Best SSD currently ?

[Legendary Gamer]

In mostly all categories ?

I have had a lot of really good luck with the M.2 Drives from Inland (Microcenter). Just stay away from the QLC drives of any brand name. Durability is absolutely dismal. Often times QLC will be rated around 100 TBW. That's garbage tier.

I have killed anything under 300TBW in frequent usage in a Year's time. Though I have seen arguments that you can't do that. The Drives just don't hold up to even their 300 TBW ratings.

Inland Drives were originally rated around 1600 TBW for the 1TB m.2 PCI-E 3.0 & 4.0 (slower 4,000-5,000 Meg / sec drives) units and more like 800 for the 7,000 Meg Sec 4.0 units. 2 TB drives typically doubled those TBW ratings.

However, recent Microcenter literature has slashed the TWB values of their drives to something like 600/1200 which is still almost double most other competitors.

The Samsung PROs are always a good choice but pricey and there are a number of other users on here that have great sugeestions.

I have the Inland 1 TB 3.0 Drives, 2 TB 4.0 Drives and one Samsung 970 Pro in active use. All have taken a beating and the 3.0 drives have been in service for 2-3 years with no issues.

I had an Early WD Black that is failing already after light usage (700 M/s)

Traditional SATA SSD's and even the M Key variants just don't have good ratings. You have to hunt for the ones that have good durability. Almost none of those will have a durability above 300.

I use the durability rating as a guideline to give me an idea how long the drives may stay in service. In practice I suppose it's going to come down to individual use cases and how much you hammer these things.

No matter what you have, I always recommend offloading the Swap File (if you still use one) to another drive so it's not beating the shit out of a slice of the memory sectors constantly.

 

[pitingres]

What SSDs are you running right now?

At the moment, I see

1 TB 980 pro
1 TB 970 pro
128 GB PM843
256 GB 860 evo
3x 1 TB Crucial MX500
2x 500GB Crucial MX500
480 GB Crucial BX500
250 GB Toshiba RD400
500 GB Mushkin Raw
1 TB SK Hynix P31
1 TB HP EX920
1 TB EX900 Pro (a Biwin unit)
240 GB Team L5 Lite 3D
2x 480 GB Team L5 Lite 3D
128 GB Team GX2
1 TB Sabrent Rocket
256 gB Sabrent Rocket

The Samsung 980/970 Pro and one of the MX500's see the highest write loads. The RD400 is probably the oldest. Subjectively, performance is pretty much the same across the board; the two Pro drives are the fastest but not by enough to make any serious difference. My workload tends towards random I/O which is why the NVMe drives don't mop the floor with the old SATA stuff.

 

[ZodaEX]

I have had a lot of really good luck with the M.2 Drives from Inland (Microcenter). Just stay away from the QLC drives of any brand name. Durability is absolutely dismal. Often times QLC will be rated around 100 TBW. That's garbage tier.

I have killed anything under 300TBW in frequent usage in a Year's time. Though I have seen arguments that you can't do that. The Drives just don't hold up to even their 300 TBW ratings.

Inland Drives were originally rated around 1600 TBW for the 1TB m.2 PCI-E 3.0 & 4.0 (slower 4,000-5,000 Meg / sec drives) units and more like 800 for the 7,000 Meg Sec 4.0 units. 2 TB drives typically doubled those TBW ratings.

However, recent Microcenter literature has slashed the TWB values of their drives to something like 600/1200 which is still almost double most other competitors.

The Samsung PROs are always a good choice but pricey and there are a number of other users on here that have great sugeestions.

I have the Inland 1 TB 3.0 Drives, 2 TB 4.0 Drives and one Samsung 970 Pro in active use. All have taken a beating and the 3.0 drives have been in service for 2-3 years with no issues.

I had an Early WD Black that is failing already after light usage (700 M/s)

Traditional SATA SSD's and even the M Key variants just don't have good ratings. You have to hunt for the ones that have good durability. Almost none of those will have a durability above 300.

I use the durability rating as a guideline to give me an idea how long the drives may stay in service. In practice I suppose it's going to come down to individual use cases and how much you hammer these things.

No matter what you have, I always recommend offloading the Swap File (if you still use one) to another drive so it's not beating the shit out of a slice of the memory sectors constantly.

If you get a SSD with wear leveling, then you don't need to worry about beating up a slice.

 

[lopoetve]

I have had a lot of really good luck with the M.2 Drives from Inland (Microcenter). Just stay away from the QLC drives of any brand name. Durability is absolutely dismal. Often times QLC will be rated around 100 TBW. That's garbage tier.

I have killed anything under 300TBW in frequent usage in a Year's time. Though I have seen arguments that you can't do that. The Drives just don't hold up to even their 300 TBW ratings.

Inland Drives were originally rated around 1600 TBW for the 1TB m.2 PCI-E 3.0 & 4.0 (slower 4,000-5,000 Meg / sec drives) units and more like 800 for the 7,000 Meg Sec 4.0 units. 2 TB drives typically doubled those TBW ratings.

However, recent Microcenter literature has slashed the TWB values of their drives to something like 600/1200 which is still almost double most other competitors.

The Samsung PROs are always a good choice but pricey and there are a number of other users on here that have great sugeestions.

I have the Inland 1 TB 3.0 Drives, 2 TB 4.0 Drives and one Samsung 970 Pro in active use. All have taken a beating and the 3.0 drives have been in service for 2-3 years with no issues.

I had an Early WD Black that is failing already after light usage (700 M/s)

Traditional SATA SSD's and even the M Key variants just don't have good ratings. You have to hunt for the ones that have good durability. Almost none of those will have a durability above 300.

I use the durability rating as a guideline to give me an idea how long the drives may stay in service. In practice I suppose it's going to come down to individual use cases and how much you hammer these things.

No matter what you have, I always recommend offloading the Swap File (if you still use one) to another drive so it's not beating the shit out of a slice of the memory sectors constantly.

That’s… not how SSDs work anymore. Wear leveling is automatic. .

 

[xSneak]

Samsung 990 Pro if you need 2TB or less.
WD SN850X for 4TB

 

[applegrcoug]

So what is the best for gen 3?

 

[xDiVolatilX]

Yep that is what happens when you buy the latest 2.5" Drives back in 2018 or whatever for 200.00 for a 1 TB Drive =)
Not knowing in the future that games keep getting bigger no matter what. My internet is slow so I have a ton of games installed
re-downloading everything would take me a few weeks. I wish the Epic launcher wouldn't delete the game director when you uninstall it.
You can rename the folder to something else so it doesn't delete it.

If I were you I would raid 0 all the 2tb drives to make one huge fast drive. And just keep a pair of 1tb drives again raid 0 for the main. Yea redownload would take long but would be nice and neat afterwords lol and load times would be as many times faster as many drives you raid 0 so do 3 for 3 times faster or 4 for 4 times faster etc. Also have u called your ISP to see if they have any good deals for a little bump up in speed?

 

[pitingres]

So what is the best for gen 3?

You can't ask for "best" without indicating what metric is most important. There's no such thing as a part that is fastest in all measurements, cheapest, and most reliable, all at the same time.

For my workload the best PCIe 3.0 SSD is probably the Samsung 970 Pro. Best as in cheapest per gigabyte, excluding SATA, seems to be the Kingston NV2 even though it's PCIe 4.0, or the Silicon Power A60 or Team MP33. Cheapest per gigabyte SSD overall might be the Team AX2 at the moment. Fastest sequential read/write rating, I don't know because I couldn't care less, it's a meaningless spec for most (not all!) users.

 

[lopoetve]

So what is the best for gen 3?

Optane P5800X

 

[Comixbooks]

Optane P5800X

I guess Intel did away with the Optane form factor they promoted it back in 2017. Just something I read a few months back.

 

[pavel]

So what is the best for gen 3?

"Best" depends on prices for the SSDS in your market area (i.e. where you'd order from). I bought a Kingston KC3000 2TB. Many of these ssds are high performance - and you wouldn't know the difference except for looking at benchmarks. However, I like to get 'money's worth' - and look at TB/$ - I like the Samsung 980 Pro - but, it's usually overpriced, imho - unless on a decent sale (which is rare).

 

[lopoetve]

I guess Intel did away with the Optane form factor they promoted it back in 2017. Just something I read a few months back.

Optane is a media type (3D crosspoint), not quite a form factor. It’s not NAND technically.

They did kill it, but we’ll see if it stays dead. Technically it’s the best - almost infinite write endurance, extreme performance with simultaneous reads and writes - it’s just expensive as heck.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

If you get a SSD with wear leveling, then you don't need to worry about beating up a slice.

That's great, perhaps you should cite the drives that come with that shit! Lol. I'm using the Inland drives because they're durable in my experience with them. What fucking drives come with this feature? Ya know, for me and the rest of the people that don't know! lol !

 

[Legendary Gamer]

That’s… not how SSDs work anymore. Wear leveling is automatic. .

Just making sure, because generally speaking. Nobody would fucking know this! Seriously, I live and breathe this shit and build systems all the time... But there is so much shit that changes you cannot know everything. FUCK!

I am happy to be eduMACHAKED that all drives come with "Wear Leveling" but ... I had no fucking idea anything had changed.... Nifty.

Been dealing with fam shit for a while but... I would have imagined this would have made headlines. Man, I must be getting way too old for this shit!

 

[lopoetve]

Just making sure, because generally speaking. Nobody would fucking know this! Seriously, I live and breathe this shit and build systems all the time... But there is so much shit that changes you cannot know everything. FUCK!

I am happy to be eduMACHAKED that all drives come with "Wear Leveling" but ... I had no fucking idea anything had changed.... Nifty.

Been dealing with fam shit for a while but... I would have imagined this would have made headlines. Man, I must be getting way too old for this shit!

Happened around the second generation or so. They actually include more cells than needed for the capacity to help- you can under provision too if you want to extend the life further, but it tends to not be an issue now.

Blocks aren’t assigned to a physical address on the media - it’s left up to the drive. Some use cells as SLC for cache, others don’t, some use DRAM, etc. but block X on your filesystem could be almost anywhere on NAND and will move all the time based on how it works - in fact, they have to move - there’s no such thing as a modify on a cell. Only read wipe and write. And cells have to be written completely.

 

[lopoetve]

That's great, perhaps you should cite the drives that come with that shit! Lol. I'm using the Inland drives because they're durable in my experience with them. What fucking drives come with this feature? Ya know, for me and the rest of the people that don't know! lol !

Pretty much anything but your most low cost sata drives will; and even those tend to. The OS helps with TRIM support. It’s a natural extension of how NAND works

 

[ZodaEX]

That's great, perhaps you should cite the drives that come with that shit! Lol. I'm using the Inland drives because they're durable in my experience with them. What fucking drives come with this feature? Ya know, for me and the rest of the people that don't know! lol !

All of the SSDs in my sig do. I'd recommend reading a couple of reviews to see what features they support before you pull the trigger on any SSDs.

 

[robbiekhan]

Short term going back to my 970 Evo Plus 1TB as the 990 Pro 2TB has some drive health estimation drop issues, dropped to 94% health with just over 2TBW whereas my 970 is 41.7TBW and at 99% after 1.5 years. Samsung said to send it in for RMA. Looks like other have same issue with the 990 too. I reckon it's a firmware bug.

The transfer speeds are pretty insane, 6700MB/s+ write and 7100MB/s read consistently in my Z690 Gaming X. The 970 is around 3500/3500 respectively. Other than outright transfer speeds, I have noticed no difference in day to day use inc gaming. I just wanted a bigger drive and got the 2TB 990 Pro for £194 lol.

 

[Mad Maxx]

I put 3 of the 2TB SN850X NVMe drives in my new build. These babies are fast and smooth. Western Digital has them on sale for $170 w/o heat sink. My mobo has built-in NVMe heat sinks so I'm good.

 

[daglesj]

Anyone still over provision still on top of what the drive sets? I still set aside 2GB on a 250GB, 4GB on a 500GB and 8GB on a 1TB.

 

[Domingo]

My plan is to buy a 2TB WD Black 850 for may main drive and a 4TB Crucial S3 Plus for image backups and things like savegames, installers, etc. I mainly need something large enough to handle 1-to-1 images but still large enough to hold a few hundred GB of other files, too.

I was going to wait and see what PCIE 5 drive brought to the table, but it's looking like they won't be arriving until Q3 and will be hot + expensive.

 

[lopoetve]

Anyone still over provision still on top of what the drive sets? I still set aside 2GB on a 250GB, 4GB on a 500GB and 8GB on a 1TB.

Nah. Enough spare cells to do that automatically, unless you’re buying QLC drives. Only time I have recently is for VSAN cache, and that’s because the limit there was 800G and finding good 800G drives is hard, so you end up with bigger.