2TB WD SN770 NVME for £99 - what am i missing?

[chrcoluk]

I'm biased against drives without dram. But I would say the Solodigm P44 Pro for sure. Why settle for middle of the road when the difference is only $15?


What changed?

Same, but in my steam deck I am pretty sure the drive I stuck in that has no dram lol, so will see how that goes.

Was the P600 mini. Is still TLC though I wasnt prepared to go QLC.

 

[wheresmycar]

I'm debating between Solodigm P44 Pro 2TB and SN770 2TB for my new gaming drive, SN770 2TB is $84 USD, and P44 Pro 2TB is $99 USD... which would you go with? I am leaning towards the P44 Pro 2TB... technically I don't need it, but the price is so dang good, eh.

For a gaming build, both will deliver 'observably' the same performance

If you rather save money, grab the SN770

If $15 won't kill you, grab the Solidigm P44 Pro which is the better of the two (DRAM+overall faster - not that it will significantly/noticeably help with a gaming build)

I was going to pull the trigger on a P44 Pro for the system drive and a SN770 for the secondary storage but ended up getting a great deal on x2 Sammy 990 Pros. In normal market conditions, I wouldn't touch a sammy and its overpriced brand-value antics.

 

[goms]

So keep in mind that this SSD uses your internal RAM memory to speed up things. This can go up to 1GB of buffer memory in your PC.

That's completely wrong. You won't find a single consumer drive that uses 1 GB of system RAM for HMB. Windows caps HMB at around 100 MB. But most drives request 32MB ~ 40 MB, and some could go as high as 64MB, and that is the case of the SN770, as seen on the TPU review. And in fact, requested does not necessarily mean used, a drive that requests 64MB (like the SN770) could actually use less than that.

 

[freeagent]

I like my SN770s. I dont mind them at all, but they are not my main drives.

 

[Mussels]

I am too chicken to break away from WD, I have been using them since forever, and I think I even have the original 64GB WD Blue kicking around somewhere..

The time I broke away to run a 120GB RevoDrive, it died within a year or so. Then I tried Intel and really like them, have a few of their SSDs kicking around.. and I tried a Crucial and it died.

Bleh. I should ask my buddy if he still has the original G.Skill 64GB SSD.. I lent it to him like 15 years ago.. have not heard from him lately

I was like that with samsung until the 980 series

WD have some trash-tier drives too, it's more about sticking with a good product line and watching for when the tech changes (Samsung doubled capacity which meant new NAND modules, and that halved their TBW in the same size drives, for example)
Going PCI-E 3 to 4 to 5 also means a change to investigate before purchasing

I want a budget 4TB NVME now, but they don't seem to exist yet. Prices are dropping at least.



Then 2TB SN850 with two partitions
1. for OS (128GB)
2. for 'user files' - downloads, desktop etc all get relocated to here, so the OS partition can be erased and I lose nothing. Higher SSD performance games can go here too, as needed.

Then this magical 4TB or larger NVME i'm waiting on, as a games drive. Currently theyr'e around $350 Au and poor value vs 2x2TB, but i lack the NVME slots for this option.

That's completely wrong. You won't find a single consumer drive that uses 1 GB of system RAM for HMB. Windows caps HMB at around 100 MB. But most drives request 32MB ~ 40 MB, and some could go as high as 64MB, and that is the case of the SN770, as seen on the TPU review. And in fact, requested does not necessarily mean used, a drive that requests 64MB (like the SN770) could actually use less than that.

This is correct, I've only seem mentions of around 16MB when it was tested, it's used to store the the file list of the drive, theoretically like a copy of the MBR, not any actual files.

 

[freeagent]

I am waiting on 4TB drives to come down too

I don't need many...

I have been looking at Sammy too, but they have always more expensive than WD here.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Having paid £88 for one of these drives a few weeks ago and still in the middle of transferring games over to it. I have certainly noticed a difference with game loading and update times.

I came from a WDS100T2B0B M.2 6GB/s SATA drive (sequential read speeds up to 560MB/s and write speeds up to 530MB/seconds) So load and update times were already pretty fast to begin with.

Wish it could be cheaper obviously but i missed some stonking good deals over the past few months and I think prices are going to go back up soon anyway as manufacturers are slowing down production to manipulate the market.

 

[Kapone33]

I am waiting on 4TB drives to come down too

I don't need many...

I have been looking at Sammy too, but they have always more expensive than WD here.

I actually like the Kingston NV2 4 TB. They certainly feel fast enough. Interestingly they are more expensive than MSI drives that are faster but not as reliable. Samsung are too expensive in Canada vs everyone else except maybe Seagate.

 

[iameatingjam]

I actually like the Kingston NV2 4 TB. They certainly feel fast enough. Interestingly they are more expensive than MSI drives that are faster but not as reliable. Samsung are too expensive in Canada vs everyone else except maybe Seagate.

Yeah thats why I have so many ssds but none are samsung

 

[Mussels]

Yeah thats why I have so many ssds but none are samsung

They really rode on their reputation from the 970 series, then raised prices and shipped out inferior products :/

They've got a real cycle of that with their SSDs. Bad, okay, top tier, bad. Over and over.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Glad to see im not the only one that finds Samsung ssds overpriced

 

[bug]

Glad to see im not the only one that finds Samsung ssds overpriced

That trend started a while ago. When I got my 970 EVO, they were already overpriced and I was looking for something else. But I stumbled upon a sale and got the drive, they were still flawless back then.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

That trend started a while ago. When I got my 970 EVO, they were already overpriced and I was looking for something else. But I stumbled upon a sale and got the drive, they were still flawless back then.

On a side note. I paid £89 for my 500GB 970 Evo in 2018. I think that was on sale at the time too otherwise I wouldnt have bought it. Amazing how we get 4x the SSD for the same money. A 500GB WD Black purchased around the same time was £114

 

[bug]

On a side note. I paid £89 for my 500GB 970 Evo in 2018. I think that was on sale at the time too otherwise I wouldnt have bought it. Amazing how we get 4x the SSD for the same money. A 500GB WD Black purchased around the same time was £114

I'm pretty sure that trend has ended. We got capacity increases with MLC and TLC. QLC didn't increase the capacities much and brought a host of other problems to the table. PLC is almost never talked about as a consequence. There will be improvements, but I fear we'll not see meaningful capacity increases anytime soon. Luckily, I'm good with 4TB for a good while.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Im personally hoping we'll see a price drop in 4TB drives. QLC doesnt bother me a whole lot as they'll be used as secondary storage anyway. They will replace the Toshiba hard drives I currently run