Question The Evo 860/870 of the NVMe World is???

[Caveman]

I'm targeting a new build late fall... My last rig was 3 years ago... At that point I bought the best bang for the buck SSD which IIR, was the 860 or 870 - not the fastest but no slouch, reliable and relatively inexpensive. Will be looking for the same sort of deal for a 2TB NVME drive later this year.

Any suggestions based on those loose requirements? And... Considering I know next to nothing about NVMe drives, is there any basic advice I need to know about these relative to SSds?

 

[damian101]

I wouldn't really worry about reliability when it comes to SSDs nowadays, unreliable SSD controllers that cause sudden SSD deaths seem to be a thing of the past. And they were easy to spot as a significant portion of the SSDs tended to fail in the first few weeks of usage, so you might want to check user reviews of the SSD model before buying it.
You of course also don't want to exceed the TBW of your SSD, so make sure the value is high enough for you. But that's normally nothing to worry about if you only use it as a system drive and install games on it.
Also make sure the SSD has a DRAM cache
The cheapest 2TB SSDs with DRAM cache are QLC SSDs, QLC NAND has currently much lower TBW per capacity and very slow write speeds of only around 80MB/s. The reason why you probably won't ever notice that is that those QLC SSDs come with huge amounts of faster NAND that gets written to first. But if you plan to write huge amounts of data like more than a quarter of the SSD at once
Some decent 2TB M.2 Nvme with DRAM Cache SSDs that are quite cheap where I live would be
Non-QLC:
ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB
Mushkin Pilot-E 2TB
Silicon Power P34A80 2TB
HP SSD EX950 M.2
Patriot Viper VPN100 2TB
QLC:
Intel SSD 660p 2TB
Crucial P1 SSD 2TB
Intel SSD 665p 2TB

 

[Caveman]

Thanks so much for your feedback. I learned a lot just from reading... The drive will be for the OS and flight simulators (DCS, IL-2, FS2020). I'm not sure how FS2020 works as far as the downloadable scenery and how it plays with the drive since it's petabytes worth of data that downloads while flying... Maybe it just flows in/out of the RAM?

I'm looking for best bang for the buck NVme. What I mean by this is something that is not state of the art... Maybe operates at 80% of the fastest thing available for 1/2 the price. I'm using a 860 SSD right now so I'm assuming even the slowest NVme is 2X the speed or something... I'll need to deep dive the specs...

Still a little confused though...Do I want QLC or Non QLC? Guessing "Non" from the context?

 

[damian101]

Still a little confused though...Do I want QLC or Non QLC? Guessing "Non" from the context?

At the current state of QLC SSDs I'd definitely pay a bit more get one of the mentioned TLC SSDs instead.

 

[Shmee]

I agree, you want TLC atm. What system are you upgrading to? If it has PCIe gen 4 support, I would get a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus when they are out. Those will be top notch in speed, and the price should be decent as well, at least judging by their current offerings.

 

[IntelUser2000]

QLC is actually fine on the TBW endurance department(because it can still fail the regular way, as with circuitry failing). It's the performance that falls behind. It may still be fine.

I'm not sure how FS2020 works as far as the downloadable scenery and how it plays with the drive since it's petabytes worth of data that downloads while flying... Maybe it just flows in/out of the RAM?

And how will it write that much? If you somehow had 1Gbit internet that maintained that speed constantly(which is impossible) and your game downloaded at that rate constantly(also impossible), then it'd take you 2 hours to reach 1TB. A 2TB QLC Intel 665p SSD has an endurance rating of 600TB. So in that hypothetical, completely unrealistic scenario it'll take you 1200 hours, and that's just to meet warranty claim numbers.

TBW endurance ratings on client are way way past usable limits. I think actually putting a number on endurance somehow gets everyone paranoid. It's like if you knew your date of death.

If you are worried, download a program that measures data written to your drive, and have it monitor while you are playing your favorite flight simulator. Measure for an hour. Based on that you'll get your requirements.