,OK
,143,128,Power On Hours,3864,OK

I've always found that even with a long time between upgrades, that drives tend to cope with the data written to them. My OS drive has 47TB of data written over what, 3-4 years? My Steam library also isn't a concern as I have 3 2TB NVMe drives in this PC (I got fed up with downloading games again after having to free up space). That's just my use case for this PC though, TBW is useful I guess as some kind of indicator as to the longevity of the drive, even that isn't quite so clear cut though.