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

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Nice! Guess this makes the nVME heat sink I bought pointless

I don't know for sure as i'm not going to remove it, but the Sabrent has stickers on both sides of the drive connecting all the chips which i've read have copper lines underneath to act as a little heatsink, like the samsungs do. Right out of the box it ran 10-15c cooler then the Inland, i got a little 40mm fan and pointed it at the drive and now it's an extra 20c or so cooler when under full load. Very happy with the $125 price tag, i sold my Samsung 500g 970 evo for $120 few weeks ago, excellent $5 upgrade.
 
Also got the Sabrent Rocket 1 TB via that Store4PC / Amazon deal, comes in a plain dark box with a plastic tray and no anti-static wrapping. Comes with an instruction booklet that tells you to set the PCIe boot option in your BIOS and use it with Windows 8.1 or 10.

I didn't see any wires on the white sticker on the bottom, IMHO that sticker is solely for identification purposes.

The black and blue sticker on top doesn't look like it has any wires running through it either, its thin enough that I can see the other side if I hold it up to a bright light, it looks literally like just a plastic sticker with no special properties. Removing it claims to void your warranty though..

Will hook it up to my testing rig tomorrow to see what version firmware it has.
 
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Sabrent Rocket came with what looks like a Sabrent branded version of the 12.2 firmware. No need to update.
 
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What are you guys paying for these? Just curious.

Paid $125 for mine, shipped, the deal was actually by Store4PC through Amazon. If I recall correctly it was also a sale on their Thunderbolt 3 drives as well.

Probably a good idea to keep a look out, some vendor is bound to put these Phison E12 based SSDs on sale again.

BTW the Sabrent clocked almost exactly the same as the Inland, Toshiba seems to be cranking out that 3D NAND like there's no tomorrow.
 
I ended up removing my Inland and replacing it with a 970 Evo Plus. My UEFI just didn't like the Inland for some reason. Drive boots fine from a cold start, fails to boot upon restart. ASRock support told me to buy a drive from their compatibility list. For those with an ASRock Phantom ITX, be aware that reboot wise, the Inland doesn't work. Maybe a future UEFI update will fix it? Who knows.
 
I ended up removing my Inland and replacing it with a 970 Evo Plus. My UEFI just didn't like the Inland for some reason. Drive boots fine from a cold start, fails to boot upon restart. ASRock support told me to buy a drive from their compatibility list. For those with an ASRock Phantom ITX, be aware that reboot wise, the Inland doesn't work. Maybe a future UEFI update will fix it? Who knows.

That's... unique?

Shouldn't be possible, but replacing the drive is likely both the easiest and cheapest solution. Posting because nearly all of my boards are ASRock (will no one else put 10Gbase-T on consumer boards?).
 
I think there are some motherboard compatibility issues with these, and likely other NVMe drives. I posted back on #303 about slow 4k speeds when I imaged my OS drive (a Samsung 950 EVO SATA). After a couple days Windows apps wouldn't open so I switched back to the Samsung and reformatted the Inland to use as a data drive. After I did that the 4k speeds looked like the others reported on here. Then, tried a fresh Windows install on the Inland and the 4k speeds worked slower but still a lot better than the original image install. By the way, when I first got my Asrock X370 Taichi I tried using an OEM Samsung SM961 and it just wouldn't boot off that at all. It essentially disappeared. I didn't have any other system to verify if it was defective, so whether it was a compatibility thing or just a bad drive, I can't say for certain. But the speed thing for this Inland has me somewhat baffled. Here are the three tests I ran:

Inland Pro NVMe.JPG


Windows 10 Imaged from Samsung SATA

Inland NVMe Data.JPG


Reformatted as a data drive

Inland Win 10 Install.JPG


Fresh Windows 10 install
 
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For those of you that own this NVMe can you tell the difference between a SATA version? I know there's a lot of benchmarks in this thread but in real life when you're opening up a program can you tell a difference? I know that NVMe and SATA SSDs are much faster than rust HDDs but not so sure if you can actually tell a difference between the two SSDs.
 
For those of you that own this NVMe can you tell the difference between a SATA version? I know there's a lot of benchmarks in this thread but in real life when you're opening up a program can you tell a difference? I know that NVMe and SATA SSDs are much faster than rust HDDs but not so sure if you can actually tell a difference between the two SSDs.

Only times I notice a diff is installing windows/programs/games and load times in games.

Pubg I load into game in about 3-4 sec, takes my wife 20+ on a 860 evo sata drive.
 
Only times I notice a diff is installing windows/programs/games and load times in games.

Pubg I load into game in about 3-4 sec, takes my wife 20+ on a 860 evo sata drive.

Well I tun this on my 2950x. And I run a Kingston dc400 on my 2600x.

The dc400 sata is an enterprise drive that is fast as hell. But the inland just seems so much snappier.

Games load faster and I get faster response throughout windows. I mean sata is still fast at 6gbps but these new nvme drives are pushing 30+gbps and have much much higher iops in the performance arena.

The queue depth 8 reads and writes are insanely fast on these too.
 
I'm surprised to see reports of noticing a difference- I sure didn't with a WD Black NVMe drive, but that was the first version and significantly slower than this.

Of course, I'd have a hard time using one for games and OS if I didn't get a 2TB one... :D
 
yeah i thought the consensus was that Nvme doesn't seem any faster than sata SSD for normal usage (games) but is nice for booting/large files.
 
yeah i thought the consensus was that Nvme doesn't seem any faster than sata SSD for normal usage (games) but is nice for booting/large files.

Large files I can see- booting I don't worry about too much, as resuming from hybernaiton/sleep is basically instant either way.

Now, as the cost approaches parity and the drives get better at IOPS...
 
yeah i thought the consensus was that Nvme doesn't seem any faster than sata SSD for normal usage (games) but is nice for booting/large files.
Depends on what your usage is.

I spend a lot of time using Adobe Lightroom editing 40MB RAW files with all changes being written to a database. Sata to NVME was about a 2x productivity jump for me.
 
I just threw one of these in my 2015 MacBook pro, so far so good and its a step up from the 512gb samsung one that was in there. I needed the extra space and there is a significant increase in write and a nominal read increase so far. Good Find!
 
Depends on what your usage is.

I spend a lot of time using Adobe Lightroom editing 40MB RAW files with all changes being written to a database. Sata to NVME was about a 2x productivity jump for me.

Did you just keep the catalog on NVMe, or were you importing to the NVMe drive too for editing?

[I currently keep the catalog on a separate SATA SSD drive and import RAWs to spinners...]
 
Did Micro Center "de-listed" the 1TB model from their website?; at least that's what it looked like yesterday, but store in NY them in stock.
 
Seagate is now selling these drives as the Firecuda 510 m2


Gigabyte just released one as well. Same exact drive as the Inland Premium and all the others. Their drives have a RGB heat spreader and cost around $120 for the 512GB and $85 for the 240GB. Didn't see a 1tb option. I suspect because the 1TB is double sided and their Heat-spreader gimmick wouldn't exactly work
 
Links
Gigabyte just released one as well. Same exact drive as the Inland Premium and all the others. Their drives have a RGB heat spreader and cost around $120 for the 512GB and $85 for the 240GB. Didn't see a 1tb option. I suspect because the 1TB is double sided and their Heat-spreader gimmick wouldn't exactly work

Links? :) Moar RGB
 
Seagate is now selling these drives as the Firecuda 510 m2

They've yet to hit retail channels. My guess is they released too early and Seagate's having the entire line updated to 12.2 so they don't have to explain to consumers that there's a destructive firmware update they have to do.
 
I ended up removing my Inland and replacing it with a 970 Evo Plus. My UEFI just didn't like the Inland for some reason. Drive boots fine from a cold start, fails to boot upon restart. ASRock support told me to buy a drive from their compatibility list. For those with an ASRock Phantom ITX, be aware that reboot wise, the Inland doesn't work. Maybe a future UEFI update will fix it? Who knows.

Strange, works fine in these asrocks and their UEFI is about the same for everything I've gotten the last few years. Might try turning on/off CSM and latest bios.
Deskmini A300W (neat toy)
X399 (many, w/ expander cards)
X470
X370

I bought a lot for various things, currently beating the shit out of the ones in the X399 boards.

Judging by performance and price the E12 is going to be a very common drive platform this year.
 
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Did Micro Center "de-listed" the 1TB model from their website?; at least that's what it looked like yesterday, but store in NY them in stock.

Microcenter has yet to fix their site and even the packaging for some drives, but its easy to tell apart in person.

x2 drive is the older model with two notches (B+M) when listed correctly is the "Professional" currently 1TB @ $120.

x4 drive is the new model with only one notch (M) when listed correctly is the "Premium" currently 1TB @ $135. It is a straight up reference design that matches the pictures in articles about E12 from last year. Unless you are super strapped for cash this is the one to get.

If you are super strapped for cash get one of the QLC (yuck) drives around 1TB @ $100, or a 2.5" SATA on sale, all m.2 SATA models cost more for some reason.

Samsung needs to wake up and drop their prices, a freaking 860 sata m.2 is $170 and 970 evo is over $200, fuck that. Onward marches progress so my next big storage server upgrade can be pure NVMe flash :)
 
I bought a lot for various things, currently beating the shit out of the ones in the X399 boards.
.

I'm doing the same, have 4 in RAID 0 and another as my boot drive. It's ridiculously fast and I can't imagine going back to HDD's except for bulk storage in my file server. Can't wait for multi TB's at lower price points in the coming years that'll saturate a 10G network so I can get local SSD performance for my game library.
 
Can't wait for multi TB's at lower price points in the coming years that'll saturate a 10G network so I can get local SSD performance for my game library.

You can saturate 10Gbit with ~six spindles. Or just a single NVMe drive (and with that, several times over). That's how far behind consumer networking is from enterprise networking.
 
Microcenter has yet to fix their site and even the packaging for some drives, but its easy to tell apart in person.

x2 drive is the older model with two notches (B+M) when listed correctly is the "Professional" currently 1TB @ $120.

x4 drive is the new model with only one notch (M) when listed correctly is the "Premium" currently 1TB @ $135. It is a straight up reference design that matches the pictures in articles about E12 from last year. Unless you are super strapped for cash this is the one to get.

Also just ask to see the package in your hands, the bubble pack easily allows you to look at the controller ID. If it says Phison -E12- that's the one to get, if it says -E8- that's the previous unwanted model.
 
So here's a incomplete list of currently known Phison E12 based M.2 form factor SSDs in no particular order..

Inland Premium
MyDigital BPX Pro
Sabrent Rocket
Silicon Power 34A80
Corsair Force Series M510
addlink S70
Seagate Firecuda 510 (not shipping yet)
Gigabye Aorus
Patriot Viper VPN100
HIKVision C2000
 
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This review on Amazon for the Sabrent Rocket 1TB may highlight a general issue with this new class of drive, you might not be able to make an OS backup unless your backup software supports 4K sectors.

Read if cloning hard drive
2 March 2019 - Published on Amazon.com
Verified Purchase
This drive is very fast and install was easy. This is down in the weeds a bit, but an important note is that it uses 4k byte sectors and has no 512 byte emulation (512e). This minor detail cost me 12+ hours of trying to figure out how to make the drive work with what I needed to do with it (clone and encrypt my OS). For clean installs, this should not be a problem. Cloning a hard drive is a problem, however, because you will need to have cloning software that can convert 512 byte sectors to 4k sectors, and even then, the cloning software may not be able to convert the boot partition (which happened to me), which will result in it being impossible to boot your computer. Most modern hard drives have 4k physical sectors (like this one) but emulate 512 byte sectors for compatibility purposes (some programs still are only compatible with 512 byte sectors). This drive does not emulate, which causes the above-mentioned issues. If doing a clean install of Windows, the drive should be fine and is very fast, but cloning did not work for me. Be aware that there may be other compatibility issues with programs, however. My laptop is less than one year old and has a SATA SSD, so this doesn't just affect traditional hard drives.

As a side note, the lack of 512e may also affect the encryption and backup of your hard drive. Popular encryption software VeraCrypt only supports 512 byte sectors, and I could not get Bitlocker to work properly after a clean install of Windows using this hard drive (could have been user error, but I worked on it for a few hours). I decided to send the drive back so I did not attempt to back up the hard drive, but it is also possible that the lack of 512e would also affect the ability to back up this hard drive to another hard drive with 512e, even if the backup drive has 4k physical sectors. Just do your homework on these issues before purchasing the drive.
 
Depends on what you mean by best.

I suppose I mean best of the Phison E12 based M.2 for those wanting 2TB for gaming with a large Steam library and not wanting to pay the Samsung 970 price.

The Corsair price seems pretty reasonable for a 2TB.
 
So here's a incomplete list of currently known Phison E12 based M.2 form factor SSDs in no particular order..

Inland Premium
MyDigital BPX Pro
Sabrent Rocket
Silicon Power 34A80
Corsair Force Series M510
addlink S70
Seagate Firecuda 510 (not shipping yet)
Gigabye Aorus
Patriot Viper VPN100
HIKVision C2000
Transcend 220S (possible Phison)


Thank you for putting this list together. Much appreciated.
 
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