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NewMaxx

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  1. Not directly. DRAM (and HMB) is used mostly for mapping which is most relevant for small I/O. Such I/O, as kokosnh states, is already bottlenecked by USB. Indirectly, some DRAM-less drives may be slower in sustained sequential/large I/O because of a reliance on a large SLC cache to mask poor performance. However, this isn't really the case for the 4TB NM790. Check the sustained write performance in the Tom's Hardware review. Also, at 4TB, you are already getting the most out of any drive's interleaving, which will probably exceed USB bandwidth (10Gbps for sure). I think that's also the case for 20Gbps with this drive. Transfers like this are often Q1T1, though, which will be slower, but you may be able to thread manually.
  2. NM790 is fine, just make sure the enclosure has thermal padding for the drive. Its controller gets hot. I have one of the 4TB ones which I mini-reviewed on my subreddit, it's a good fit for your use case.
  3. TBW is arbitrary and largely meaningless. Current TLC is rated for around 3,000 cycles, although there is variance from 700 (media grade) to 5,000 (best RG) or 10,000 (industrial/commercial grade). SLC mode will be 60,000 to 100,000 for consumer, 250,000 or more in some cases. QLC is at around 1,500. TBW will usually hit a mark far below these values, but it's also within the warranty period (which is more important). TBW also is supposed to refer to NAND writes rather than host so accounts for write amplification, and WA can vary based on many factors. "The obvious question then is, if LDPC is so great, why wouldn't you use it as standard?" You answered this yourself right after: it's more computationally expensive to use soft decoding. Soft decoding can require more power, needs more die space for the ECC engine, needs more NAND space for spare corrective code, and can be less efficient (uses more power, produces more heat). Also, it does increase latency (if you are hitting enough decoding steps). Luckily, it's usually not needed in the early lifetime of drives, in fact I would expect more consumer drives don't see enough wear for this to matter much. As a side note on MLC: some 3D TLC has better endurance than some 2D MLC. Small process MLC with BCH was actually worse than Samsung's initial V-NAND TLC generations. Samsung's last 2D MLC was around 10,000 cycles while their early V-NAND was 20,000 to 30,000 for 3-bit MLC (TLC). 3D NAND is in a much larger effective node with a structure that reduces cell-to-cell interference, and can carry far more charge, so comparing most consumer MLC to TLC is not useful. The exception is Samsung's 3D MLC (which they no longer make). Micron's first-gen 3D MLC was just their TLC in MLC mode, which is not the same as native.
  4. Warning Comp. Temp. Threshold: 90 Celsius Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold: 95 Celsius For this drive. The controller package itself can get quite hot without a heatsink, though.
  5. The T7 Shield is designed to maintain. Also, you want to thread your transfers for maximum performance, although that doesn't always work well over USB.
  6. Modern DRAM-less NVMe drives are quite good. I'd limit this to newer Gen4 models, 5+ GB/s usually, but I think it's been proven they are very fast. And also quite efficient. Gen3 drives (w/DRAM) have a lot of drawbacks. Usually 8-channel (power and thermals), often 28nm (less efficient), older flash (less efficient and slower). Also, hardware is regularly swapped on these. The exceptions are, again, the Gold P31 (hard to find, expensive) and the 970 EVO Plus (can be expensive, and has two hardware revisions). It's not a matter of "get Gen4 since it's faster" since you're not going to notice a big difference in normal use. It's more a matter of, why use older tech if you don't have to, and that's exactly how manufacturers see it. It's why SATA SSDs are junk and Gen3 NVMe SSDs are largely junk as well. The new tech comes in 4.0 drives, it's not really a matter of the bandwidth difference but marketing and the fact drives are backward compatible anyway. Although sure, if you can find the 970EP as the cheapest 2TB drive, go for it. I just wouldn't suggest others like say, the SX8200 Pro, because the reliability just isn't there when it's using the flash and controller overstock of the week. (and older DRAM-less controllers, E13T/3.0 era included, are just less reliable) And also, QLC can be quite usable, so right off the bat I think that's contradictory to the OP. A cheap 2TB P41 Plus can be quite reasonable. And yes, the 3.0 670p also works, if you can find it. But I've said my piece as someone who has a lot of experience in this field and gave my recommendation above, hopefully more than enough information in this thread to help decision making. (the most popular capacious 3.0 TLC drive w/DRAM is the 4TB MP34, which has some reliability issues, and my advice in this thread is based on some desire for "reliability")
  7. Gen3 isn't necessarily cheaper. If it is, great. I probably wouldn't buy Gen3 today given that Gen4 is as fast and usually faster (and more efficient) and can usually be found at the same price. Unless you're okay with DRAM-less drives and older hardware/flash. I question the reliability then, which is something most people won't compromise on. Although many Gen4 drives are also junky. And honestly, QLC isn't necessarily bad, there are cases I'd take it over TLC even. In any case, looking at current availability (Amazon U.S.), the WD Blue SN580 is in a good spot. For $10 more or so you can get higher-end, the Crucial T500 has been $108 which is the deal to beat I think for 2TB + TLC. That was the Crucial site price though, but I think it hit $102 on Amazon at one point. Prices are on the way up however, and these are USD prices before tax.
  8. Want to add to my post just above: the issue isn't necessarily signal integrity, another problem was power supply. 75W from PCIe is enough for four Gen5 drives at peak but there is still some concern for stability which required additional circuitry on the AIC PCB. Sabrent just put out a single-drive adapter for Gen5.
  9. It depends on your region. If you live in an area supported by PCPartPicker, check and filter there. Otherwise I'd need more information.
  10. Right, and the only two worthwhile are the Gold P31 (difficult to find in many regions, especially at 2TB) and the overpriced 970 EVO Plus. The latter has undergone hardware upgrades so it's not a bad choice, but many Gen4 options will be more efficient as well as "faster." I'd make an exception for the 970EP if you can find it priced well, which does happen. But for most cases, it's safe to ignore Gen3.
  11. Cards requiring bifurcation aren't technically restricted by generation. My "3.0" card works with my 4.0 drives just fine. Unfortunately, I don't have 5.0 drives to test, but I know someone who works on this stuff (ex-Tom's Hardware SSD reviewer who works on designing such products). IIRC, 5.0 support on 4.0 adapters is hit or miss and they had to make 5.0-specific adapters tuned with retimers to ensure that level of performance, however it's possible that good traces would work (e.g. CPU lanes, which you'd usually be using for bifurcation anyway).
  12. If by "EU" you mean "UK", the cheapest 2TB TLC drive would be the WD SN580. In other areas of the EU it might be the MP44L (which to my knowledge is still TLC). This is EXCLUDING 3.0 drives as for the most part there's no reason to go with 3.0, they are inferior in every way except for minor exceptions that are rarer and usually cost more.
  13. I can help here as I have a full spreadsheet with all these drives. There's multiple SN560 types but also the SN560E, with the "E" used in portable SSDs. For example, some had/have the SN550E, SN750E, etc. The SN560E is the older version of the SN560, the main difference being the controller used. CH SN560 uses the regular Polaris Mp16 controller and is x2 4.0 while the PC SN560 is Mp16+ and x4 4.0. In the SN560E's case, the first is switched to x4 PCIe 3.0. The controller difference is from original SN550 (Mp16) to SN570 SE/2TB + SN580 (Mp16+). The difference there is effectively just the bus speed, from 1200 to 1600 MT/s. For a 3.0 drive this has virtually no impact (it can give more max bandwidth for a 4.0, and a slight latency improvement). If buying this as an "SN560" this is closer to the x2 4.0 than the x4 4.0 (and x2 4.0 does translate to x4 3.0 in direct bandwidth with minor power efficiency differences, also WD is known to do this weird x2 PHY switch for CH drives as they are designed for whitelisted applications like the XBox). I have no evidence of this but I believe the "E" models are designed for portable SSDs in a way that makes them potentially be capped in some ways when "shucked" for internal usage. This could be shown with lower sustained/TLC write performance, but I have not been able to test this myself. In any meaningful way you should compare it equal to the stock drive which, in this case, would be the updated SN550 with BiCS5 (112L). The original SN570 (<2TB, check Tom's Hardware) also uses this controller and flash combo at x4 3.0 so is the closest drive for a direct comparison in performance. The SN560E's firmware revision (232xWD) puts it right before the updated SN550 (233xWD) and original SN570 (234xWD) so this makes sense. So the drive you received both is and isn't what it was sold at ("SN560") but it's close enough. tl;dr as this is mostly useless information - you got what is usually used for portable SSDs (enclosure with a bridge chip) that's basically a launch 1TB SN570, which is not a bad drive. I think regular SN560s often come in laptops and those are more like the SN580 which has a bit more bandwidth. (that $979 ASUS at Best Buy right now comes to mind)
  14. If you can find one in the M.2 form factor with DRAM, even OEM, you can convert that to the 2.5" form factor easily enough. Older systems can in many cases have their UEFI modified to support NVMe booting as well, but most systems will support NVMe as a secondary drive as-is via PCIe spec (if you have Windows 8.1+ or the driver for 7/8.0). In most cases any system old enough not to have any options there is probably old enough that it won't benefit much from DRAM on an SATA SSD anyway. There are some good DRAM-less ones too, you just have to avoid poor quality flash and QLC (and if possible, weaker controllers).
  15. https://sourceforge.net/projects/cloverefiboot/ Basically, you use a legacy boot method to get to the bootloader which supports NVMe for indirect boot. The PCIe issue is separate but if the system has PCIe (rather than PCI) it should support it regardless. As for BIOS mod, I'd need to know the exact board to see if it's moddable. Most likely it is. Here is an update for the Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P for one example.
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