Reference: Helpful NVMe, Flash, SSD Reference + Tips & Tweaks

[DevTech]

The next few years will speed ahead on Flash! NVMe will be everywhere, QLC will kill the consumer HD market and Thunderbolt 3 will host external NVMe with new lower prices that will make very powerful workstations on the go.

 

Discuss, add tips, tweaks, advice etc to possibly build a useful reference. I'll add any good stuff you come up with to this post and please feel free to point out mistakes and suggest improvements!

 

 

Reference Links & Info

 

Flash Types:

 

SLC - 1 memory bit per cell - highest speed, highest writes before destruction

MLC - 2 memory bits per cell

TLC - 3 memory bits per cell

TLC 3D - 3 memory bits per cell - In 2018, the world supply of 3D NAND Flash ramped up tremendously - brings back some speed and a huge increase on #writes before cell death over TLC

QLC - 4 memory bits per cell - The newest attempt at higher density to perhaps replace the HD for consumer usage. Horrible 1st gen write endurance similar to early TLC so far...

 

 

SSD Performance

 

Top end NVMe drives are on a path to actually max out the 4 PCIe lanes they are using. At that point we might see a return to RAID and see below for a RAID card using the GPU PCIe x 16 slot to pack in 4 NVMe drives!

 

SSD Reliability

 

Manufacturers are now publishing Write Endurance in their specs. It is the number of terabytes you can write to a drive before you kill it. The number is very dependent on the size of the drive and on your decision to Over Provision or not.

 

NVMe performance level drives lifetime are typically 300 TB for 500 G and 600 TB for 1 TB drives. That's 600 full re-writes of the entire drive in both cases. Nobody is going to overwrite their data that many times for a plain old storage drive, but the problem is that these high performance drives are being used as real world work horses where video editing, graphics creation and development can generate massive write loads.

 

SSD Over Provision

 

Before you format your new drive for the first time, you can choose to create a partition that is smaller than the drive. If there is a partition on the drive that has never been allocated most firmwares will use that for spare write cells, producing a large boost in drive longevity.

 

 

Did You Know?

 

1. Did you know that those amazing NVMe write speed specs are mostly false?

 

The top end NVMe drives have a 1 gig RAM cache and a 30 - 100 gig SLC cache. After you blow past the cache the drive writes at its native TLC NAND Flash specs which are 1/2 speed at best and as low as 1/4 the rated speed.

 

2. Samsung made my life easier for a while with one of the longest runs of dominance well ahead of the pack in tech history!

 

The performance and reliability of Samsung NVMe became so far ahead of everyone else that without any thought, I could tell everyone to buy Samsung, anything else would be crazy. In 2018, 3D NAND Flash production came online everywhere and off-the-shelf NVMe controller chips improved to the point that almost any drive manufacturer can build a generic device that gets them to 80% of Samsung with zero effort. 2019 will be the year of competition again!

 

3. Did you know that the performance of a NVMe drive model depends on it's size? The standard sizes are 250, 500, 1 TB and 2 TB. Each size variation within the same model will have different DRAM cache, different SLC cache and often different layouts of the 3D NAND Flash chips, all of which combine to affect performance. Typically the performance increases with the size of the drive and the longevity of the drive will increase as well in most cases.

 

4. Did you know that current Thunderbolt 3 drives and USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 mbits) both use a USB-C connector but they are not compatible? You need to find out which protocol your USB-C connector supports, but in most cases Thunderbolt 3 was a well advertised feature of whatever computer, motherboard or laptop you purchased.

 

5. Did you know that some motherboards can be sneaky and due to a shortage of PCIe lanes will feed the primary or secondary M.2 socket with 2 lanes instead of 4? Not a problem for a low end NVMe drive, but a huge issue for the top performing drives.

 

 

Tips

 

 

- insert Tips here

 

HowTo & Tweaks

 

- insert tutorial info here

 

 

Leading NVMe drive models 2019

 

- tbd (incomplete)

- Corsair M510, Adata S11, upcoming 980 Pro, Crucial, Muskin, Intel, Kingston, etc need to be evaluated and ranked

- Intel Optane needs to be included for completeness

- Planning to include various Enterprise drives and devices

- Hoping to locate a SLC drive for reference

 

 

How to spot 2019: For WD Black, SN750 denotes the 2019 update and for the SX8200, 2019 is "Pro" and for HP the jump from 920 to 950 is the 2019 model and for Samsung it is "Plus" - The Samsung 970 Pro had not yet had a hardware refresh for 2019.

 

Note: The following are all great drives. The order is based on DevTech's balanced criteria, which weights Sequential Write and 4K Write far more than most. But if read performance is the only criteria, chances are that a NVMe drive not really needed anyways and getting a 4 TB SATA would be far better value than a super-fast 500 GB NVMe.

 

For Random 4K/IOPS which is of interest for Dev work and other professional content editing (except Video Editing) the WD Black SN750 (2019), Adata SX8200 Pro (2019) and HP EX950 (2019) are all about at parity with the Samsung drives.

 

 

Leaders, 500 GB

 

1. Samsung 970 Pro

 

2. Samsung 970 EVO Plus (estimated: Only 250 and 1 TB currently available)

 

3. WD Black SN750

 

4. Adata SX8200 Pro

 

5. HP EX950

 

 

Leaders 1 TB

 

1. Samsung 970 EVO Plus

 

2. Samsung 970 Pro

 

3. Adata SX8200 Pro

 

4. WD Black SN750

 

5. HP EX950

 

 

 

 

Plugging in your NVMe drive

 

 

Motherboard

 

- tbd

 

PCIe single or dual or quad card.

 

- tbd

 

- ASUS Hyper M.2 X4

 

- ASUS Hyper X16

 

 

 

PCIe RAID card

 

- tbd

 

- Highpoint X16 Quad M.2 RAID

 

 

 

External NVMe drives

 

Thunderbolt 3  at 40 mbits and USB 3.1 Gen 2 at 10 mbits

 

- tbd

 

Other things you can do with NVMe

 

- tbd

 

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I know that it is usually hit and miss, with a larger spoonful of miss on these sorts of "lets build something useful" so my expectations are super low and anything at all is appreciated for our community...

 

 

Edit: update title to follow format of other reference threads intended to be continuously updated over time...

 

[DevTech]

Will probably add some sort of pricing info to get a sense of "value" but that sort of info dates real fast and I'm hoping for a useful reference that will last a few years until Quantum CPUs and Quantum SSDs hit the market...

 

500 GB

 

Samsung 970 EVO Plus - not available

3 year warranty, ? MTBF, 300 TB write endurance.

 

WD Black SN750 - $130

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820250109&Description=wd sn750&cm_re=wd_sn750-_-20-250-109-_-Product

5 year warranty, 1,750,000 MTBF, 300 TB write endurance.

 

HP EX950 - $120

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2W08NS3723&Description=hp ex950&cm_re=hp_ex950-_-20-326-205-_-Product

5 year warranty, 2,000,000 MTBF, 320 TB write endurance.

 

Adata XPG SX8200 Pro - $120

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA8S18RX3656&Description=sx8200 pro&cm_re=sx8200_pro-_-9SIA8S18RX3656-_-Product

5 year warranty, 2,000,000 MTBF, 320 TB write endurance.

 

 

Conclusion:

 

The XPG includes a heatsink which makes it the value leader in the High Performance NVMe drives