Who makes the best price/performance 1TB gen 4 or better Nvme for a new PC?

wareyore

HDCOTY 2023
Joined
Jan 1, 2014
Messages
2,151
I've liked the Lexar NM790 at ~$70 when I could get them over the last year or so. What other 1TB Nvme drives are best suited for new os drives on systems these days?

1725209302405.png
 
For just TLC. 1TB and Gen4, as long as you buy from a decent manufacturer that stands behind their product, It doesn't really matter at this point. 8-50TB, Gen5, specific use cases or workflows and then the options start to matter.
 
WD/Kingston/Samsung you can seldom go wrong. I lean more towards WD/Kingston these days due to Samsung performance issue under linux.
 
any of the good brands and whichever is on sale at the time.
Of course, we need to define the "good" brands. My rule: Anything sold on Amazon sold by lots of companies is suspect if all those companies have brand names that you can't pronounce or never heard of. Lots of scammer companies (from China).
 
Just buying from a "good" brand doesn't automatically make everything from their lineup acceptable for all use cases, same with them being TLC vs QLC, because TLC DRAM-less drives exist. Just make sure that if you're going to be using a drive for lots of I/O intensive tasks and sustained performance matters to you, opt for a drive with DRAM cache, but if you're just getting something for storage, then that becomes largely irrelevant.
 
but if you're just getting something for storage, then that becomes largely irrelevant.
If you are using something just for storage, why not an HDD? Posing the question as an exercise.

Long term, my goal is to replace 36 TB of spinning rust now used primarily for storage (lots of reasons, TL;DR) with SSDs. OI course, when SSDs become cheap enough my 36 TB could easily be 50 TB. :D
 
If you are using something just for storage, why not an HDD? Posing the question as an exercise.
Should be obvious.

Not every system is a large enough form factor to put an HDD in (or it might be undesireable due to thermals, etc), and it could just be games storage, not general media/document archival, so high read speeds would still be desirable even if top write performance isn't.

And furthermore, if large scale storage is your thing, then external/networked storage is the answer, but that's off-topic and beyond the scope of what was asked in the OP.
 
I am currently using Samsung 980 Pro's and WD Black SN850X.
The 980 seems to have really high endurance. Wrote almost a PB to it in a few days.
Samsung-980-Pro-56-percent-Chia.jpg
 
I've had really good luck with the Kingston NV2 series of NVME. Decent performer and runs nice and cool.
 
WD/Kingston/Samsung you can seldom go wrong. I lean more towards WD/Kingston these days due to Samsung performance issue under linux.
I avoid WD since they had that foul up on their black line that caused a large number of failures. It was clearly a design issue that shouldn't have occurred.
 
How on earth are you using that much data?

Probably Chia mining.
Ya, my friend wanted to try Chia mining back in 2021. I tried to talk him out of it but he insisted. He bought the 1TB 980 Pro, five 8TB drives, and had a 2TB passport.
All of those writes were done when I was re-plotting all the drives for pool mining.
About a year later we shut it down and he sold me all the drives. I ended up selling 4 of the 8TB drives to a friend since 8's were too small to put into my NAS.
I kept the 8TB Black since it's that cool looking external.
btw, it wasn't a good idea to buy an open box NVME during 2021 due to people using up the drives plotting and then returning them.
1725487277869.png
 
Last edited:
I avoid WD since they had that foul up on their black line that caused a large number of failures. It was clearly a design issue that shouldn't have occurred.
Then avoid Samsung for their 980 PRO fiasco, avoid Kingston and AData for swapping our parts once in retail vs review samples..
Most companies have some form of scandal behind them these days.
 
Then avoid Samsung for their 980 PRO fiasco, avoid Kingston and AData for swapping our parts once in retail vs review samples..
Most companies have some form of scandal behind them these days.
Different level of sloppiness and denial when issue discovered.
 
Haven't had any issues with my SN850X in my daily rig or my 12 or so SN750s I have, got an SN850 non-x or two around here somewhere too lol.
 
Back
Top