New build, get SSD m.2 pcie 4.0 or stick with the Samsung 970 evo plus

On a new build, is it worth getting a pcie 4.0 compatible m.2 drive?
All my SSDs in the past have been the samsung series (pcie 3.0).

This is a Ryzen 3700x build with a x570 chipset.

Thanks for any advice.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1893-pcie-4-vs-pcie-3-ssd/

"Samsung's Evo line used to get our top recommendation, but Sabrent's Rocket Gen 4 SSD is definitely worthy of your consideration. If you don't do content creation or other data-intensive work, there won't be much benefit, though down the road there may be some scenarios that can take advantage of the full 5GB/s speed. Much of the Gen 4 SSD launch is marketing hype, but it's true that the drives are objectively faster, so it's always great to see technology progress."

So I guess stick with Samsung..?

No. It's worth waiting for proper 4.0 drives and newer flash if you want to go that route, likely late next year. Depending on your usage the current crop of 3.0 drives will be sufficient.

• Prosumer: WD SN750. Small SLC cache, load-efficient, consistent performance. Single-sided as well.
• Consumer/Games: Any of the SM2262/EN drives, like the SX8200 Pro.
• All-around: 970 EVO Plus on the high end, any E12-based drives for lower end.
• Budget: 660p/665p/P1 for capacity (QLC), A2000 for consumer performance, SN550 for consistency.

Maxx said:

No. It's worth waiting for proper 4.0 drives and newer flash if you want to go that route, likely late next year. Depending on your usage the current crop of 3.0 drives will be sufficient.

• Prosumer: WD SN750. Small SLC cache, load-efficient, consistent performance. Single-sided as well.
• Consumer/Games: Any of the SM2262/EN drives, like the SX8200 Pro.
• All-around: 970 EVO Plus on the high end, any E12-based drives for lower end.
• Budget: 660p/665p/P1 for capacity (QLC), A2000 for consumer performance, SN550 for consistency.

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I disagree. Many of the E16 drives offer similar or better performance vs the 970 evo plus with comparable or lower price. I’ve bought a mp600 and a firecuda 520 each for less than the Samsung, each with better performance. If 4.0 drives were more expensive, it would be a different matter.

Benchmark with 4x Sabrent pcie 4.0 1TB drives and the Gigabyte AIC controller.

Also, the temps never went over 50c at full blast over and over.

sphinx99 said:

I disagree. Many of the E16 drives offer similar or better performance vs the 970 evo plus with comparable or lower price. I’ve bought a mp600 and a firecuda 520 each for less than the Samsung, each with better performance. If 4.0 drives were more expensive, it would be a different matter.

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The E16 is just the E12 with slightly-updated LDPC and a 4.0 PHY. The flash makes a jump from 667 MT/s to 800 MT/s. That's it for hardware difference - raw sequential performance, and not a whole lot more actually.

The design difference is in the SLC cache. The E12 drives have ~24GB of dynamic SLC while the E16 is the entire drive. SLC caching is inherently for consumer workloads since they're bursty, but one of this size means they're going specifically for bursty sequentials. Well no kidding, it's a PCIe 4.0 drive! But really it's just an E12 with a 4.0 PHY and a large SLC cache because we're seeing 96L flash in 3.0 drives with some regularity now.

So let's do a quick analysis of how SLC cache changes the performance profile.

• Small, static cache which is similar to no cache (common on enterprise drives) with MLC-like consistency: WD SN750
• Small, dynamic cache which is consistent but can't hold big data: P34A80 which is an E12 drive
• Large, dynamic cache which is good for bursty workloads but suffers outside the cache and with a fuller drive: SX8200 Pro
• Full-drive dynamic cache like you'd have in an E16 drive: SX6000 Pro
• Static + dynamic cache with best of both worlds: 970 EVO Plus

Now compare full-drive performance of the listed drives. SN750 > P34A80 > SX8200 Pro. The SX6000 Pro actually does all right, this might be due to it using MLC rather than SLC caching, but it's still well below the rest. The 970 EVO Plus? Top dawg - fast flash, fast controller, static + dynamic cache. Here is an E16 graph, though, keeping in mind that every other drive tested out-writes it eventually. That low performance state would not be desirable, let's put it that way.

The 970 EVO Plus's controller is more powerful than the E12/E16. It's a penta-core design with specialized cores (read, write, host) while the E12/E16 is a dual-CPU design with co-processors for I/O offloading (read, write). The upcoming E18 will have the same design but be tri-core for good reason - the E16's design is outdated. The flash on the drives is of similar quality though. We see tri-core designs on the Samsung 860 EVO, for example, with read/write/host, so it's likely the upcoming E18 will actually be flat-out superior to the E16 even with the same cache design.

Are the E16 drives fast? Yes. But it's insane to say they're faster than a 970 EVO Plus. If you check heavy workloads on something like StorageReview, the 970 EVO Plus wipes the floor with the E12-based BarraCuda 510 in arenas that matter, like fuller drive, heavier mixed I/O, all-important latency, etc. The E16 transfers faster, that's it.

And yeah, the E16 has come down a lot in price. It's somewhat reasonable now. That wasn't the case at launch. But why should it cost more? It's just due to low 4.0 adoption. You're literally paying more for the same hardware, not even native 4.0 hardware.

If you're a consumer with multiple NVMe that needs bursty sequentials it's a good stopgap solution. It's also plenty fast on its own. I just don't think it's a good value. If you're someone waiting for some real progress with a 4.0 drive, this is not it.

As a final note: I hope this brief analysis helps show my difference in opinion properly. Or at least a different perspective on the drives. I've had E16 owners block me in rage on Reddit over it, people take their hardware purchases seriously - I'm not here to offend but to share information. So nothing personal and if you like the drive that's quite all right by me!

OBWANDO said:

Benchmark with 4x Sabrent pcie 4.0 1TB drives and the Gigabyte AIC controller.

Also, the temps never went over 50c at full blast over and over.

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Hmm, interesting. I would have expected higher read performance. Looks pretty fast, though!

I actually have the ASUS Hyper M.2 which can also do 4x4 (3.0 by design, but 4.0 works) but no 4.0 drives to test currently.

Yeah, theres always room for improvement, but still decent perf. I'm going to be playing with it for awhile to see what I can eek out, but I dont expect much to change.

But I did keep my 4.0 x16 slot open exclusively for storage since pretty much anything else used in that slot is a waste.

Plus once the faster 4.0 drives come around, I can upgrade and pawn some of these off on the kids or whatever.

The big thing was that everyone was screaming about the temps on the Sabrent drives. and they probably would get hot, but in the pcie 4.0 raid card, the heat sinks and active cooling keep everything in tolerance under heavy load without the monster truck heatsink on a stick.

I just went through this same scenario (always had Samsung before) and I ended up buying 2 x Sabrent Rocket Gen 4 2TB drives. They've been nothing but outstanding for me so far.

They're neat drives. It'll be interesting to see what Phison can do with more power in a smaller process node, along with better flash and NVMe 1.4.

OBWANDO said:

Benchmark with 4x Sabrent pcie 4.0 1TB drives and the Gigabyte AIC controller.

Also, the temps never went over 50c at full blast over and over.

View attachment 211739

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dam thats fast lol eventually i pick up one of those in a 2tb size

I was going to get the 1TB Sabrent PCIe4 drive this week for sh*ts and giggles but in the end decided on the 1TB Corsair 510. I don't have PCIe4 but going forward...

Anyway the 510 is a stunning drive. Blows my previous Samsung NVMe out of the water benchmarks wise. Things have moved on the past 3 years or so.

All the benchmarks show they are quite a bit faster but I'm looking for noticeable real world difference. Like faster loads of game and apps.

sasquatch182 said:

All the benchmarks show they are quite a bit faster but I'm looking for noticeable real world difference. Like faster loads of game and apps.

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Exactly. Real world, you're still bottlenecked elsewhere. Low queue depth performance, especially reads and super-especially 4K, is still king for basic usage. Latency is also important. In most cases though you'll be fine even on SATA but in edge cases NVMe will be faster, up to ~15% faster. Sean Webster of Tom's Hardware and I had a discussion about this and we agree that you can "feel" NVMe being smoother once you use it long enough, but subjectively when you first upgrade it's nothing special.

Within that realm if you want a leap you have to go to a different kind of flash, for example 3D XPoint which is write-in-place memory. So it doesn't need overprovisioning, it's just as fast when it's fuller, it has crazy low latency and very high IOPS at even LQD.

If you're sticking with NAND, though, the next best thing is SMI controllers because they were developed in concert with Intel (hence the 600p, 660p, 760p, etc). Very much optimized for daily usage. The Phison controllers are more balanced but generally go towards pushing IOPS. I call the E12 the "budget 970 EVO" because that's basically how they were designed.

Now of course if you're living in SLC cache, and for consumer workloads you should be, these are all fast drives. SMI on paper is better at apps/games, LQD, 4K, but does that amount to much? Very small difference in real world. But SLC cache design is an important concept here.

Let me add also that drives with large SLC caches, like the MP600, have the tendency to get "stuck" in the intermediate direct-to-TLC mode. I've had at least two people ask me why their MP600 got slow. Usually you can fix this with a sanitize or secure erase + write but it's one of the dangers of relying so heavily on SLC mode. Phison has already said they've "refined" the full-drive SLC in the E18, but that kind of makes me feel like the E16 is an early adopter type thing. Which...it is.

AnandTech's Year in Review has a comment from the author that I find relevant to this discussion:

"I have an E16, but the review unfortunately won't be out until after CES. It's the Seagate Firecuda 520, and I also got one of the updated E12-based 510s with 96L NAND so I can show exactly what effect the controller upgrade has vs changing to newer, faster NAND. But I'm hardly the only competent SSD reviewer out there.

If you care about real-world performance rather than setting a high score on CrystalDiskMark, E16 is obviously not a game-changer—especially after you check the prices. At best, it's a hint at what is to come when the PCIe 4.0 ecosystem matures."

So we'll probably have a review that hits the drives a little harder to see exactly how that shakes out. However his conclusion matches my own: the E16 is not a game-changer and not a good value due to its pricing, but does illustrate what a real 4.0 drive will bring to the table.

I do disagree with part of the article as a side note:

"The new material consists almost entirely of new optional features, so there's usually no practical impact to seeing version 1.4 on a drive's spec sheet instead of version 1.3. Most of the new features are only relevant to server or embedded use cases, so most consumer SSDs won't be implementing any of the new optional features."

While this was largely true with 1.2 to 1.3 (and thus should be with 1.3 to 1.4) I think he's underestimating the impact of consoles on NVMe. Understandably, it's a PC-centric site (correct me if I'm wrong), however I feel that consoles might leverage some aspects of NVMe uniquely that may translate to changes on the desktop for at least gaming. It's possible we won't see these right away or even at all but until we know more about the upcoming consoles' storage usage I think we should hold off. While he accurately states that controller manufacturers are waiting for the 12nm process, I suspect relatively low 4.0 demand is playing a role (AMD funded Phison to bring out the E16 stopgap) and that consoles with 4.0 support from AMD are also a factor. Put 4.0+ into people's hands affordably as AMD has begun to do and I think they'll find uses for some optional features. (although I suppose "embedded" could refer to consoles)