HOT ! Various 1TB NVMe with coveted E12 Controller $135 aprox retail

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Please do provide an update. I don’t know that I need a blazing fast drive in the NUC but the Inland is about $10 cheaper for what appears to be a superior SSD but curious/concerned about heat in the “K” (short) version of the NUC.
I didnt realise my Sabrent drive comes with a heat plate that covers every chip.
The 1TB is a single sided drive, there are no chips on the underside.
This cooling plate will do 2 things, get the NAND warm quickly using heat from the E12 controller, and give slightly better cooling to the E12 as well.
I'll find out later how well it performs, it is sat on my table ready to be fitted, and how small it is!
 
I didnt realise my Sabrent drive comes with a heat plate that covers every chip.
The 1TB is a single sided drive, there are no chips on the underside.
This cooling plate will do 2 things, get the NAND warm quickly using heat from the E12 controller, and give slightly better cooling to the E12 as well.
I'll find out later how well it performs, it is sat on my table ready to be fitted, and how small it is!

Alright, I'm thoroughly confused. You say that the Sabrent is single-sided? I thought that all of these 1TB E12 drives were double-sided (which would make sense if they are all using the same hardware and firmware, just branded differently).

Is this the exact one that you have?

Curious as I'm seriously thinking about replacing the 512GB Toshiba NVMe in my Precision 5510 and I'm not sure if a double sided drive can fit. If it can't, that will limit my choices. Thankfully there are single-sided SSDs using other controllers that have similar speeds to the E12 drives, but they are a little more expensive.

And are you sure that's a heatspreader on it? There was some debate earlier in this thread about that; some said that it was merely a sticker. Others thought that it was supposed to contain wires for heat transfer but I think one guy peeled it off and found no evidence of that. One person did say that the Sabrent ran 10-15 degrees cooler than the Inland, but there's not much data for the other drives as most seem to have gone with the Inland due to its slightly lower price.
 
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Plus microcenter taxes, no thanks. I will wait for BlackFriday deals for ssd.


$99 is basically a Black Friday price for this drive in my eyes. Will be see a 1tb NVMe with this level of performance for under $99 .... I seriously seriously doubt it. But would love to be proved wrong.
 
$99 is basically a Black Friday price for this drive in my eyes. Will be see a 1tb NVMe with this level of performance for under $99 .... I seriously seriously doubt it. But would love to be proved wrong.
Price is good, its just additional taxes which kills the deal.
 
Alright, I'm thoroughly confused. You say that the Sabrent is single-sided? I thought that all of these 1TB E12 drives were double-sided (which would make sense if they are all using the same hardware and firmware, just branded differently).

Is this the exact one that you have?

Curious as I'm seriously thinking about replacing the 512GB Toshiba NVMe in my Precision 5510 and I'm not sure if a double sided drive can fit. If it can't, that will limit my choices. Thankfully there are single-sided SSDs using other controllers that have similar speeds to the E12 drives, but they are a little more expensive.

And are you sure that's a heatspreader on it? There was some debate earlier in this thread about that; some said that it was merely a sticker. Others thought that it was supposed to contain wires for heat transfer but I think one guy peeled it off and found no evidence of that. One person did say that the Sabrent ran 10-15 degrees cooler than the Inland, but there's not much data for the other drives as most seem to have gone with the Inland due to its slightly lower price.
Yes that looks exactly like the drive I have.
There are no chips on the underside which seems reasonable as the 2TB version would populate it.

You raise a fair point about the heat spreader, it might be a sticker.
Unfortunately I cant check, access is extremely limited and I havent found my motherboard box yet to get the mounting screw so it is held in place with a light mass!
(my mobo is horizontal)


Performance:
With room ambient 21C (case ambient 25C) my drive idles at 27 to 28C.
Under a standard test of Crystal Diskmark it peaked at 48C during the Seq Q32T1 read/write and 4K Q8T8 write tests.
Copying over 250GB of data from a hard drive at 150MB/s it mostly stayed at 28C but for a few seconds went up to 35C, and occasionally to 31C.
It handles normal work loads with ease.

I use Windows 7 btw and the performance isnt any less than others report.
Compared to a Samsung 840 Pro SSD boot drive and games storage:
Windows is definitely snappier, boot is faster by around 33%. 18 seconds to the desktop.
Some of this could be down to zero fragmentation with the new copy. (it does make some difference)
All games are quicker to load. They were not fragmented before the copy.
I would say they load twice as quickly and in some cases even faster. ie BF5, Greedfall ...

To sum up, I am very impressed with this drive.

The only downside is the inability of most drive monitoring software to see the drive under Windows 7, its as if the drive didnt exist.
Even the Sabrent SSC tool that changes from 4K to 512e sector size didnt see the drive in Windows 7. I had to boot my Windows 10 drive to change it.
Then the OS and system files were easily cloned in Windows 7 using the free version of Macrium Reflect.
To monitor it I am using Hard Drive Sentinel free trial. This only lets me monitor temp though. It defaults at 10 seconds update, I changed it to 1 second.
The SMART tab shows nothing other than temp monitoring tick boxes.
fyi
 
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Hi - what's the issue with updating the firmware for this drive (inland) ? Is there a fix or enhancement? I'm tracing back but there's 34 pages now..
 
Just got my Inland 2TB in the mail today. It was already at 512e sector size instead of 4K (might have been when I formatted it). and the firmware was 22.4.
 
I'm pretty sure that it was XP that didn't differentiate between HDs and SSDs and would do things that would reduce the lifespan (run defrags and various other mass background writes). IIRC this was fixed in 7. 10 is fine; you won't need to do anything special for it.

Where did you get that?
My boot drive is a 6.5 yr old 840 Pro with almost 55,000 hrs on the clock.

Perhaps you are talking about early drive controllers that didnt run trim automatically.

Most of my research I admit is very old. When SSDs hit the scene I was interested in getting one but never did. I was reading about failure rates and felt these were high maintenance drives and at the time was fine with spinning disks. Now with games starting to load up slower on disk I felt it was time to grab an SSD for my main Windows drive and toss a game or two on it for fast loading times. However in the back of my mind I still had those myths lingering around and felt that maybe they were still issues that may need some attention to better optimize the drive I just bought.
 
Most of my research I admit is very old.

To update:

You just toss an OS on them and go.

The only time you'd worry about an SSD, practically speaking, is if you're hammering it with some other workload, i.e. large production databases, heavy video editing, heavy write-bound loads, etc.
 
Most of my research I admit is very old. When SSDs hit the scene I was interested in getting one but never did. I was reading about failure rates and felt these were high maintenance drives and at the time was fine with spinning disks. Now with games starting to load up slower on disk I felt it was time to grab an SSD for my main Windows drive and toss a game or two on it for fast loading times. However in the back of my mind I still had those myths lingering around and felt that maybe they were still issues that may need some attention to better optimize the drive I just bought.
Just get one, they are the single biggest thing to happen to computing since electricity.
 
To update:

You just toss an OS on them and go.

The only time you'd worry about an SSD, practically speaking, is if you're hammering it with some other workload, i.e. large production databases, heavy video editing, heavy write-bound loads, etc.

If you're an average user the SSD will probably last 8-9 years. You'll likely upgrade a few times before then.
 
There is no more significant improvement to the speed and feel of a PC when going from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD. Once you use a system with an SSD you will curse any older machine that still uses an old spinner.

The new breed of SSD is fast but even an older SSD still feels significantly faster than any HDD.
 
There is no more significant improvement to the speed and feel of a PC when going from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD. Once you use a system with an SSD you will curse any older machine that still uses an old spinner.

The new breed of SSD is fast but even an older SSD still feels significantly faster than any HDD.
Yeah, computers with HDDs are physically painful to use after experiencing SSDs.
 
Yes that looks exactly like the drive I have.
There are no chips on the underside which seems reasonable as the 2TB version would populate it.

You raise a fair point about the heat spreader, it might be a sticker.
Unfortunately I cant check, access is extremely limited and I havent found my motherboard box yet to get the mounting screw so it is held in place with a light mass!
(my mobo is horizontal)


Performance:
With room ambient 21C (case ambient 25C) my drive idles at 27 to 28C.
Under a standard test of Crystal Diskmark it peaked at 48C during the Seq Q32T1 read/write and 4K Q8T8 write tests.
Copying over 250GB of data from a hard drive at 150MB/s it mostly stayed at 28C but for a few seconds went up to 35C, and occasionally to 31C.
It handles normal work loads with ease.

I use Windows 7 btw and the performance isnt any less than others report.
Compared to a Samsung 840 Pro SSD boot drive and games storage:
Windows is definitely snappier, boot is faster by around 33%. 18 seconds to the desktop.
Some of this could be down to zero fragmentation with the new copy. (it does make some difference)
All games are quicker to load. They were not fragmented before the copy.
I would say they load twice as quickly and in some cases even faster. ie BF5, Greedfall ...

To sum up, I am very impressed with this drive.

The only downside is the inability of most drive monitoring software to see the drive under Windows 7, its as if the drive didnt exist.
Even the Sabrent SSC tool that changes from 4K to 512e sector size didnt see the drive in Windows 7. I had to boot my Windows 10 drive to change it.
Then the OS and system files were easily cloned in Windows 7 using the free version of Macrium Reflect.
To monitor it I am using Hard Drive Sentinel free trial. This only lets me monitor temp though. It defaults at 10 seconds update, I changed it to 1 second.
The SMART tab shows nothing other than temp monitoring tick boxes.
fyi

Thanks, Nenu. Good information.

I am still puzzled because I went back through nearly all 34 pages of this thread to prove to myself that I wasn't crazy and sure enough, there are several posts stating that the 256GB/512GB E12 drives are single-sided while the 1 & 2 TB versions use a double-sided configuration. I believe you when you say that yours is single-sided; after all, you are in possession of it and I'm sure that you looked at it when installing it, lol. But I would like to get to the bottom of it before purchasing. I was under the impression that these were all basically the same drives with different brand names on them. If that's not the case, it makes it that much harder for those of us who might specifically need a single-sided drive for mobile devices.

I even checked a couple of other sites just to see if there might be different variants out in the wild. It looks like our very own Maxx from this thread also posted about this drive over on reddit and got some feedback there:

upload_2019-10-26_16-57-31.png

So you can understand why this is perplexing to buyers looking for a single-sided drive!

Thankfully I'm not in a rush to upgrade the NVMe drives in my laptop or my desktop as they're both "fast enough" for now but as you can see, the Toshiba that came in my Precision could use a bit of improvement:

ToshibaCrystalDiskMark.JPG


Am currently running a 512GB 950 Pro in my desktop but will likely wait until I do another build to replace that one. It's fast enough that I don't want to bother with pulling it and imaging when it's not even 1/2 full. The bulk of my data resides on 2 x 2TB SATA SSDs.
 
Just get one, they are the single biggest thing to happen to computing since electricity.

Oh I got the 512GB version of the Inland NVME and I love it. Its takes my setup under 20 seconds to get into Windows and GTA V and Assassin's Creed Unity load up so fast.
 
There is no more significant improvement to the speed and feel of a PC when going from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD. Once you use a system with an SSD you will curse any older machine that still uses an old spinner.

The new breed of SSD is fast but even an older SSD still feels significantly faster than any HDD.

An upgrade from a sata ssd to nvme is a big difference as well. There are easily two big leaps in performance that is noticable, sata spindle to sata ssd to nvme. Each one has a noticeable difference. But you are right that going from spinning hard drive to any ssd is by far the single most incredible upgrade one can do to a computer.

Everytime I am in microcenter I see someone about to buy a hard drive and occasionally I ask them what they are using it for and many of them say to upgrade their computer and I urge them to buy a sata ssd instead and most of them do. I would recommend nvme but almost all mainstream PC users have no idea what nvme is, how to install it, and almost NONE of their computers have nvme interfaces on board.
 
Kinda off topic -

Anyone else notice the Adata XPG 8200 Pro 2TB price on Amazon shot up to $320 (from ~$270)? And the HP EX 950 2TB is seemingly starting to disappear (only 3rd party sellers)?? I've been putting off upgrading to an M.2 drive...got me thinking it's time to pull the trigger. The Inland is a heck of a deal at $225, even the Sabrent Rocket 2TB at $250; but the disk cloning headache has me balking.

Wondering if the Silicon Motion drives are just getting to EOL w/ the all the PCIe 4.0 stuff coming out, or are we nearing the bottom of the RAM/SSD price drop?
 
Kinda off topic -

Anyone else notice the Adata XPG 8200 Pro 2TB price on Amazon shot up to $320 (from ~$270)? And the HP EX 950 2TB is seemingly starting to disappear (only 3rd party sellers)?? I've been putting off upgrading to an M.2 drive...got me thinking it's time to pull the trigger. The Inland is a heck of a deal at $225, even the Sabrent Rocket 2TB at $250; but the disk cloning headache has me balking.

Wondering if the Silicon Motion drives are just getting to EOL w/ the all the PCIe 4.0 stuff coming out, or are we nearing the bottom of the RAM/SSD price drop?

I just cloned my old Samsung to the Inland drive without issue. No headache at all.
 
Kinda off topic -

Anyone else notice the Adata XPG 8200 Pro 2TB price on Amazon shot up to $320 (from ~$270)? And the HP EX 950 2TB is seemingly starting to disappear (only 3rd party sellers)?? I've been putting off upgrading to an M.2 drive...got me thinking it's time to pull the trigger. The Inland is a heck of a deal at $225, even the Sabrent Rocket 2TB at $250; but the disk cloning headache has me balking.

Wondering if the Silicon Motion drives are just getting to EOL w/ the all the PCIe 4.0 stuff coming out, or are we nearing the bottom of the RAM/SSD price drop?
I used the SSC tool on Sabrents downloads to convert my 1TB to 512e, cloned my OS, works like a dream.
 
Would adding a heat sink to the SSD be a good idea? I just got an RX580 and it runs a lot hotter at idle than when my old 7850 was installed. The RX580 has some weird "fan stopped" mode that I'm not in love with and it heats up my SSD from 29C to 40C at idle with the RX580 installed.
 
This could be a "black friday" pricing tatic ... which is often seen. Raise the price then drop the price for Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
 
This could be a "black friday" pricing tatic ... which is often seen. Raise the price then drop the price for Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

Microcenter tends to jump around with prices frequently. I would expect that the Black Friday pricing would be at or under the $99 but it may be tied to a bundle like they do with a motherboard/cpu combo.

They have run $5 or $10 off Samsung SSD’s in the past when you bought one with a motherboard.
 
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Must have been a temporary price hike as it's showing $99.99 again for me today. It's $110.99 on Amazon, which is about the same price as Micro Center if you're not local to one and have to pay tax + shipping from their online store.

At any rate, there's absolutely no need to despair if you do miss the $99 price. Pricewise, it's within spitting distance of other E12 drives that are actually slightly faster, at least on paper. IDK how noticeable the difference would be (probably not very) but here's a quick comparison of some of the top E12 drives:

upload_2019-10-29_11-41-18.png


Maxx's comprehensive spreadsheet is awesome, but I'm putting together my own to narrow down my choices between the E12 drives, SM2262EN drives, and the (obviously higher priced) Samsungs that I may have to use in my Precision 5510. But I'll almost assuredly go for one of these when it's time to upgrade my desktop from this trusty 950 Pro.
 
In case it helps someone, these are my figures for the Sabrent Rocket 1TB with Windows 7.
It is also a 3480MB/s drive.

1TB Sabrent CrystalDiskMark.jpg
 
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I have a local microcenter near me, but this or the sabrent rocket on amazon?

Or the Inland sold by Microcenter ON Amazon. I was too lazy to drive 10 minutes to MC, plus the one near me was OOS on the 1TB, so Amazon 1-day delivery it was. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RCM6DXK/

As for the Sabrent, there's a review on Amazon claiming Sabrent pulled a switchout on the components in September - anyone remember the Kingston V100 scandal? Release the drive to glowing reviews, then quietly switch to inferior components later on to boost margins. Link to review, FWIW.
 
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Thanks, Nenu. Good information.

I am still puzzled because I went back through nearly all 34 pages of this thread to prove to myself that I wasn't crazy and sure enough, there are several posts stating that the 256GB/512GB E12 drives are single-sided while the 1 & 2 TB versions use a double-sided configuration.

It appears Phison has an E12S controller which in its reference state has four rather than two NAND packages per side (also possibly 96-layer NAND). Makes it easier to be single-sided at 1TB. These drives may also now have less (1/2) the DRAM. I'm still investigating but I have at least two examples so far from Inland and Sabrent. (this is NewMaxx, FYI)

Examples here (Inland 2TB, double-sided, 512MB on top which means 1GB or 1/2 normal total) and here (Sabrent 1TB, single-sided, 512MB on top which means 1/2 normal). The E12S seems to be just a smaller E12 although Phison claimed no change in process nodes until next year with their 4.0 controllers. Specs remain the same. The move to four NAND packages and less DRAM is a cost-saving change.
 
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It appears Phison has an E12S controller which in its reference state has four rather than two NAND packages per side (also possibly 96-layer NAND). Makes it easier to be single-sided at 1TB. These drives may also now have less (1/2) the DRAM. I'm still investigating but I have at least two examples so far from Inland and Sabrent. (this is NewMaxx, FYI)

Examples here (Inland 2TB, double-sided, 512MB on top which means 1GB or 1/2 normal total) and here (Sabrent 1TB, single-sided, 512MB on top which means 1/2 normal). The E12S seems to be just a smaller E12 although Phison claimed no change in process nodes until next year with their 4.0 controllers. Specs remain the same. The move to four NAND packages and less DRAM is a cost-saving change.

Thanks for investigating this, but wow, they had better not.
I was so careful the drive I selected had 1GB cache, not 512MB.
ffs.
 
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Thanks for investigating this, but wow, they had better not.
I was so careful the drive I selected had 1GB cache, not 512MB.
ffs.

A lot of people are reporting the drives are "30-50% slower" but I dispute this finding. The E12S has the same specs as the E12, the NAND is the same or superior (96L), but there is less DRAM (which would only impact heavy workloads/benchmarks). I suspect there might be a change in the SLC cache design that might result in poor sequential performance in benchmarks but I have no evidence/proof of this yet. As an example, compare the SN750 to the SX8200 Pro: the SN750's small, static SLC cache runs out rapidly and drops to 1500 MB/s almost immediately while the SX8200 Pro's large, dynamic SLC cache remains twice as fast for quite a while. This does not mean the SN750 is inferior whatsoever, just a design decision, so my theory so far is that the new drives might forego SLC for some reason. Still investigating.
 
A lot of people are reporting the drives are "30-50% slower" but I dispute this finding. The E12S has the same specs as the E12, the NAND is the same or superior (96L), but there is less DRAM (which would only impact heavy workloads/benchmarks). I suspect there might be a change in the SLC cache design that might result in poor sequential performance in benchmarks but I have no evidence/proof of this yet. As an example, compare the SN750 to the SX8200 Pro: the SN750's small, static SLC cache runs out rapidly and drops to 1500 MB/s almost immediately while the SX8200 Pro's large, dynamic SLC cache remains twice as fast for quite a while. This does not mean the SN750 is inferior whatsoever, just a design decision, so my theory so far is that the new drives might forego SLC for some reason. Still investigating.
If mine is a 512MB cache drive I would dispute it for general use as well.
I also didnt notice a slowdown copying my games onto this drive, which I would have expected.

It is approximately twice as fast as my old 840 Pro for game load times, it surprised me.
Windows load time is around 33% faster, from when the OS load starts to when the desktop appears.
The 840 Pro had been defragged about a month earlier which made it a lot snappier, there was little wrong and it benchmarked well.
I have the CrystalDiskMark figures if you are interested.

My issue is what I would repurpose this drive as once I have finished with it.

Perhaps I should copy a large file say 50GB and let you know the time windows reports it has finished?
I realise Windows also caches the copy so there will be a small error but with such a large file it should only be a few % out.
(I am on Windows 7)
Let me know.
...
Although thinking about it, a smaller file size copy time will let us differentiate between the 512MB and 1GB SLC cache sizes better, barring the windows cache error.
Can you suggest a tool to do the copy that will show when the transfer rate drops?
 
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If mine is a 512MB cache drive I would dispute it for general use as well.
I also didnt notice a slowdown copying my games onto this drive, which I would have expected.

It is approximately twice as fast as my old 840 Pro for game load times, it surprised me.
Windows load time is around 33% faster, from when the OS load starts to when the desktop appears.
The 840 Pro had been defragged about a month earlier which made it a lot snappier, there was little wrong and it benchmarked well.
I have the CrystalDiskMark figures if you are interested.

My issue is what I would repurpose this drive as once I have finished with it.

Perhaps I should copy a large file say 50GB and let you know the time windows reports it has finished?
I realise Windows also caches the copy so there will be a small error but with such a large file it should only be a few % out.
(I am on Windows 7)
Let me know.

The Intel 660p only has 256MB of DRAM even on its 2TB SKU. It makes no difference on that drive. Of course, that's a four-channel controller with QLC, but the point stands: you're only going to exceed 512MB of DRAM cache if you're really hitting the drive hard. The reason this concerns me, though, is that one area the E12 has over the SM2262/EN drives is such workloads (being a "budget 970 EVO" of sorts); by halving the RAM, that pushes the drives instead firmly in the "desktop performance" (everyday NVMe) category instead. Which is fine since it's priced and has been priced that way for a while now, but nevertheless worth noting.

Since people are calling it slower it must be the SLC cache design. Honestly, it's possible the flash is 96-layer (not 64-layer) which if anything would be a bit faster. The easiest way to test SLC would be a prolonged/sustained, sequential write, at speed. That last part is crucial, a file copy would have to come from another NVMe drive that can read fast enough.

Benchmarks are more squirrelly. If you see my recent Reddit post on the Addlink S22 review, the reviewer clearly overestimates the ability of the drive to cache, likely because he is not benchmarking properly. The old tool HDTach might work (worth a shot). HDTune only works if it uses specific settings but also worth checking. The normal E12 drives have only a 30GB dynamic SLC cache, quite small by consumer standards, so if there's a noticeable drop it must be static-only (which has to be in the overprovisioned/reserved space, and thus would be 12GB at most and probably smaller). This would actually give the drive more consistent performance, which would have two benefits - one, less hard on the controller (if it has changed at all) and two, less demanding on the DRAM.
 
Benchmarks are more squirrelly. If you see my recent Reddit post on the Addlink S22 review, the reviewer clearly overestimates the ability of the drive to cache, likely because he is not benchmarking properly. The old tool HDTach might work (worth a shot). HDTune only works if it uses specific settings but also worth checking. The normal E12 drives have only a 30GB dynamic SLC cache, quite small by consumer standards, so if there's a noticeable drop it must be static-only (which has to be in the overprovisioned/reserved space, and thus would be 12GB at most and probably smaller). This would actually give the drive more consistent performance, which would have two benefits - one, less hard on the controller (if it has changed at all) and two, less demanding on the DRAM.

Perhaps copy to/from the same drive?

I have version 3.040 of HDTach which at best uses 32MB zones and seems to max at 2GB/s, is this useful?
I dont have HDtune Pro, is the free version useful?
 
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