Best PCIe 4.0 NVME Drive?

What is the best performing Gen 4 NVME drive for operating system and gaming?

  • Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus

    Votes: 9 31.0%

  • Samsung 980 Pro

    Votes: 10 34.5%

  • Western Digital Black SN850

    Votes: 10 34.5%
  • Total voters
    29
B

Blackstone

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 8, 2007
Messages
3,577
Assume the following use scenario:

1. High end PC gaming;
2. Drive will store operating system and games;
3. Drive will run various media servers like Roon, Plex, ect, but will not be used for mass storage of media files;
4. Capacity will be 2TB (assume there will be a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro very soon).
5. Drive will be replacing an 840 Evo from 2014 as system disk.
6. Assume Microsoft Direct Storage will be implemented and utilized by future games.
 
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Who ever is cheaper. Sure the Samsung is the best out of the bunch but will you notice a difference between them. No you won't. I believe they all have 5 year warranties also. Samsung and WD are solid if you want issue free RMA. I can't comment on Sabrent since I never delt with them.
 
For all that stuff a PCI 3 drive (sitting around 3500 MB/s read performance) will likely be indistinguishable from a newer more expensive PCI 4 drive - at least for now

I personally went with the WD SN850 2TB as I think they are great drives and I like WD as a company a little bit more than Samsung in terms of support and reliability
 
German Muscle said:
Sabrent all day.
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+1 to the Sabrent. People say that NMVe is no faster in practice, but for me, upgrading from a SATA SSD SamSung 860 (probably the slower version) has been great. Windows boots up noticeably faster. Big complicated programs like MS Outook just "snap" open even with multiple OST and PST files. Same for Word, Excel and Adobe Lightroom. Go for it. You won't regret it.

My rig includes an ASUS ROG AMD X570 Strix-E board with AMD 3900X CPU. I was running with the Samsung drive for about two months before I upgraded to the Sabrent drive, because I want to make sure that my new rig is stable, which it is. Very happy. Adios Intel. ;)
 
x509 said:
+1 to the Sabrent. People say that NMVe is no faster in practice, but for me, upgrading from a SATA SSD SamSung 860 (probably the slower version) has been great. Windows boots up noticeably faster. Big complicated programs like MS Outook just "snap" open even with multiple OST and PST files. Same for Word, Excel and Adobe Lightroom. Go for it. You won't regret it.

My rig includes an ASUS ROG AMD X570 Strix-E board with AMD 3900X CPU. I was running with the Samsung drive for about two months before I upgraded to the Sabrent drive, because I want to make sure that my new rig is stable, which it is. Very happy. Adios Intel. ;)
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"no faster in practice" That's utube till dealers are out of stock. "buy a new b450 for a new ZEN3 cpu." That's utube till dealers are out of stock. Right> a gen 4 cpu lane twice as fast as a gen3 lanes isn't really any faster. Wait till Intel has gen4 lanes on their desktop boards. I want an old AM4 socket with out of date 24 cpu lanes because "4 years of the same socket". But it's the guys first amd build, why would he want a fourth years of the same socket. No AM5 with 48 cpu lanes on the socket because "four years of the same socket". Why do guys with utube channels that push boards with AM4 and only one X16 PCIe socket and only one M.2 socket on the cpu lanes have a Threadripper for all their own content creation work. TR just can't game because 1080P. Go up in res and the bottleneck is your GPU! Get a new game engine that uses all your cores and a TR 3960X will be king of 1080P. You need 16 lanes GEN3 to run a new GPU that will run on a GEN4 8X socket. But not on your nice new 400 series mobo! Antthing AMD offers that isn't on Intel is "no faster in practice".
 
First off, I just want to say that reading your post hurt my brain. I'm not going to respond to a lot of it, as it sounds a bit like a religion to you and less like an actual technical argument.

I did want to take a swing at this one though:
MaxHughes said:
Why do guys with utube channels that push boards with AM4 and only one X16 PCIe socket and only one M.2 socket on the cpu lanes have a Threadripper for all their own content creation work.
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This one is simple. Most of those Youtube channels are speaking to gamers, not to content creators, and - spoiler alert - gaming and content creation have vastly different system requirements. Recommending more expensive TR systems to people that don't need that muscle or 'width' on the system is bad advice, and - as it currently stands - gaming isn't one of the workloads that benefits.

As for my source for that - I'm a gamer with a Ryzen 3700X (soon to upgrade to 5800X) in a B450 board running a PCIe 3.0 SSD for my primary drive. Meanwhile, in my closet not 10 feet away I have a 3900X sitting in an X570 board. And I review SSDs as a side gig, and have all the access in the world to *literally* free PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and I haven't bothered swapping my main rig over to X570 or plugged in one of the Gen4 drives. I just game, and for games it doesn't matter.
 
German Muscle said:
Laid waste to the 980 Pro. Im not sure what they figured out but they found something.
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I think that's overstating it. They are very similar in performance - all three of the top Gen4 drives are right now. And for gaming workloads, absolutely none of their differences matter.
 
sinisterDei said:
First off, I just want to say that reading your post hurt my brain. I'm not going to respond to a lot of it, as it sounds a bit like a religion to you and less like an actual technical argument.

I did want to take a swing at this one though:

This one is simple. Most of those Youtube channels are speaking to gamers, not to content creators, and - spoiler alert - gaming and content creation have vastly different system requirements. Recommending more expensive TR systems to people that don't need that muscle or 'width' on the system is bad advice, and - as it currently stands - gaming isn't one of the workloads that benefits.

As for my source for that - I'm a gamer with a Ryzen 3700X (soon to upgrade to 5800X) in a B450 board running a PCIe 3.0 SSD for my primary drive. Meanwhile, in my closet not 10 feet away I have a 3900X sitting in an X570 board. And I review SSDs as a side gig, and have all the access in the world to *literally* free PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and I haven't bothered swapping my main rig over to X570 or plugged in one of the Gen4 drives. I just game, and for games it doesn't matter.
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90% of what I said was about GEN4 lanes for drives and GPUs. We have two generations of GEN4 NVMe drives out and all the new RX3000 and RX6000 GPUs are GEN4. Hell, Radeon's got a new GEN4 Radeon Pro VII. If utube hadn't pushed so hard to hold AMD's feet to the fire over 4 years of AM4 we would have seen an AM5 with more pins and more cpu lanes. I own a Ryzen and a TR. An AM4 socket with only one 16X socket and only one M.2 socket with cpu lanes is a choked chicken! I'm not a content creater, I build an all purpose PC. I'm running six Sabrent GEN4 drives, all of them on cpu lanes. I can only put one M.2 on my Ryzen build. If you use a second M.2 it's off chipset lanes and slows down. If you use that X570 board you'll get GEN4 speeds out of one drive. That's it! I love that 5800X, now I know what to expect from a 5000 series TR or TR PRO.
 
MaxHughes said:
I can only put one M.2 on my Ryzen build. If you use a second M.2 it's off chipset lanes and slows down. If you use that X570 board you'll get GEN4 speeds out of one drive. That's it!
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That is a lie. I have 4 NVME SSDs in my X570 build and they're all running at exactly the rated speeds and have zero issues. My 24 lanes are as follows:
8X to GPU (which isn't bandwidth limited at all.)
4x to 4 different NVME drives, which equals the remaining 16 lanes.

My PCI-E gen 4 SSD doesn't do anything noticeably different from any of my various quality PCI-E 3.0 NVME drives except for generate a tiny bit more heat and is way better with HUGE amounts of super, super tiny files (which is actually relevant to me, as both my PLEX and Minecraft server have literally millions of small files.)
For games the difference is practically nothing.

Regardlesss of PCI-E lanes, my RAMcache > > > > any NVME speeds it's basically entirely academic anyway.

Also this whole thing you got where you keep repeating the words "utube" as though you know better than anyone else is getting... irritating.

----------------------
Back on topic, I'd probably personally go with the Sabrent Rocket+ for price reasons and a good experience with Sabrent so far, but I haven't personally used a WD or Samsung NVME SSD yet. (Yet again, for price reasons.)
 
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TheSlySyl said:
That is a lie. I have 4 NVME SSDs in my X570 build and they're all running at exactly the rated speeds and have zero issues. My 24 lanes are as follows:
8X to GPU (which isn't bandwidth limited at all.)
4x to 4 different NVME drives, which equals the remaining 16 lanes.

My PCI-E gen 4 SSD doesn't do anything noticeably different from any of my various quality PCI-E 3.0 NVME drives except for generate a tiny bit more heat and is way better at loads of super, super tiny files (which is actually relevant to me.) For games the difference is practically nothing.

Regardlesss of PCI-E lanes, my RAMcache > > > > any NVME speeds it's basically entirely academic anyway.

Also this whole thing you got where you keep repeating the words "utube" as though you know better than anyone else is getting... irritating.

----------------------
Back on topic, I'd probably personally go with the Sabrent Rocket+ for price reasons and a good experience with Sabrent so far, but I haven't personally used a WD or Samsung NVME SSD yet. (Yet again, for price reasons.)
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On boot I load my 32GB AMD/DRC RamDisk from a stored img file on my drive. That's seq. read speed on my storage drive. Were you well warned of the future limits of only 24 cpu lanes? When first gen Ryzen and first gen TR launched did any channel mention quad channel memory Vs dual channel memory? I only mention things I bought, installed and used. Tellme aboutyourTR build.
 
TheSlySyl said:
That is a lie. I have 4 NVME SSDs in my X570 build and they're all running at exactly the rated speeds and have zero issues. My 24 lanes are as follows:
8X to GPU (which isn't bandwidth limited at all.)
4x to 4 different NVME drives, which equals the remaining 16 lanes.

My PCI-E gen 4 SSD doesn't do anything noticeably different from any of my various quality PCI-E 3.0 NVME drives except for generate a tiny bit more heat and is way better with HUGE amounts of super, super tiny files (which is actually relevant to me, as both my PLEX and Minecraft server have literally millions of small files.)
For games the difference is practically nothing.

Regardlesss of PCI-E lanes, my RAMcache > > > > any NVME speeds it's basically entirely academic anyway.

Also this whole thing you got where you keep repeating the words "utube" as though you know better than anyone else is getting... irritating.

----------------------
Back on topic, I'd probably personally go with the Sabrent Rocket+ for price reasons and a good experience with Sabrent so far, but I haven't personally used a WD or Samsung NVME SSD yet. (Yet again, for price reasons.)
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0nly 16 cpu lanes to the PCIe sockets or 8X 8X. The second socket is 8X or two M.2 drives. One m.2 X4 on the mobo on cpu lanes and one M.2x4 on the mobo off the chipset. Very few gamers have a new GEN4 GPU. RX6000 or RTX3000 is ok on a GEN4 8X.
 
sinisterDei said:
I think that's overstating it. They are very similar in performance - all three of the top Gen4 drives are right now. And for gaming workloads, absolutely none of their differences matter.
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Note that in my post, #6 in this thread, I didn't say a thing about any games. Because I'm not a gamer. If anything I'm a content creator, even if I don't do video transcoding. And my motherboard is PCIE-4. And my post is based on my personal usage.
 
MaxHughes said:
On boot I load my 32GB AMD/DRC RamDisk from a stored img file on my drive. That's seq. read speed on my storage drive. Were you well warned of the future limits of only 24 cpu lanes? When first gen Ryzen and first gen TR launched did any channel mention quad channel memory Vs dual channel memory? I only mention things I bought, installed and used. Tellme aboutyourTR build.
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You buy me a Threadripper build and I'll gladly tell you about it. Considering that it costs multiple times my current PC and is also multiple times more any budget than I will ever have for a computer, i've never considered it and likely will never consider it. I also don't need it.
The X570 with its 24 lanes is more than adequate. Especially coming from X370 where I *was* starved for lanes even with my humble needs. The only reason I upgraded to X570 in the first place was because I could keep my same processor and get more PCI-E lanes. (Also this particular board has more SATA ports, which I also needed.)

Also yes, i was aware of exactly how many lanes every chipset has for PCI-E lanes, also aware of dual channel vs quad channel and ECC vs non ECC and all that other fun stuff involving RAM timings and speeds. I'm also aware of more factors of NVME controllers than I really have any reason to ever know about considering how little they matter in real world performance for the types of workloads that I'm going to be putting on them.

The SSDs I currently have in my system range from an ADATA SX8200 (non pro), A sabrent Rocket QLC, Silicon Power TLC and a corsair force MP600 PCI-E 4.0. They're all different years and different controllers because I had to buy them at different times when the funds appeared to do so. Yeah, a single 8TB sabrent would literally fulfill 95% of my SSD needs but I'm never going to be able to justify spending the money on one.

For my own curiosity i've tried loading games from all 4 SSDs because its the kind of thing that amuses me, and the end result is that it was all basically a wash when it comes to game loading. Maybe a second or two here and there, but nothing compared at all to just using a small 6-8GB RAMcache + SSD. So that's why I just have my games cached on the slower Silicon Power drive for now. This is with my largest city skylines city which off a normal HDD takes about 2 minutes to load and also includes a timer on the load screen. So its a pretty easy test. Loading it off NVME instead of HDD brings that down to about 40-45 seconds depending on the SSD, then down to about 15 seconds if its coming from RAMcache.
 
TheSlySyl said:
That is a lie. I have 4 NVME SSDs in my X570 build and they're all running at exactly the rated speeds and have zero issues. My 24 lanes are as follows:
8X to GPU (which isn't bandwidth limited at all.)
4x to 4 different NVME drives, which equals the remaining 16 lanes.

My PCI-E gen 4 SSD doesn't do anything noticeably different from any of my various quality PCI-E 3.0 NVME drives except for generate a tiny bit more heat and is way better with HUGE amounts of super, super tiny files (which is actually relevant to me, as both my PLEX and Minecraft server have literally millions of small files.)
For games the difference is practically nothing.

Regardlesss of PCI-E lanes, my RAMcache > > > > any NVME speeds it's basically entirely academic anyway.

Also this whole thing you got where you keep repeating the words "utube" as though you know better than anyone else is getting... irritating.

----------------------
Back on topic, I'd probably personally go with the Sabrent Rocket+ for price reasons and a good experience with Sabrent so far, but I haven't personally used a WD or Samsung NVME SSD yet. (Yet again, for price reasons.)
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Been running two sabrent rockets in raid 0 X570 board for at least a year now and no issues at all. Very fast drives. The write speeds are incredible. Drives have endured many crashes testing ram and cpu clocks over the past year without fail or corruption. Gonna get another for extra storage maybe a 4TB this time.
 
I watch utube to find out whats new. If they review gear I own, then I point out what they didn't bother to mention. This isn't a gamer only channel and I can disagree with you or utube. get over it. As for GEN4 NVMe drives I think current sales of GEN4 drives show gamers agree with me. I can't mention TR because you don't want one?
 
I also voted with my wallet, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus.

But to be honest, all of those drives are very solid choices for a new Gen 4 NVME drive and represent the cream of the crop right now. As others have said, it really just comes down to price, rep and availability... not so much performance.
 
I don't understand these votes
WD is by far the best and fastest, money no object
the WD850 performs the closest to an optane SSD, and that's all that needs to be said
Sabrent is good if money is important
 
shinotenshi said:
I don't understand these votes
WD is by far the best and fastest, money no object
the WD850 performs the closest to an optane SSD, and that's all that needs to be said
Sabrent is good if money is important
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Sure it might be the "fastest" I the 3 but it is not worth $150 more. They all are close enough that no one will tell a difference.
 
vegeta535 said:
Sure it might be the "fastest" I the 3 but it is not worth $150 more. They all are close enough that no one will tell a difference.
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This, and for that extra $150 you could just more than double your ram and get yourself a giant ramcache that'll be faster than any of em anyway.
 
German Muscle said:
https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/9692/sabrent-rocket-4-plus-2tb-nvme-2-ssd/index.html
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that review basically said what i just said, WD850 is as close as you can get to an optane drive.

The OP criteria does not include price. of all the options listed, without price being a consideration, which was not requested, the easy answer is the WD850. If the op wants us to consider price, he/she should include that, they haven't and didn't therefore the only correct answer the WD850.
 
shinotenshi said:
the only correct answer the WD850.
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I stand by my original response; there should be a fourth option - "they are all the same". In the linked review, all three drives being discussed here - plus some other drives that are decidedly lower performance overall - have nearly identical game loading times. When the difference between the "best" is 7.1 seconds and the "worst" is 7.9 seconds when loading a level, then I would argue that it doesn't matter. They're all fine, and in fact those results are likely within the margin of error.
 
The reason I asked is because some of the reviews seem to suggest the WD SN850 is doing something faster than the other two, but then it seems like the 980 Pro still seems to come out on top overall but there is no 2TB capacity.

Considering my 840 Evo has been my main drive since like 2014 and hasn’t missed a beat, I’d like to stick to Samsung but they don’t offer 2 TB yet.

By the way to poster above if one drive loaded at 7.9 seconds and the other 7.1, there is a clear winner. If you were comparing 0-60 times between two cars I would say the latter trounced the former.
 
I added another criteria:

“Assume Microsoft Direct Storage will be implemented and utilized by future games.”

This is really what I am getting at. This is about NEXT gen gaming not loading the Witcher.
 
Blackstone said:
“Assume Microsoft Direct Storage will be implemented and utilized by future games.”
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I hope games use DirectStorage.

However, it will not likely be a requirement anytime soon; if it was, then a *huge* portion of the PC gaming audience would not be able to participate in whatever game makes it a requirement. It's also significantly less important on PC, since PCs can just load a bit longer up front into the more ample (and segregated) memory pool. This is in contrast to consoles, with their 16GB of shared memory, that *need* streaming assets.
 
German Muscle said:
Specifically Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. Fastest drive on the market right now. Laid waste to the 980 Pro. Im not sure what they figured out but they found something.
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I run 5 2TB and one 1TB Sabrent GEN4 TLC drives. I don't have the $ to upgrade them to GEN4 PLUS. 7000/6600 is just a new controller on the GEN4 drives. The circuit bandwidth is 8000/8000.
sinisterDei said:
I stand by my original response; there should be a fourth option - "they are all the same". In the linked review, all three drives being discussed here - plus some other drives that are decidedly lower performance overall - have nearly identical game loading times. When the difference between the "best" is 7.1 seconds and the "worst" is 7.9 seconds when loading a level, then I would argue that it doesn't matter. They're all fine, and in fact those results are likely within the margin of error.
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When it's M.2 direct to VRAM we may see better load times with GEN4 PLUS drives. Half the load time comments are done on an M.2 drive running on chip set feed M.2 sockets.
 
MaxHughes said:
When it's M.2 direct to VRAM we may see better load times with GEN4 PLUS drives
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I can hope so, but I still argue it likely won't make much of a difference on PC for an entire product generation.

Games will not be built with the assumption of DirectStorage capabilities being present; it's simply not going to be supported by a majority of gaming-capable computers for the foreseeable future, and unless a company wants to neuter the size of their own potential customer market they will design games for PC using a 'lowest common denominator' type setup. Right now this lowest common denominator even includes mechanical hard drives, and in the near future will probably move to encompass the presence of a SATA SSD, but the safe assumption will not include a NVMe SSD (3.0 or 4.0) for at least an entire console cycle, or longer. Keep in mind *new* PCs today are being sold with SATA SSDs very often.

And with lots of games, even if the game is designed to support fast loading via DirectStorage, often times you'll end up waiting anyways. As an example, right now I'm playing a fair bit of League of Legends. Despite the fact that *MY* computer can load into a match in only a few seconds, when I play online I very often end up waiting 1-2 minutes for loading because the game waits on *everyone* to load into the match before presenting me with the game. Any load speed advantage I have is neutralized by the game client playing fair and waiting for everyone else. Almost any multiplayer game will work in a similar fashion.
 
sinisterDei said:
I can hope so, but I still argue it likely won't make much of a difference on PC for an entire product generation.

Games will not be built with the assumption of DirectStorage capabilities being present; it's simply not going to be supported by a majority of gaming-capable computers for the foreseeable future, and unless a company wants to neuter the size of their own potential customer market they will design games for PC using a 'lowest common denominator' type setup. Right now this lowest common denominator even includes mechanical hard drives, and in the near future will probably move to encompass the presence of a SATA SSD, but the safe assumption will not include a NVMe SSD (3.0 or 4.0) for at least an entire console cycle, or longer. Keep in mind *new* PCs today are being sold with SATA SSDs very often.

And with lots of games, even if the game is designed to support fast loading via DirectStorage, often times you'll end up waiting anyways. As an example, right now I'm playing a fair bit of League of Legends. Despite the fact that *MY* computer can load into a match in only a few seconds, when I play online I very often end up waiting 1-2 minutes for loading because the game waits on *everyone* to load into the match before presenting me with the game. Any load speed advantage I have is neutralized by the game client playing fair and waiting for everyone else. Almost any multiplayer game will work in a similar fashion.
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That is a skeptical view but I think we will see PC games using this tech about the same time is this new Gen of consoles utilizes it.
 
Blackstone said:
That is a skeptical view but I think we will see PC games using this tech about the same time is this new Gen of consoles utilizes it.
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In my mind, it is a difficult technology to "use" without also "requiring" it.

For consoles, with their limited memory budgets, it is an absolute game changer. Levels can be much more complex, and all the level assets can be streamed in and out of memory during gameplay and virtually eliminate loading times while respecting the limited memory budget on a console.

For PCs though, things are different. If you *design* your game around super-high-speed asset streaming, then you encounter a player that doesn't have it, then their gameplay experience is going to suffer a lot. So the natural reaction for a developer, given that a *huge* portion of the PC playerbase will *not* have PCIe Gen 4 DirectStorage capabilities, is going to be to design the games in such a way that they do not rely on that tech. Thankfully, in PC land, memory budgets can be significantly larger which will help; as an example, instead of sharing 16GB of memory between both the GPU and the main system, a 'normal' circa-2020 gaming PC would come with 16-32GB of main system memory and 8-10GB of VRAM. As a result, at the same asset quality level I can hold much more level data in memory at any point, and my need to stream that data is diminished. By the end of the current console generation, those PC numbers are also likely to have increased by quite a bit - meanwhile, PS5 and XSX will still have 16GB.

It's the same reason that no sane PC developer will release a game in even the mid-term future that *requires* raytracing. To do so would alienate a *huge* portion of the PC playerbase. Or, to put it another way, it's the reason almost zero big-name games come with VR requirements. Half Life Alyx was a huge exception to that, and the internet was full of memes at the time about loyal players of the franchise up until that point being forced to read a plot summary rather than play the game, because the barrier for entry blocked them off.

Or I could be totally wrong. But I don't think I am.
 
sinisterDei said:
I can hope so, but I still argue it likely won't make much of a difference on PC for an entire product generation.

Games will not be built with the assumption of DirectStorage capabilities being present; it's simply not going to be supported by a majority of gaming-capable computers for the foreseeable future, and unless a company wants to neuter the size of their own potential customer market they will design games for PC using a 'lowest common denominator' type setup. Right now this lowest common denominator even includes mechanical hard drives, and in the near future will probably move to encompass the presence of a SATA SSD, but the safe assumption will not include a NVMe SSD (3.0 or 4.0) for at least an entire console cycle, or longer. Keep in mind *new* PCs today are being sold with SATA SSDs very often.

And with lots of games, even if the game is designed to support fast loading via DirectStorage, often times you'll end up waiting anyways. As an example, right now I'm playing a fair bit of League of Legends. Despite the fact that *MY* computer can load into a match in only a few seconds, when I play online I very often end up waiting 1-2 minutes for loading because the game waits on *everyone* to load into the match before presenting me with the game. Any load speed advantage I have is neutralized by the game client playing fair and waiting for everyone else. Almost any multiplayer game will work in a similar fashion.
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With guys standing in line for a $1500 GPU, I don't think it's going to be all that long a time. If HW suppliers and Game developers don't get their ass in gear the PS5 market will take over the industry. APU's don't generate the corp profit they make on top end cpus and gpus.
 
Sabrent, no doubt. Got one and is smashing with Ryzen 9 3900x
 
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