Anyone have an nVME Gen 4 SSD they like with good random read performance at high (4TBish) capacities?

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Sycraft

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I'm starting to look at rebuilding my desktop and one of the things I do is audio production. Currently my samples sit on a number of different SATA SSDs but I'd like to stick them all on one drive. This won't be the system drive, that is going to be a 980 Pro, it'll be dedicated for samples. As such it needs to be large, because I have a lot of them, and it needs good random read performance because you get many samples being played back at once and they stream from disk (they just cache a bit in RAM). Write speed isn't important, nor is write endurance, the samples get written to disk and then stay there. The output audio files go on another drive.

Any recommendations I should have a look at?
 
Why gen 4 with good random read performance at 4TB?

Edit: What I mean to ask is, wouldn't any gen 3 4TB nvme drive work just as good? The differences between gen 3 QLC and gen 4 TLC is only really apparent in benchmarks, no?
 
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It doesn't have to be gen 4, that is true, mostly just wanting as much bandwidth for future possible needs. That said I haven't actually measured the throughput of the samplers when all spun up, I imagine it is only a couple hundred megabytes per second total.
 
Sycraft said:
It doesn't have to be gen 4, that is true, mostly just wanting as much bandwidth for future possible needs. That said I haven't actually measured the throughput of the samplers when all spun up, I imagine it is only a couple hundred megabytes per second total.
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If so, even a gen 3 QLC drive will perform smashingly and might save you a few bucks. If you are looking for endurance though, then I'd recommend going with a gen 4 TLC drive instead.
 
I recently upgraded to this drive, a 1TB WD Black SN850 on a Z590 chipset with an 11th gen i5. Just ran disk mark again.


1656588451638.png
 
ZeroBarrier said:
If so, even a gen 3 QLC drive will perform smashingly and might save you a few bucks. If you are looking for endurance though, then I'd recommend going with a gen 4 TLC drive instead.
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Shouldn't need any real endurance since it isn't going to be getting many writes. Once the samples are on there they stay on there, they just get read a whole lot. The actual sample streaming itself is sequential but since generally it is streaming a couple thousand at once, it is a random access pattern.
 
This is my 980 Pro in my X570 Dark Hero with a 5900X,
CrystalDiskMark_Samsung_980_Pro-2TB.png


Re-ran with current version,
CrystalDiskMark_20220630212822-Samsung-980-Pro-2TB-2.png
 
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Other than bizarre Optane stuff you'll do fine with a SN850. Not that you'll probably notice in RL usage.
 
Semi on topic: any reason why 4TB NVME's aren't so widely available yet from the biggish manufacturers? IE WD, Samsung, Micron/Crucial, Hynix? I'd be totally fine with a WD Blue SN550 in 4TB. Too bad my incoming laptop stopped supporting SATA SSDs of any kind :|

Does it have anything to do with the density of mainstream NAND not yet being fully ready for mass production? I see most 4TB drives are more than 2x the price of 2TB drives. SATA 4TB drives (870 EVOs) are about 2x more expensive than the 2TB drives, which makes me think it's a physical space issue.
 
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ZeroBarrier said:
Okay cool, but that doesn't change the fact that the OP specified an nvme drive in the 4TB capacity.
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Yes, get that (or a cheaper two card version) and slip two 2TB in RAID0...for the thrill. Even higher performance too. Or just old JBOD.

"You can't always git what you wantttt...."
 
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