NVMe advice

[Shrek]

I've recently gone from

• Core 2
• Windows 10
• HDD

to

• Intel i5 10th generation
• Windows 11
• MSI Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super
• 16GB DDR4
• NVMe M.2

Now I ask advice on which NVMe and size (I presently have a Western Digital Blue 512 GB at 98% life), and any other update advice (I don't game a lot); reliability is a big thing for me, so any form of over-clocking is out, and speed is not an issue (I would have stuck with the Core 2 if it wasn't for not being able to upgrade to Windows 11).

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Cant go wrong with an 1TB WD SN770. The price for that is always very competitive from what i've seen.

 

[Shrek]

The 2 TB version is the same price ($140) between the

• WD Black SN770
• WD Black SN850X

would this change your recommendation?

 

[Psychoholic]

If they are the same price i'd go with the SN850X since it has DRAM and the SN770 does not.

...You'd probably never be able to tell the difference in day to day use, but hey they are the same price as you say.

 

[AleXXX666]

The 2 TB version is the same price ($140) between the

• WD Black SN770
• WD Black SN850X

would this change your recommendation?

850X is faster. No brain for same price. However, radiator recommended. I have 770. In desktop: works perfectly without radiator; in laptop: radiator is a must-have!
Speeds are Okay but as you said "one price" definitely get better 850X.

 

[Shrek]

The price I quoted was without heatsink (mine is a desktop application)

Is DRAM cache a good idea, in the sense of corruption if there is a power cut? I'm for reliability over speed.

 

[kapone32]

The price I quoted was without heatsink, so I now wonder if the heatsink is a good idea (Desktop application)

Is DRAM cache a good idea, in the sense of corruption if there is a power cut? I'm for reliability over speed.

If your board already has a heatsink it is redundant.

 

[datnoz]

The price I quoted was without heatsink (mine is a desktop application)

Is DRAM cache a good idea, in the sense of corruption if there is a power cut? I'm for reliability over speed.

you could diy something like put caps (capacitors) on the power line on m.2 slot using some kind of middle board that would stick to the mobo between the mobo and the ssd.
I wouln't do this since caps are very sensitive to heat (from what i've seen), as i wouldn't have complete control over temps.

 

[dirtyferret]

The 2 TB version is the same price ($140) between the

• WD Black SN770
• WD Black SN850X

would this change your recommendation?

SN580 blue is often hard to beat for the price and performance, seems SSD have been increasing in price the last several months from the low fall prices

 

[freeagent]

I run SN850, SN850X, and SN770. I am satisfied with everything about them. I also have SN750’s running in another system, all good.

 

[tabascosauz]

The 2 TB version is the same price ($140) between the

• WD Black SN770
• WD Black SN850X

would this change your recommendation?

I would not pay a significant premium for the SN850X, but no way I would take the SN770 for the same price. They aren't even close to the same tier. SN770 is a fine representation of what a modern DRAMless drive can achieve, but it's a DRAMless drive.

Any ol' cheap heatsink or motherboard heatsink works fine for the SN850X. Thermally there isn't a crazy difference between most of WD's drives in day-to-day.

There are plenty of other options out there, but as someone who had to RMA a SN750, it's just easy to deal with WD support. SN550, SN570, SN750, SN850X all treated me well, but the SN750 was a bit slow.

 

[Wirko]

Is DRAM cache a good idea, in the sense of corruption if there is a power cut? I'm for reliability over speed.

The onboard DRAM is is not a write cache. It holds a copy of the drive's FTL and possibly other metadata, which is permanently stored in NAND memory. In that sense, it's a read cache.

 

[evernessince]

The price I quoted was without heatsink (mine is a desktop application)

Is DRAM cache a good idea, in the sense of corruption if there is a power cut? I'm for reliability over speed.

Unless the SSD specifically advertises PLP (power loss prevention), there is always a chance of data corruption during a power event. There are only a few consumer SSDs that offer PLP while it's very common in the enterprise space.

 

[Super Firm Tofu]

For the same price you might as well pick up the SN850x. I've got some 2TB and 4TB and they've been just fine. Max. read performance between the 770 and 850x won't matter much as you're limited to Gen3-x4 with 10th Gen Intel anyway - a max of 3500MB/s R/W.

 

[Shrek]

It's getting to feel a lot like Christmas.

Now that I finally have a Windows 11 machine, I may, perhaps, could be... stop hankering on about Windows 10

 

[Wirko]

Also don't forget about the WD Red SN700. About the same price as the 850X, older, lower performance (PCIe 3.0), but great TBW rating.

 

[Shrek]

$202 is quite a bit up on $140 for 2TB although the higher endurance is very tempting.

• WD Black SN770 $140
• WD Black SN850X $140
• WD Red SN700 $202
• WD Blue SN580 $120

 

[tabascosauz]

$202 is quite a bit up on $140

Is that 2TB vs. 2TB? or 4TB SN700?

I wouldn't put too much stock in the SN700 endurance rating unless you are literally torturing your drive with writes to actually make use of it. Otherwise it's a nice refreshed SN750 which is a solid drive, but only for the right price.

It's made for the long run in performance too, so if you're transferring huge files all the time then great, but performance is rather low if that's not what you're doing. SN750 didn't exactly impress in performance, even when it was new. The efficiency isn't bad, but is basically irrelevant outside of laptops.

 

[Shrek]

All 2TB, unless I made a mistake (amazon.com); the 4TB Red SN700 is $330

The SN750 does not seem available (on amazon.com); I have an SN550 500GB at the moment.

 

[JWNoctis]

In my experience those "huge flash chip" WD SSDs that looked alike (SN570 etc.) tended to run very much cooler than most others (970 EVO Plus, T500 which is admittedly a PCIe 4.0 drive), that a laptop's flimsy heat spreader or a thermal padded and passively-cooled external enclosure (had one in both) are more than sufficient to cool them. Though I haven't verified those onboard thermometer sensors, other than by touch.

They are also more than fast enough, though the SN570 has a small SLC cache or some other limiting mechanism, and speed drops off fast if you copy large files. Interestingly, SN570 and SN770 seemed to have almost the same part numbers on their components, apparently the same board except for the colour, and the SN770 does not appear to have the same problem in benchmarks.

Still, a DRAM drive will be even faster.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I have to cheap out somewhere on my builds and I admittedly tend to do this with storage. I find that a high-quality Gen 3 NVMe drive with DRAM is all you'll ever need. While it's preferred to have it, DRAM or no DRAM has not been as much of a dealbreaker as it was in the past since modern DRAMless NVMe SSDs have HMB support.

Pretty much any SSD will do, you won't be able to tell them apart 99% of the time. Check W1zz's reviews and see something that fits on your budget well. There have been a few models that have been highly reviewed that you can find at a low price nowadays.

 

[Legacy Ivy Terascale]

if you store fotos videos documents ... more than 128 GB , you should also have a HDD or SSD to manually copy them , just in case the NVME fails
or use RAID 1

 

[Shrek]

I have had two solid state drives fail on me so far, and that was out of a rather small number.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I have had two solid state drives fail on me so far, and that was out of a rather small number.

Only one really died on me, I've had them malfunction though, but all were fixed with a secure erase command. The remarkable for me is Seagate. It's my bad luck charm, a 100% failure rate. Every single Seagate HDD I have ever owned has died.

 

[datnoz]

All 2TB, unless I made a mistake (amazon.com); the 4TB Red SN700 is $330

The SN750 does not seem available (on amazon.com); I have an SN550 500GB at the moment.

In France the nv2 2tb is at 125 bucks rn.