4tb Crucial P3 Plus or 4TB MX500

[davidst95]

Hi, I'm looking at getting a 4TB SSD to replace an old failing hard drive.  It will mainly be used for data I don't usually use daily and nightly backups of my Intel Optane 480gb OS drive (which is usually about 200gb full) with Acronis True Image, so speed isn't really an issue   I'm looking at either the 4tb Crucial P3 Plus NVMe or the Crucial 4TB MX500.   The P3 is, of course, faster but it is dramless and is QLC and has 800TB TBW, while the MX500 is 3D TLC with 1000TB TBW.   I have a 2TB Samsung 990 for games and VMs.

 

I read some people say dramless QLC SSDs are perfectly fine while others say stay away from them.   Both drives are similar prices, and I have space in my desktop for either one.   Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

 

David

[flibberdipper]

I'll suggest neither and I'll instead do my usual simp of the Teamgroup MP34. ~3,500MB/s read and 2,500MB/s write, DRAM cache, 2,400TBW endurance, and the price is lower than both (at least in the US).

 

I've got a pair of MP33's (a 128 and a 256GB) as well as a 4TB MP34 and they've all been perfect so far.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, davidst95 said:

Hi, I'm looking at getting a 4TB SSD to replace an old failing hard drive.  It will mainly be used for data I don't usually use daily and nightly backups of my Intel Optane 480gb OS drive (which is usually about 200gb full) with Acronis True Image, so speed isn't really an issue   I'm looking at either the 4tb Crucial P3 Plus NVMe or the Crucial 4TB MX500.   The P3 is, of course, faster but it is dramless and is QLC and has 800TB TBW, while the MX500 is 3D TLC with 1000TB TBW.   I have a 2TB Samsung 990 for games and VMs.

 

I read some people say dramless QLC SSDs are perfectly fine while others say stay away from them.   Both drives are similar prices, and I have space in my desktop for either one.   Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

 

David

Both will be multiple times as fast as that hard drive (as well as a LOT more expensive) the standard pricing for NVMEs seemed to end at 2tb

 

some dramless drives are OK, because they use system ram instead. The drives I hear about that with though are a lot smaller than 4tb.  What is your use case for this?

[davidst95]

Hi, sorry for the delay.   I have been on travel. 

On 5/24/2023 at 6:14 PM, Bombastinator said:

Both will be multiple times as fast as that hard drive (as well as a LOT more expensive) the standard pricing for NVMEs seemed to end at 2tb

 

some dramless drives are OK, because they use system ram instead. The drives I hear about that with though are a lot smaller than 4tb.  What is your use case for this?

 

Hi, sorry for the delay.   I have been on travel.  I primarily want to use the drive as data storage for nightly backups of my OS drive (Intel 905 480 GB Optane) and temporary downloads folder.   I already have a 2tb Samsung 990 for my games and other apps.   Thanks.

 

David

[davidst95]

On 5/24/2023 at 6:14 PM, flibberdipper said:

I'll suggest neither and I'll instead do my usual simp of the Teamgroup MP34. ~3,500MB/s read and 2,500MB/s write, DRAM cache, 2,400TBW endurance, and the price is lower than both (at least in the US).

 

I've got a pair of MP33's (a 128 and a 256GB) as well as a 4TB MP34 and they've all been perfect so far.

 

Sorry for the delay.   Thanks for the suggestion.   I'll check the drive out.

[Bombastinator]

11 minutes ago, davidst95 said:

Hi, sorry for the delay.   I have been on travel. 

 

Hi, sorry for the delay.   I have been on travel.  I primarily want to use the drive as data storage for nightly backups of my OS drive (Intel 905 480 GB Optane) and temporary downloads folder.   I already have a 2tb Samsung 990 for my games and other apps.   Thanks.

 

David

So reliability not speed.  In windows you just make restore points.  Also there’s OneDrive.you can also have a “back it up every 24hs thing setup so you don’t even have to think about it.  Iirc the standard is 3 sets of backups. One on the drive, one with you but not in the machine, and one off site (so likely some sort of cloud thing these days). Backup one seems to be the nvme.  Backup 2 could be a usb stick and backup 3 could be cloud.  Chances of failure get statistically very very small when you do it that way.  It depends on how important and unrecreatable the data is though.

[davidst95]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

So reliability not speed.  In windows you just make restore points.  Also there’s OneDrive.you can also have a “back it up every 24hs thing setup so you don’t even have to think about it.  Iirc the standard is 3 sets of backups. One on the drive, one with you but not in the machine, and one off site (so likely some sort of cloud thing these days). Backup one seems to be the nvme.  Backup 2 could be a usb stick and backup 3 could be cloud.  Chances of failure get statistically very very small when you do it that way.  It depends on how important and unrecreatable the data is though.

 

Thanks for the suggestions.   I should have clarified how I back up my OS drive.   I use Acronis True Image (or whatever it's called now).    After it's saved to a local disk, it automatically clones the image to my UnRaid server.  I have been using this process for years and have been happy with it.   It's really simple to restore the OS if I need to. I'm not a big fan of Windows restore points.    I have it not worked in the past when I really needed it to.  

 

Also, I forgot to mention I have a dual boot with a Ubuntu partition, so Acronis takes care of the whole OS drive in one backup.   It also allows me to restore specific partitions in case I just need one OS reverted back on a certain day.

 

I was just looking for a cheap big scratch disk for the initial backup and data I want to keep locally.   I just use OneDrive for my documents and an extra copy location of important photos so I can access them on multiple machines.

 

Thanks again,

 

David