NewMaxx

Thanks a lot! You saved me a bad purchase 😄
Went for the SN580 from various reviews and benchmarks this is imo the best all round cheap drive (at least for my inteded use)

Kioxia Exceria Plus G3, WD SN580, Team MP44L are good cheap drives. Also the WD SN770, Lexar NM790, if in your region.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

I think OP was thinking about having a PCIe switch to switch between drives, and only have one usable at a time. I'm guessing this is possible, but liekly a produce that has a pretty small userbase.
 
One fun fact is some of the optane + qlc drives intel sold needed PCIe bifurcation support on the board. These are dead now, but a lot of oem systems probably support bifurcation on the m.2 slot because of this.

No it’s pretty reasonable, first thing I do is disable the fastboot in windows.
As fastboot in windows just put your PC to form of a hybrid hibernation mode, instead of shutting it down, and then starting fresh next day. 
 
do not mix the fastboot in uefi, with the windows one. 
the uefi is just skiping POST procedure ( if you don’t OC, or change hardware, it ok, but it’s safer and slower for motherboard, to check if everything is OK on evry PC power on )

as for your problems, it seems just like typical data retention problem, and looks like the SSD just isn't refreshing the old data.
SSD have to use error correction algorithm, like LDPC, to read the old data, so it’s slower. The problem was known from the first commercial use of TLC NAND in Samsung 840, when the SSD would slow down to like 1MBps reading couple months old data

what model is it? And how old is the data? 
 
 

KC3000 is best 
Phison E18 (8ch) + DDR4 + 176L TLC micron

next is S70 blade 
IG5236 (8ch)+ DDR4 + 176l TLC micron or 128L TLC YMTC ( the 128l TLC is comparable to P5 plus ) 

worst is P5 plus ( but not so far from s70 blade, problem is, it’s hot)
Micron DM02A1 (8ch) + DDR4 + 176l TLC micron 

 
endurance is similar, as they are on the same 176l TLC micron NAND, at least if you don't get the YMTC nand in s70.
 
 
 

You are correct. The motherboard will still support a pcie 4.0 connection, but you will only get 3.0 speeds if your cpu doesn't support it.( The connection between the cpu and chipset will be pcie gen 3)

It's strangely constructed question.


Top of the line PCIE 4.0 SSD, will be faster, then top of the line PCIe 3.0 SSD (as 2 generation of SSD controller, and NAND will do the the work ) even in PCIe 3.0 slot. 
But the sequential speeds will be similar, as both are capped on PCIE 3.0 x4.

Only in CPU M.2 slot, you could see the 4.0 gen one, do over 3500MBps
 

r/NewMaxx but a dude on Amazon recently got the QLC too.

I would just add that if you plan on putting this device in your next build then it might be better to go with pci-e 4 instead so you can take advantage of it at that point. pci-e 3 was around for 10 years before they started changing over to pci-e 4. Just something to think about.

It's somewhat similar to the WD Green (SATA) controller switch-a-roo many years back (circa 2018) where they basically put on a USB flash drive controller. The SA510 went from the stellar Marvell 88SS1074 to basically a low-end SanDisk part. These kind of controllers are perfectly serviceable but are in no way as good as the original, especially as the new model lacks DRAM (which is more important for SATA SSDs).
 
"Serviceable" meaning, yeah, older computer upgrade, large storage, etc, assuming precautions are taken. Arguably you should move to NVMe for anything more right now, anyway. It's hard to find a good SATA drive.

MTBF is also a pretty meaningless specification. TBW is actually part of the warranty, amount written or time. If you do the math you get the drive writes per day (DWPD) value which is more valuable, usually in enterprise, but basically if the backups will fall short of the TBW within the time period then the TBW doesn't mean too much for warranty. It can help gauge general data retention or wear endurance but this is not related to reliability per se (MTBF is closer there, but it's statistical based on the bathtub curve). I say can because TBW is often arbitrary on consumer SSDs.
 
"Reliability" wise I would lean proprietary - Crucial P5 Plus, Hynix Platinum P41/Solidigm P44 Pro, Samsung 980/990 PRO (despite the issues), or WD SN850(X), although I suppose the SN770 would be adequate. To be fair I hadn't read your original reply, was just giving basic info on-the-fly based on his response to you, basically that he misunderstood the max spec.

Not the person you are replying to with questions, but you can't go by the "on the box" sequential "up to" speed specifications. 7,300 MB/s is with high queue depth and also in the SLC cache. The 1 GB/s or so you can get with a 10Gbps enclosure would match up better with steady state (TLC) speed and preferably at QD1 (typical file transfers). The 1TB SN850X is probably around there, but it has a large cache so you may have to consider that, keeping in mind the cache size changes with free space.
 
Also, TBW means very little for the most part in the consumer space. "Reliability" is very difficult to measure here. I would put the SN850X on the higher end of that, though.

As some others said, just use windows storage spaces and make them 1 single drive. 

My game library is set up like this, I have a 1TB drives, and 2 256’s all acting as 1 large drive. I wouldn’t do this for critical data, but games are pretty much throw away data since it’s all re-downloadable from steam/origin/blizzard etc 

Conflicting data is an understatement. I really need to make a singular and coherent article on this subject, but who has the time...
 
Anyway, for your questions: covering the whole SSD is better practice. You want to spread heat to some degree because of how composite sensors work. Usually you are told to leave labels in place when installing a heatsink.

2280 is just the dimensions. 22mm wide and 80mm long. the enclosure doesn't support that drive as it uses the NVMe protocol but the enclosure only supports SATA.

No, the enclosure only supports SATA drives. You need one that supports NVMe.

GC still relies on TRIM to identify invalid pages more quickly but it is automatic at idle, yes. Enclosures have a sleep timer which can often be modified in firmware (for the bridge chip). Sufficient GC will probably be detected as the drive being active - the reason it's done during idle is so it doesn't interfere with host I/O. If you mean the enclosure goes to sleep before GC has time to kick in, I suppose that's possible, although running an optimize/TRIM would probably kick it into gear. The amount of idle time before GC varies and can be quite high/long on some drives but this time is also tracked such that the drive will engage it more quickly if necessary (e.g. if SLC is full).
 
Any USB3.0+ port will/should support UASP and through SCSI a method to discard. Certain older bridge chips may turn off the relevant block discard flag, probably because the chip manufacturers wanted to make newer products for more $ that had TRIM explicitly because the ability to support it is trivial (you can often modify firmware or workaround this limitation). In any case, any modern system and enclosure should have implicit support, although there are ways to test this (and also Windows seems to ignore this flag). I can say for sure that any 10Gbps chip is by far new enough.

The bridge chip is PCIe on one side, USB the other, with protocols being NVMe and UASP respectively. The TRIM command is ATA with SCSI's analog being UNMAP. The bridge chip translates SCSI to NVMe. If you look under the RTL9210B on Realtek's site, for example:
 
"Supports all command set of NVM Express SCSI Translation (e.g., Unmap, Security protocol in/out …)"
 
Notice I said TRIM is an ATA command and not NVMe. In NVMe it's Deallocate. The secret here is that the SSD controller will interpret these (TRIM, UNMAP, Deallocate, Discard) effectively as TRIM. For simplicity's sake, the primary three are usually referred to as TRIM.
 
TRIM is not as important as it used to be because modern drives are aggressive with maintenance and garbage collection, especially because they rely on SLC caching. Main reason for this is to maintain performance for burst writes (consumer), and they also check for stale data for refreshing. Without TRIM the drive is not notified by the filesystem/host when files are deleted, however if a future write from the host goes to the same location the drive realizes this file is invalid so it can mark areas for GC the next time the drive is idle. This can be an issue with sustained writes especially on a fuller drive, but for everyday consumer use (read-heavy, burst writes with lots of idle time) with some free space (with TLC and DRAM, even factory OP is enough) this isn't a huge deal. In certain environments (NAS/servers w/parity) you may even need to turn off TRIM, but I won't complicate the dicussion here.
 
That said, it is somewhat relevant for older consoles which would not send the command to external USB storage. Usually you're using SATA SSDs in that case and a lot of the bigger ones were and are DRAM-less (and possibly QLC, too) so the lack of TRIM can in some cases hurt performance, although on an old console it's not a big deal. It's still usually not the enclosure's fault.
 
To address the question more specifically, that is for 10Gbps external NVMe SSDs, it's less of an issue because you're bottlenecked by USB in most cases. USB can't pass HMB (TB and certain USB4 implementations can) so there are some drives that *might* get bogged down here, like the P3/P3 Plus, if you're doing a lot of writes.

You can also consider the s70 blade, as it’s little cheaper.
but yes, if performance matter, then go KC3000. 
 
Ps. Buy why it needs to be PCIe 4.0? 

If you have very slow reads it's because the cells have degraded and the controller is forced to use soft error correction, read retries, and even parity to reconstruct the data. This can happen with a very worn drive, or simply if the data is stale and never refreshed. Without knowing how the drive was used and more about the setup I can't pinpoint the issue but I will say it's extremely rare unless you had the drive sitting in a closet for two years. Alternatively there's something wrong with the firmware. The drive is supposed to refresh on its own and a full drive of reads (scan) will induce this, too. However, manually reimaging the drive - that is, making an image, secure erasing, then reapplying the image, or something equivalent - twice a year will do the trick.