Best 2TB NVME Drive

[PrankishTrac]

Looking to get rid of spinning rust for good and speed up my system, what NVME SDD would you recommend, been looking at Intel and considered Samsung however their drives are so... expensive.

Here is the link to the Intel one I've been looking at, reviews seem good, but maybe somebody here as some amazing input they could add. https://www.newegg.com/intel-660p-series-2tb/p/N82E16820167461

[Electronics Wizardy]

What are you storing on it? The 660p is far from best, but a good value. QLC can limit its speed in some uses.

[Juular]

Mushkin Pilot

[PrankishTrac]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What are you storing on it? The 660p is far from best, but a good value. QLC can limit its speed in some uses.

Everything, OS, Games, etc.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, PrankishTrac said:

Everything, OS, Games, etc.

660p should be fine speed wise for that, but you would get a faster drive if you got a 2tb tlc pcie 3 x4 drive. Id personally get the cheaper 660p and the difference in performance is so small.

[PrankishTrac]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

660p should be fine speed wise for that, but you would get a faster drive if you got a 2tb tlc pcie 3 x4 drive. Id personally get the cheaper 660p and the difference in performance is so small.

I would like to save as much money as possible, I also don't NEED it right now. Do you think it would be worth the wait or would I be wasting time?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, PrankishTrac said:

I would like to save as much money as possible, I also don't NEED it right now. Do you think it would be worth the wait or would I be wasting time?

Id go for the 2tb 660p. Performance will be fine for the listed tasks(if you wanted to do things like run lots of vms, or raw video edting, id spend the extra).

[PrankishTrac]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id go for the 2tb 660p. Performance will be fine for the listed tasks(if you wanted to do things like run lots of vms, or raw video edting, id spend the extra).

Okay, thanks for the help!

[Juular]

13 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

but you would get a faster drive if you got a 2tb tlc pcie 3 x4 drive

@PrankishTrac Hello, Mushkin Pilot are cheaper than Intel 660p and it's indeed very fast TLC drive ...

[PrankishTrac]

5 minutes ago, Juular said:

@PrankishTrac Hello, Mushkin Pilot are cheaper than Intel 660p and it's indeed very fast TLC drive ...

Whats the difference between TLC, honestly my biggest concern is reliability, since I will be storying almost everything on it.

 

[Juular]

1 minute ago, PrankishTrac said:

Whats the difference between TLC, honestly my biggest concern is reliability, since I will be storying almost everything on it.

Reliability is no concern with modern SSDs (NVMe at least). Difference that the end user would notice are only in performance, sustained write speeds mostly. QLC drives fall to slower than HDD speeds after some amount of data written continuously and that amounts gets smaller the more full drive is, like on my 80% full 1TB Intel 660p it's about 10GB buffer after which write speeds fall to 100 MB\s. Either way, if you can get TLC drive for cheaper, any of them, it would be better and Mushkin Pilot is no any drive, it's very fast, on par with Samsung 970 Evo.

[PrankishTrac]

3 minutes ago, Juular said:

Reliability is no concern with modern SSDs (NVMe at least). Difference that the end user would notice are only in performance, sustained write speeds mostly. QLC drives fall to slower than HDD speeds after some amount of data written continuously and that amounts gets smaller the more full drive is, like on my 80% full 1TB Intel 660p it's about 10GB buffer after which write speeds fall to 100 MB\s. Either way, if you can get TLC drive for cheaper, any of them, it would be better and Mushkin Pilot is no any drive, it's very fast, on par with Samsung 970 Evo.

Okay, thanks for the suggestion not that much more expensive either.

[Juular]

1 minute ago, PrankishTrac said:

Okay, thanks for the suggestion not that much more expensive either.

It's cheaper, actually ... https://pcpartpicker.com/product/VzQG3C/mushkin-pilot-2-tb-m2-2280-solid-state-drive-mknssdpl2tb-d8

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Juular said:

It's cheaper, actually ... https://pcpartpicker.com/product/VzQG3C/mushkin-pilot-2-tb-m2-2280-solid-state-drive-mknssdpl2tb-d8

Just saying that 200 dollar pice point is from one seller on amazon that has one review. Everyone else seems to be selling it for 220-250 ish.

 

Also intel normally has a much better track record with reliability than many other brands.

[Juular]

10 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Just saying that 200 dollar pice point is from one seller on amazon that has one review. Everyone else seems to be selling it for 220-250 ish.

True ... still, it's probably better to go for 220$ TLC than 200$ QLC.

QLC were supposed to bring SSD prices down and yet we don't see that. And that will not chance while people will still pay the same price for QLC as for TLC.

10 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Also intel normally has a much better track record with reliability than many other brands.

Because they mostly make just the CPUs for consumer market which don't fail at all ?

Almost all SSDs on the market use a limited choice of controllers and NAND. And while Intel makes their own NAND (QLC), they use SMI controller which can be found in Kingston A2000 too for example, generally speaking all SSDs except Samsung you can find will differ just by a sticker slapped on them because you could find several other SSDs with the same controller and NAND choices and they will perform similarly. Mushkin Pilot, Intel 760p, HP EX920, ADATA SX8200 Pro and HP EX950 (no, newer controller) for example use the same controller and NAND.

[Kilrah]

I like my Adata SX8200Pro.

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 hours ago, Juular said:

True ... still, it's probably better to go for 220$ TLC than 200$ QLC.

But for the listed use, tlc vs qlc really won't matter, the slc cache is big enough on the 660p to not notice the write speeds, and endurance won't be an issue.

 

9 hours ago, Juular said:

Because they mostly make just the CPUs for consumer market which don't fail at all ?

Almost all SSDs on the market use a limited choice of controllers and NAND. And while Intel makes their own NAND (QLC), they use SMI controller which can be found in Kingston A2000 too for example, generally speaking all SSDs except Samsung you can find will differ just by a sticker slapped on them because you could find several other SSDs with the same controller and NAND choices and they will perform similarly. Mushkin Pilot, Intel 760p, HP EX920, ADATA SX8200 Pro and HP EX950 (no, newer controller) for example use the same controller and NAND.

But intel(and samsung for that matter) seems to put the extra effort into making them more reliabable. From people that work with lots of drives, like doing laptop deployments, intel and samsung seem to be on top with reliability.

[Juular]

17 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

the slc cache is big enough on the 660p to not notice the write speeds

I do notice it if i write more than 10GB, my 1TB drive are 80% full, speeds fall to 100MB\s.

17 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

But intel(and samsung for that matter) seems to put the extra effort into making them more reliabable

Nothing Intel can do about that, as i said, they use the same controller and NAND as all other SSD manufacturers except Samsung which kinda stands out but their pricing are sky high.