Got a price alert from CamelCamelCamel - historical low .
(Dont forget the $10 off app only offer)
CamelCamelCamel.
For a spare games drive, would people recommend this drive? Or something else? Budget roughly around ~$120
Go with the Crucial P1 instead, it has DRAM. Currently $115 on amazon or $110 with free express shipping from shopping express.
https://www.shoppingexpress.com.au/buy/crucial-p1-1tb-2000mb…
Thanks for the heads up. Better this or to stretch the budget to $140 for the Samsung 970 Evo Plus that popped up recently do you think? Not really sure if the extra speed is even useful if it's just loading games off a disk. I have my OS on another drive.
Last year they were around the same price/slightly higher but came with great cashback or promotional bonuses like AC Valhalla, etc.
Would this Kingston be the better buy? https://www.amazon.com.au/Kingston-NVMe-PCIe-SNVS-1000G/dp/B…
Stay away from that Kingston. The Kingston you want is the A2000 but they have been discontinued and hard to find cheap now. The next cheapest option is the P1. As to whether you go with the samsung or not, up to you. You likely won't see any difference in load times between the crucial and Samsung but the Samsung has higher endurance and longer warranty because of this (2 years Vs 5 yrs). If its only $140 for the EVO plus (bear in mind there is an standard EVO too), i think the Samsung is the better buy if you can stretch the budget.
@drinkin-beer: Can I ask why? Unreliable, or issues or something? Looking at Kingston or Crucial. Cheers!
@sean85: The NV1 is actually fine for a DRAMless drive, I just wouldn't buy a drive that didn't have dram. Especially when you can get drives with DRAM for basically the same price (P1).
Don't have the 2tb version unfortunately
Crucial have swapped out the TLC for QLC so the performance of these takes a really hard hit and slows down. Especially considering it's DRAMless.
Crucial P1 would be the better buy around this price.
Other OzB threads say under sustained load it only has 40mb/s speeds, slower than a HDD.
Possibly the worst QLC drive. Plenty of others with QLC will perform better once the SLC cache is exhausted.
How can you tell if its TLC or QLC. I think I remember running synthetic benchmarks for my 2Tb and it matched the early TLC review speeds, but is that sufficient to say its not QLC?
@annarchon: No because it was a brand new drive that sat unopened for months. Even now its only half full, but it replaced a SATA 970 evo. Not sure about the SLC bit.
@ATangk: The QLC slow down occurs when you have exhausts the SLC cache and have to write to the QLC directly. If the drive is emptyish then the SLC cache is at its largest (P1 1TB has about 96gb when empty), so you would almost never exhaust the cache. But as you fill it up, the cache (which uses the empty space) shrinks (for the P1 its 12gb minimum). So once you write 12gbs in succession, you will fill up the cache and you drop down to QLC speeds.
These are rubbish.
P1 uses QLC, but it has Dram and big SLC cache etc to compensate, so its only when you exhaust both then it start to hit.
P2 did away with the dram but they had TLC, so hey its not that bad TLC with SLC cache will good enough to compensate for the lack of Dram! Then they removed TLC on the P2. So its the worst of both worlds, Dramless and TLC less.
I own a Crucial P1 1TB purchased a couple of years ago. Was using it as my C drive. Got so sick of it slowing down to a crawl after sustained writes and affecting normal Windows usage that I've since replaced it with a Samsung 970 Evo Plus. While the P1 was fine for fast reads, and had good write speeds for the first 20GB of sustained writes, but after that it is much worse than a normal mechanical hard drive. Yes it slows to around 40-70MB/s writes after about 20GB written in one go (e.g. copying a large folder or installing a game), which is unforgivable for a M.2 SSD. And once it does slow it consumes 100% hard drive resources with very slow access times, which in turn slows down normal usage of Windows (Windows basically freezes) until the full writes have finished. This M.2 hard drive's performance is therefore disappointingly bad. Spend the extra $30 and get a Samsung Evo Plus or WD Black or similar and save yourself the frustration.
Thanks this is great insight! Would you have any thoughts on 870 Evo vs Evo Plus?
@JSONBourne: The Samsung 870 Evo is a SATA SSD drive, while the 970 Evo Plus is a M.2 SSD. The 870 is a very good SATA SSD that can sustain read and writes at the maximum SATA speed limit of approx 500MB/s without slowing down. If you don't have a spare M.2 slot then this is the SSD to get. The Samsung 970 Evo Plus is a M.2 SSD that has excellent read and write speeds of over 2000MB/s. While it too slows down after around 40GB of sustained writes, the write speed temporarily drops down to around 1000MB/s, which is still excellent performance vs cost. Nothing like the Crucial P1's drop to only 40-70MB/s.
Thanks, have cancelled my order
Is it TLC or QLC now?
1TB is QLC.
Before anyone asks: this is not compatible with PS5
This is Gen 3. PS5 needs Gen 4.
Be careful, Tom's Hardware revealed a sneaky swap that Crucial did where they installed 4x slower chips and used the same model number!
I’m not sure if this will work or not. I have an old MacBook Pro from 2012, which only has 128gb of storage and is not enough for today’s standards. I know that Apple uses their proprietary tech or whatever for their SSDs. As far as I know, there are some kind of adapters for that. The question is: is this SSD capable of that mod? If anyone has any idea please shade light on this? If not this then are there any other options available around the same price? My budget is around $100-120. Any or little help is appreciated. Thank you
I have upgraded a couple of 2012-2015 era Macs. This will be fine, I used a P1 previously. You have to make sure you get a 2012 specific adapter though, they changed the proprietary format between the 2012 and 2013 models.
Thanks a ton for the reply. I’ll go for it
Getting better isn't it?