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

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With all this talk of prices going up on memory and solid state storage coming up (and seems to have already started), I'm glad I got my 1tb Sabrent nvme about a week ago before prices really started climbing. I paid I think $130 for it which was enough but still, could and will be worse.
 
Damn it. Just getting ready to build out the next box. Was there an event (or increased collusion) that is driving up these drive prices?
 
heelix said:
Damn it. Just getting ready to build out the next box. Was there an event (or increased collusion) that is driving up these drive prices?
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Samsung(?) chip plant had a power outage recently, not sure if that's exactly why but wouldn't surprise me
 
OFaceSIG said:
This is the craziest re-badge job I've ever seen. But according to the images this an 1TB E12 based drive for right now (1/15/20) for $120. PIONEER lol... yeah the folks that make head units and turntables.

https://smile.amazon.com/Pioneer-Internal-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B07P5QFRP2/ref=sr_1_17?keywords=intel+660p&qid=1579127062&refinements=p_n_feature_three_browse-bin:6797521011&rnid=6797515011&s=pc&sr=1-17
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Once upon a time Pioneer made a pretty wide variety of PC hardware and optical media drives. I'm still running a Pioneer Blu-ray drive in my workstation that's among the fastest I've benchmarked for ripping media. This is kinda neat to see; I just wonder how good a drive it is.
 
Halon said:
Once upon a time Pioneer made a pretty wide variety of PC hardware and optical media drives. I'm still running a Pioneer Blu-ray drive in my workstation that's among the fastest I've benchmarked for ripping media. This is kinda neat to see; I just wonder how good a drive it is.
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In theory this is just the same reference design with their sticker on it. No different than what sabrent and many others were doing. It has the same string of numbers along the top of the PCB like many of the reference PCBs do.
 
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horrorshow said:
Just a heads up, I slapped an EK NVMe heatsink on the 1TB and load temps dropped almost 20c..
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thesmokingman said:
What were your temps before? Im guessing your board doesn't have integrated heatsinks.
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Do these normally run pretty hot?

I stuck one in a laptop which as no heatsinks, but now its fans are at non-inaudible levels all the time. I wonder if it is compensating for heat released by this drive.
 
I suppose I should look at temps. The Asrock board mine is in didn't have heatsinks, but the HAF 932 has a 240mm fan pulling air in from the side.
I might give that Pioneer one a shot. we will see
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Do these normally run pretty hot?

I stuck one in a laptop which as no heatsinks, but now its fans are at non-inaudible levels all the time. I wonder if it is compensating for heat released by this drive.
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They can get toasty w/o a heatsink. If there is room, try a thinner heatsink. For ex. this Lenovo E595 would not fit a thick ek sink so I used the one below. Ideally you want the drive not to throttle.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07J1VKPSX/
 
Mine hit 72*c under use. Otherwise 23*c.

More stuff to get. It's a shame there isn't a waterblock for these.
 
thesmokingman said:
They can get toasty w/o a heatsink. If there is room, try a thinner heatsink. For ex. this Lenovo E595 would not fit a thick ek sink so I used the one below. Ideally you want the drive not to throttle.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07J1VKPSX/
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I really don't care much about throttling. This machine is used for Office, Email and Minitab.

I just want to slow down the fans. :p
 
DogsofJune said:
I used HWiNfo64, but CrystalDiskInfo shows temps too


It's a good thing I'm not using air to cool the TR. Thanks for the suggestion. I may actually go that route
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CrystalDiskInfo doesn't show the drive for me (for some reason) and I don't think I'll use HWinfo64 again as it likes to wreak havoc with my Corsair RGB stuff.
 
RE: Heat

These SSD drives can run very very warm to somewhere approaching hot by design. At one point I had the operating temp range for these chips and I remember the numbers were like 160F or something silly. Can they run hotter than the flames of hell? Probably not. When I've researched this, it was always an air-flow issue.

Sorry but I also think part of the problem is that people are over-reacting, finding a solution and then sharing that experience with people. Presto, you've just panicked everyone.

For example those Panasonic commercial 80mm fans that were all the rage 10 - 12 years ago. I'm not sure I really even needed them but damn, it felt good to know those loud motherfockers were cooling everything I pointed one at. I'm sure these heat-sinks have a very similar effect on people. Peace of mind as well probably reducing heat.

Imagine that you're a cave man and you're out one late morning hunting for small game and or forging for nuts and berries, plants, etc. Maybe you just wanted to go draw some graffiti on some rocks, who the hell knows ... and then one day you cross paths with a HUGE prehistoric Cave Bear standing at 11 foot tall. You run home, tell everyone what you saw and then, the whole village stays away from that part of the surrounding area. Presto, you've just panicked the whole village ( these forums ) ..... Only, it wasn't a HUGE Cave Bear, it was a much smaller bear making a lot of noise.

I've bought and used 3 of these drives personally and suggested, bought / supplied around 11 or 12 of these for clients and a few friends. 30% of them going into laptops. I've never had one issue whatsoever.

Of course these PC's and Laptop's are modern and properly ventilated.

Most of you don't have anything to worry about so you can relax.

I'm sure there are guys in here that have their PC's near vents in their room, stuffed under a small desk next to a bed or dresser, even a trash can can create a zone of warm air that's not ideal for a PC. Hell, even a small bedroom can create a warm climate zone depending on a few factors. I've even seen where case fans were never plugged in and they never thought to investigate, or became unplugged.

I'm not convinced at all this should be a serious consideration when purchasing this drive.
 
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SixFootDuo said:
I'm not convinced at all this should be a serious consideration when purchasing this drive.
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The drive (controller) will throttle around 70C. How long would you have to sustain writes to hit that? Approximately 100s of writing at a maximum (low queue depth) of 2100 MB/s - that's 210GB of writes. Perhaps more relevantly, what's the equilibrium write speed at this point? 1350 MB/s. Why is this relevant? Because the E12 drives only have, at most, 24GB of dynamic SLC cache, after which you drop to TLC speeds. Which at 1TB are around 1050 MB/s. Which means no amount of writes will throttle. (source: TechPowerUp)

Those poking around my source will point out that using a fan removed the throttling state. Great. Now go back one page. Sustained writes over 15 minutes: 1006 MB/s. Yep, just like I said.

Heatsinks should be considered for aesthetic purposes, not least because cooling the NAND when writing is bad (damages the cells). (source: pgs. 26-27, JEDEC) Are there exceptions? Absolutely - but a heatsink won't do any good without proper airflow, and proper airflow would almost always be sufficient.

Keep in mind that mixed, small I/O at queue depth can make a drive run hotter than even sequential writes. E.g. doing mass Windows updates, which may remain in SLC. In that case, yes, cooling a drive can improve performance, although personally none of my drives - and I run five NVMe in my main PC alone - have ever hit 70C. Then again when I use heatsinks on them, I cool only the controller if possible, and I always have good airflow.
 
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Maxx said:
Update the firmware. Although be aware, queue depth is a factor for sequentials.
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Updating the firmware has always seemed like a hack job on these, and potentially destructive. Are you sure it will actually make an appreciable difference?

For me it's the boot drive for my server, which only reboots quarterly, and I cannot afford any possibility of a fried drive. I can't image it provides enough of a benefit for me to bother, but perhaps it will for DogsofJune.
 
arnemetis said:
Updating the firmware has always seemed like a hack job on these, and potentially destructive. Are you sure it will actually make an appreciable difference?

For me it's the boot drive for my server, which only reboots quarterly, and I cannot afford any possibility of a fried drive. I can't image it provides enough of a benefit for me to bother, but perhaps it will for DogsofJune.
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It's definitely worth updating from ECFM11.0, he's on ECFM12.1 so it's less beneficial. Nevertheless might improve his sequentials a little if he cares that much. As stated, sequential performance at low queue depth is going to be much lower, not to mention TLC speeds on this drive are closer to 1000 MB/s anyway.

I think it's been covered in this thread that the firmware updates are non-destructive. I think the most current is 12.4 but I've only seen 12.3 in this thread (I believe). I don't think there's much to gain from 12.1 to 12.3. It's also possible to use generic drives for the storage controller on this drive - that's how you get the VLO utility to read the hardware - but it's not necessary from a performance standpoint.
 
What was the conclusion on the 512 gig versions? I picked one up so I could send off the WD Black that bellied up on me.
I guess we will see if it's worth the $70 for it.
 
horrorshow said:
Mine came with 12.6 (picked up at MC 2 weeks ago)
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Nice. The problem is locating one you can flash, unfortunately. Although I don't think there were any huge improvements past 12.1 (which was more consistent than the launch 11.x).
 
Started seeing some weird issues with my Rocket (firmware 12.3) I've had it since august with ZERO problems.
I was using it as cache, but I bothered to completely remove the cache from it, thinking it may have been primocache software, and download games to it directly and it was just... randomly stopping reading written files. Causing all sort of weird issues.

Since then I deleted the entire drive, reformatted it in 512e and i'm currently redownloading stuff to it for testing. It hasn't shown a single error in SMART, either with Hard Drive Sentinel, Sabrents own app, or anything, so I'm really wondering if the issue may have something to do with PCI-E 3 or something. I'm pretty sure this all started with a windows update.
 
I know I'm severely limiting the performance by running the Inland drive via a USB enclosure, but I have to say it is noticeably better than the SATA drive I was using via USB previously (MX100 I think?). Use it as a boot drive for my iMac. Might be the 4KT1 performance, but duplicating files, searching,or making a bunch of updates to small files, all of that is *flying* now
 
SixFootDuo said:
RE: Heat

These SSD drives can run very very warm to somewhere approaching hot by design. At one point I had the operating temp range for these chips and I remember the numbers were like 160F or something silly. Can they run hotter than the flames of hell? Probably not. When I've researched this, it was always an air-flow issue.

I'm not convinced at all this should be a serious consideration when purchasing this drive.
Click to expand...

Thank you. Malventano in his PcPer days did a mail bag chat specifically addressing this at one point. Every time I try to tell the same thing to people, they look at me like I have a horn. For 99% of home users, thermal throttling will never be an issue.
 
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