Question QLC for larger capacity drives?

[StinkyPinky]

I know QLC is often frowned upon due to endurance issues, but my understanding is that at large capacities (2TB for example) this is much less of an issue? Is that true?

Just thinking of getting the below drive as a gaming/media drive and the price for it seems very competitive with decent speeds.

Corsair MP600 Core M.2 2280 2TB PCIe, NVMe Internal SSD - Newegg.com

 

[UsandThem]

They are fine for "normal" uses, including the OS drive. While the endurance isn't as high as TLC drives, most users don't write that much data to their drives.

What they aren't good for is for users who write large amounts of data (like encoding Blu-ray discs, video editing, writing and moving very large files etc).

Almost all of my SSDs that I have in the various computers in the house have less than 50 TB written to them in over 5 years.

That said, if you can get a good quality NVMe 3.0 TLC SSD for less than what the Corsair drive you linked to cost, you will never notice less "real world" performance from it using using it as a OS/storage/media drive. A few drives that are good performers and save you a few bucks:

https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-2tb-blue-sn550-nvme/p/N82E16820250173

https://www.newegg.com/mushkin-enhanced-pilot-e-2tb/p/N82E16820226902

https://www.newegg.com/xpg-gammix-2tb/p/0D9-00DF-00047?Item=9SIAJNUAJP4710

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've been running a pair of 1TB QLC Intel 660P drives. 1800MB/sec read/write. In RAID-0, they were over 3000MB/sec read/write.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Honestly in the end I just went for a Samsung 980 1TB, it was on special at the Samsung store for $104.

 

[UsandThem]

Honestly in the end I just went for a Samsung 980 1TB, it was on special at the Samsung store for $104.

That's the drive I bought because it was the only one on sale when I needed one, and I've been very happy with its performance.

It can write a lot of data before it exhausts its SLC cache, and even then the cache recovers much quicker than a lot of drives out there.

 

[nosurprises]

In most usage QLC is fine and a major upgrade to HDD. If you want to use it for professional type of work like writing GBs of data constantly, it can be an issue -- the sequential write speed can be slower than HDD.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I wouldn't know about QLC. I picked up a pair of SK Hynix P31 Gold NVMEs for a machine I'm building. They have an SLC buffer in a design they call HyperWrite, increasing the speed for writes.

Haven't got that machine together yet -- too many things on my plate unrelated to my computers and their projects. But the SK Hynix model has good press, and they're priced a bit lower.