Lexar NM790 4 TB

[azrael]

In the conclusion of the article it's stated that the Crucial P3 Plus uses 176-layer TLC NAND, but according to the SSD Database here on TPU, the P3 Plus is a QLC NAND drive. Which of these two statements is correct?

 

[Bwaze]

Imagine if you bothered linking to the original page: https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/is-ssd-good-for-long-term-storage.html

But that page is nonsense anyway. The image that it shows is from a presentation that's at least 8 years old, and the presentation itself is for drives that have already exceeded their endurance rating. AnandTech covered it here but the long and short of it is that this is nonsensical alarmist BS. Stop perpetuating it.

Sorry, I have seen that info reposted many times, and I haven't seen (or I have forgotten) the AnandTech debunking. So yeah, it is alarmist if it only holds true for drives that have exceeded their endurance rating.

 

[ARF]

The TBW rating is just a warranty number that you will never reach with normal usage anyway. If the drive fails and they send you a new one, it doesn't come with your data. Really, the only way to secure your data is to make backups.

True, but TBW is very important to build trust in the product.
For backups, I have my critical data (photos, documents, downloads, music, movies) copied on three different drives.

 

[W1zzard]

In the conclusion of the article it's stated that the Crucial P3 Plus uses 176-layer TLC NAND, but according to the SSD Database here on TPU, the P3 Plus is a QLC NAND drive. Which of these two statements is correct?

I could swear I saw it listed as TLC in the database when I wrote the conclusion. Removed that sentence from the conclusion

 

[azrael]

I could swear I saw it listed as TLC in the database when I wrote the conclusion. Removed that sentence from the conclusion

Thanks for clarifying that. I guess I'll be getting myself a Lexar NM790 4 TB drive then.

 

[Assimilator]

P3 line is QLC for all models.

 

[csendesmark]

The TBW rating is just a warranty number that you will never reach with normal usage anyway. If the drive fails and they send you a new one, it doesn't come with your data. Really, the only way to secure your data is to make backups.

TBW or "Terabytes Written" is just a made up rating by the manufacturer, basically a bet made by the producer.
Even if the number just made up, arbitrary value show the confidence in the SSD.
I wonder if Seagate's FireCuda 530 really as durable as they claim, just for comparison between some 4TB models:
Seagate FireCuda 530 - 5100
KINGSTON KC3000 - 3200
Lexar NM790 - 3000
CORSAIR MP600 PRO LPX - 2800
WD SN850X - 2400
KINGSTON NV2 - 1280

For the low-end drives like the NV2 is only 320× full rewrite of the whole drive while they give you 3 years of warranty so that is: 1.176× usage of the full drive, daily, for 3 years.
The Seagate promises 2.2792× full daily rewrite for 5 years....
So this is really just war of the numbers

 

[c2DDragon]

Too bad there is no screw included in the package.

219,99€ on Amazon.fr.

The Crucial P3 Plus 4To is at 201,99€, it's slower (still a fast SSD) and comes with a screw.

I'm now confused and don't know what to buy X3 for my computer and my laptop !

Thanks

 

[csendesmark]

Too bad there is no screw included in the package.

I never heard of an m.2 SSD comes with a screw,
The screw should be part of the mainboard, extension car or external case.

 

[c2DDragon]

I never heard of an m.2 SSD comes with a screw,
The screw should be part of the mainboard, extension car or external case.

I had 1 screw on my mainboard (I wonder if I used a screw from another mainboard or if it was included now xD), for the other slots they made systems to attach m.2 SSDs which are invented by the devil, not just simple screws. It's a huge pain to put them.
At least there is a simple free screw in my laptop.

By the way now you know Crucial gives a screw

 

[Chrispy_]

Nice, this passed my 30-second "sniff test" review skim.

Skip to sustained write speeds page, make sure it's not a QLC turd or something with firmware issues.
Skip to cost/TB page, and make sure it's not a rip-off.
Skip to conclusion and make sure there's nothing unexpected in Wizz' summary.

3/3 so added to my mental "will buy if I see it at a sensible price" list.

 

[csendesmark]

I had 1 screw on my mainboard (I wonder if I used a screw from another mainboard or if it was included now xD), for the other slots they made systems to attach m.2 SSDs which are invented by the devil, not just simple screws. It's a huge pain to put them.
At least there is a simple free screw in my laptop.

By the way now you know Crucial gives a screw

Okay, I never had a Crucial SSD,
And yes, losing those screws is really easy, starting with the screws are in a plastic pouch in the box.
So I screwing them into the boards m.2 slots not to lose them

 

[ARF]

TBW or "Terabytes Written" is just a made up rating by the manufacturer, basically a bet made by the producer.

How do you think so? I think it's more reasonable to think it's an actual representative of the wear factor under different lab stress conditions.

 

[Chrispy_]

How do you think so? I think it's more reasonable to think it's an actual representative of the wear factor under different lab stress conditions.

It's typically a warranty number that they expect some acceptable percentage of drives to reach.

The manufacturer knows the rated number of PE cycles of the NAND they bought for their drive, and they know the average write amplification of their firmware, so it's pretty simple math.

Frequently we see SSDs with TBW specs that are far lower than sum of their NAND type and capacity, even accounting for pessimistically high write amplification. In those instances, your guess is as good as mine, but some manufacturers have used that initial, dubiously-low TBW specification to then justify a bait-and-switch from TLC to QLC NAND. Such a douchebag move does indeed meet spec when the original spec was pre-planned as some abysmal QLC-tier endurance value in the first place

 

[QUANTUMPHYSICS]

4TB drives are so wonderfully expensive now!

 

[PlatinumProclaim]

@W1zzard It would be nice if you could do some additional testing of the work area impact as you did for other DRAM-less drives. Would also be interesting to know if there is any benefits of manually increasing the HMB allocation size the OS provides the controller.

 

[tpudine]

@W1zzard It would be nice if you could do some additional testing of the work area impact as you did for other DRAM-less drives. Would also be interesting to know if there is any benefits of manually increasing the HMB allocation size the OS provides the controller.

WD has done internal testing on this
tl;dr even 16MB is enough for the vast majority of use cases.

 

[atomek]

I've paid 210$ for my 114 MB NEC Hard Drive. This is 0.1 GB or 0.0001 TB.

 

[PlatinumProclaim]

WD has done internal testing on this
tl;dr even 16MB is enough for the vast majority of use cases.

That white paper doesn't look that insightful to me and it doesn't answer my question anyway.

Just look at the reviews of many other DRAM-less SSDs on TPU, where there is a work area test chart included. Also for comparison, the review of similar SSDs configs with MAP1602 + YMTC flash: The Acer Predator GM7 1TB reaches 77k write IOPS and Netac NV7000-T 2TB reaches 67k. But the NM790 4TB here only reaches 28k, despite having 40M HMB instead of 32M. I just find it weird that he notices it too, speculates about it, but then leaves that one chart out.
But I just re-read the conclusion and he does mention that he contacted Lexar about the weird IOPS, so maybe he will update it all later on?
I'm just curious why it's lower despite having a larger default HMB size. Possibly larger FTL entries because of 4TB capacity making it effectively smaller?

 

[zmeul]

Are you really that strapped for system DRam that you're going to miss 40MB

there's more to the DRAMless controllers than using the system RAM for caching
have you noticed how DRAMless models have a significant lower endurance than their DRAM counterpart? unless I absolutely do not care about the data on the SSD, I always buy SSDs with DRAM on-board

just about 2 days ago I bought a cheap ass NM620 to replace the OS drive on my TrueNAS machine because I needed the SATA port for a HDD - since I have the config stored in a different place I do not care what happens to the OS drive on the NAS

The TBW rating is just a warranty number that you will never reach with normal usage anyway. If the drive fails and they send you a new one, it doesn't come with your data. Really, the only way to secure your data is to make backups.

wanna test something?

fill your OS drive to above 80% with static data and use it like that - note the failure date
I work in tech support and I see failed SSDs used improperly on a regular basis - some fail dramatically where professional data recovery is needed, others fail in read-only mode where I can recover the data myself

end users partition their SSDs, another problem

the vast majority of people make two mistakes: they don't consider SSDs consumables, and they don't make proper back-ups - their idea of a "back-up" is copying the data to D:\ partition on the same SSD
- oh, but I have a back-up
- no you don't

 

[tpudine]

there's more to the DRAMless controllers than using the system RAM for caching
have you noticed how DRAMless models have a significant lower endurance than their DRAM counterpart? unless I absolutely do not care about the data on the SSD, I always buy SSDs with DRAM on-board

Sorry but this is old conventional wisdom from the days of SATA SSDs. DRAM is much less important for modern Gen 4 NVMe drives.

Most DRAMless NVMe drives w/ HMB have full 5 year warranties, compared with just 3 years for DRAMless SATA.

DRAM in SSDs is used to hold the FTL mapping table that keeps track of physical and logical location of blocks (it is NOT a write cache), DRAM matters for OS/boot drives that will get lots of random writes where the mapping data is updated frequently. With DRAMless SATA SSDs this table had to to be written/updated directly on the NAND which increases write amplification and hurts endurance (as well as being much slower).

NVMe with HMB mitigates these issues by borrowing some host memory, 32/64MB of host RAM is plenty to cache mapping data for consumer workloads. The main drawback of HMB is higher access latency than dedicated DRAM, but most users will never feel a difference unless they're doing extremely heavy workloads over large areas.

The NVMe protocol is just far superior than AHCI, even without HMB. Modern controllers on the 12nm node are much more advanced too. Look at TPU SN770 review to see how far modern DRAMless SSDs can perform.

 

[zmeul]

Sorry but this is old conventional wisdom from the days of SATA SSDs. DRAM is much less important for modern Gen 4 NVMe drives.

Most DRAMless NVMe drives w/ HMB have full 5 year warranties, compared with just 3 years for DRAMless SATA.

DRAM in SSDs is used to hold the FTL mapping table that keeps track of physical and logical location of blocks (it is NOT a write cache), DRAM matters for OS/boot drives that will get lots of random writes where the mapping data is updated frequently. With DRAMless SATA SSDs this table had to to be written/updated directly on the NAND which increases write amplification and hurts endurance (as well as being much slower).

NVMe with HMB mitigates these issues by borrowing some host memory, 32/64MB of host RAM is plenty to cache mapping data for consumer workloads. The main drawback of HMB is higher access latency than dedicated DRAM, but most users will never feel a difference unless they're doing extremely heavy workloads over large areas.

The NVMe protocol is just far superior than AHCI, even without HMB. Modern controllers on the 12nm node are much more advanced too. Look at TPU SN770 review to see how far modern DRAMless SSDs can perform.

you're the only one who's talking about SATA SSDs, I'm talking about NVMe since it's the only protocol who supports Host Memory Buffer

 

[Yashyyyk]

Thank you for testing a 4TB drive

I don't know how many ppl care about efficiency, but it would be interesting to see Performance/$/W (include/normalize for efficiency as well)

This looks like a decent step up from the P31/Hynix drives? I wasn't satisfied with many others (or they were way more expensive)

Otherwise just performance/$/TB would be interesting, combining both charts on page 18 (may have to multiply to adjust for scale)

(and then if you wanna get crazy you could combine all 4)

Attached a GPU Performance/$/W for context, you can see that the "My GTX 1080" is still high on performance/$/W because I got it for cheaper (everything is ~MSRP except it and the A4000, which is $500)

 

[sn4k3PT]

Why brother with "overpriced" consumer SSD's when you can get Entreprise SSD's for a same price or less?
Consumer SSD's are a joke, only recently they start to release "good" 4TB TLC to market, eg: KC3000, but major 4TB and 8TB are crap QLC.
Entreprise SSD's are at quality TLC nands on 4TB and 8TB for years!
Eg, DC1500M 7.6TB costs here 500 eur (Thats 100 eur more than a "4Tb Kingston FURY Renegade" for the double space!) and with 1 DWPD/5years! Entreprise NAND is much more reliable because it scope of use and in that area they can't mess with specs or manipulate the product, something that is frequent in consumer products. Not to mention the extra warranty period you get, 5 years on most!
A SK Hynix (HFS7T6GDUFEH-A430A) costs about 366 Eur on ebay new, even cheaper than this Lexar (cost per Gb)

Just buy M.2 to U.2 converter (Same protocol just different connector), get Entreprise NAND and call it a day, get more and better for less!
And if you want the best just look for Samsung PM9A3 (If you can get a good deal)

 

[DaveLT]

Too bad there is no screw included in the package.

219,99€ on Amazon.fr.

The Crucial P3 Plus 4To is at 201,99€, it's slower (still a fast SSD) and comes with a screw.

I'm now confused and don't know what to buy X3 for my computer and my laptop !

Thanks

Um, all lexar nvme SSDs come with a screw for typical motherboards.

Even the NM610 pro

Why brother with "overpriced" consumer SSD's when you can get Entreprise SSD's for a same price or less?
Consumer SSD's are a joke, only recently they start to release "good" 4TB TLC to market, eg: KC3000, but major 4TB and 8TB are crap QLC.
Entreprise SSD's are at quality TLC nands on 4TB and 8TB for years!
Eg, DC1500M 7.6TB costs here 500 eur (Thats 100 eur more than a "4Tb Kingston FURY Renegade" for the double space!) and with 1 DWPD/5years! Entreprise NAND is much more reliable because it scope of use and in that area they can't mess with specs or manipulate the product, something that is frequent in consumer products. Not to mention the extra warranty period you get, 5 years on most!
A SK Hynix (HFS7T6GDUFEH-A430A) costs about 366 Eur on ebay new, even cheaper than this Lexar (cost per Gb)

Just buy M.2 to U.2 converter (Same protocol just different connector), get Entreprise NAND and call it a day, get more and better for less!
And if you want the best just look for Samsung PM9A3 (If you can get a good deal)

Hello new user, some of us here run DATACENTER SSDs, I run a PM1733 7.68 on my PC and I wish I didn't do it.
It runs hot as hell without a fan for one, U.2 cabled adaptors are loose. And lastly no warranty. If you paid the real price for any of those, you wouldn't be able to afford one, also even without warranty, I would have to pay over 400$ for a PE6011 7.68TB (which is a HFS7T6GDUFEH-A430A)
while I only paid 309$ for my NM790 4TB