SSDs - State of the Product?

[Chewy509]

Hi all,
Just wondering what the current recommendations are for 1-2TB nvme ssds are these days. Need to replace the boot drive in my sons system due the current one starting to exhibit IO errors.
Currently has a Kingston KC2500 1TB which has been fine until a month ago, where the recoverable media errors jumped from less than 100 to more than 447K according to the SMART data. The Kingston diagnostic software says the drive if fine, but windows is also showing IO errors in the event log and its had to run chkdsk a few times on boot as well, so I’m going to replace it irrespectively of what the Kingston software says.
The motherboard is an Asus TUF Gaming B560M plus Wifi (for Intel 11th gen), so limited to PCIe 4.0 on the first nvme slot. The slot has its own heat sink, so a drive without a heat sink is preferred.

 

[Chewy509]

— remove dup post —

 

[sedrosken]

Something not super-ultra-high-end but with TLC NAND and a decent DRAM cache is what you're looking for. Last month the MSI Spatium M470 and M480 were pretty good buys, not sure if they still are, I think I paid $115 for a 2TB M470 on Newegg? Granted, the machine I put mine in doesn't have PCIe 4.0 or 5.0, it went in an Intel 10th gen laptop, so maybe take my recommendation with a grain of salt. Both models should be using a Phison controller, though the NAND seems to differ on source by batch, I don't think I ever saw anything from a no-name in there. I think mine uses Micron chips.

 

[Mercutio]

There's a giant "it depends" that's based on your expected workload. Do you need fast burst transfers or sustained IOPs?
I bought 4x Acer GM7000 2TB drives for $115/drive yesterday. They're somewhat above average in terms of performance but at the price, I couldn't find anything better. The Samsung 990 Pro and (shudder) WD SN850 Black are supposed to be two of the best general purpose NVMe drives on the market, while the Seagate Firecuda 530 is everyone's favorite workstation drive.

I use a lot of Crucial P3s for low-cost client builds where no-names like Silicon Power and TeamGroup also live and I'm aware that my Micron 7450 drives are objectively better-performing than the Intel models I have in most of my servers, but since I'm trying to get high capacity u.2 drives as cheap as possible, it's really a case where beggars can't be choosers for me.

 

[Chewy509]

Thanks, sorry forgot to mention it’s mostly for gaming until next year when he is off to university, then it’ll be gaming, some more gaming and then maybe some word, excel stuff for his studies.
Was looking at the Crucial T500, as its only a few dollars more than the Crucial P3 plus and Crucial P310 series, but comes with higher performance and a higher write endurance. (The P3+ is AU$180, and the T500 is AU$205 for the 2TB models).
The WD 2TB Black is AU$430 and the Samsung 990pro is AU$305 and the Seagate FireCuda 530R is AU$249…