Kingston NV2 2TB - cheapest way to add a 4TB Raid-0 NVMe gamedrive

[igor_kavinski]

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/3QXJ7P/kingston-nv2-2-tb-m2-2280-pcie-40-x4-nvme-solid-state-drive-snv2s2000g

$129.99 from B&H. $260 for a 4TB RAID-0 game drive if you have two spare M.2 slots on your mobo.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Kingston NV2 2TB Review | Affordable Gen4 Storage | GPCB

Being an entry-level SSD, the Kingston NV2 range was launched in September 2022, with only a brief press release and little fanfare. This is in stark contrast to most high-end NVMe SSD releases, but not surprising considering the NV2’s budget nature. It uses Phison’s new PS5021-E21 controller...

www.gamingpcbuilder.com

Benchmarks look fine for a DRAM-less SSD.

 

[Captante]

I wonder how 2 of them would do on an add-in 8x PCIe NVME card?



And only certain drive-benchmarks will be affected by "no DRAM" cache drives (typically BIG reads/writes) so depending on how the drive is used it's possible to never notice it "seat-of-the-pants" for home-users.

OTOH if you frequently deal with large media file-transfers or databases you might end up regretting the purchase after hitting the "cache-wall" a few times and dropping to sub-HDD speeds.

 

[igor_kavinski]

OTOH if you frequently deal with large media file-transfers or databases you might end up regretting the purchase after hitting the "cache-wall" a few times and dropping to sub-HDD speeds.

That's why I would do the RAID-0 to mitigate some of the performance loss. Twice the throughput should mean cutting transfer times in half.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I wonder how 2 of them would do on an add-in 8x PCIe NVME card?

Depends on the quality of the adapter card. If it's good and is able to split the x4 lanes evenly between the two SSDs, it should work fine.

 

[Captante]

That's why I would do the RAID-0 to mitigate some of the performance loss. Twice the throughput should mean cutting transfer times in half.

Game-levels are typically NOT big enough to run into the cache problem even on a single drive so these in RAID 0 used as a Steam drive might be interesting!

 

[Captante]

Right now I have Steam running on a dedicated Crucial 1tb Gen 3 NVME. (original P5 w/DRAM)

Pretty sure RAID 0 will result in the exact same cache usage in both drives so it won't mitigate the problem of no DRAM in applications where it comes up.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Pretty sure RAID 0 will result in the exact same cache usage in both drives so it won't mitigate the problem of no DRAM in applications where it comes up.

Kingston NV2 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review - Value SSD Done Right

The Kingston NV2 is a huge improvement over the NV1. It comes at similar pricing but is significantly faster. Thanks to the new Phison E21 controller, the drive offers the highly popular PCIe 4.0 capability at only $80 for the 1 TB version, making it a great choice for any cost-optimized system.

www.techpowerup.com

Write speed starts out at around 2.8 GB/s, which is surprisingly low for a "PCIe 4.0 SSD", and in the range of what we're usually seeing on Gen 3 SSDs. The underlying reason is that there's only four flash channels, so writing is slower. Once 88 GB have been written, the pseudo-SLC cache is full, and the drive has to write to flash directly. 88 GB for a 1 TB SSD in 2022 is relatively small, but still ok. Writes now run at a very respectable 600 MB/s—considerably faster than what SATA drives offer. Only once 800 GB have been written to the drive, performance starts jumping between 600 and 80 MB/s, averaging to around 400 MB/s, until the drive is full. This is a HUGE improvement compared to the Kingston NV1, which dropped to approximately 100 MB/s once the SLC cache was full.

With RAID-0, in worst case you would have to write 1.6 TB of data for performance to falter below a constant 600 MB/s.