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…

 

[Mercutio]

Amazon is doing a buy two, get one free sale on Silicon Power 4TB TLC 2.5" SSDs. I'm not sure if anyone needs 12TB of 500MB/sec storage but on the other hand, that's an absurd bargain for $360.

This post will be hilarious in about five years.

 

[ddrueding]

I am still keeping an eye out for a replacement of my archive cold storage 8x8TB Synology unit. The prices are getting close.

 

[Mercutio]

I actually can't believe prices on 8TB drives haven't fallen any more than they have. It seems silly that a refurb 8TB drive is $100 when I've found 16s for $140 in recent memory. At least your Synology unit probably does support SAS (mine does and mine is ancient) so you have the option of grabbing enterprise drives if you need.

 

[ddrueding]

Mine is also ancient (DS1812+), but I'll only replace it if I can go fully solid state for a very reasonable price. Probably still a couple years out.
In the meantime I pull it out, plug it in, and power it on whenever my wife wants to look at old home movies or whatever. A few times a year.

 

[Mercutio]

You CAN just plug a bunch of 7.6TB u.2 drives into the NAS you have right now. Just like how m.2 drives can be addressed as SATA drives (sometimes), so too can u.2s be addressed as plain old SAS. 7.6TB u.2s are fairly easy to find but in my experience they're going to be priced nearly the same as 15TB models and if my choice is $900 for one and $1100 for double the capacity, that's not much of a choice.

I'm surprised you'd have things like family photos offline in any way. That stuff should always be accessible, if only so it doesn't get lost when you aren't around to haul it out.

 

[ddrueding]

The irreplaceable stuff is in 3 places, offline here, offline at our storage unit (in another similar Synology) and in Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. The S3 is only in case the other two units fail in some way. The main reason the unit here is off most of the time is that my space is limited and the noise is unacceptable.