suggestions for an affordable m.2 with good (or at least decent) random r/w

[iameatingjam]

TLDR at bottom

Well my Netac nv7000 finally died when I tried copying a 1.3TB file onto it. Ironically I was doing this to de-raid 0 my sata drives, since it was done with disk management which means I can't trim and as I was using the drive(s) more and deleting lots of files I had started to worry about longevity... those 'new' MX500s don't have the best endurance to begin with so I at least wanted best efficiency with the writes I do have... so yeah... I ended up causing an ssd failure by trying to prevent a different one.

But I really went to bat for that drive, it was really fast and traded blows with the sn850x ( I had an early version... before... components were swapped out later on it became more sketchy)... but yeah turns out endurance still not the best, but could be worse than ~3 years, especially when it was a boot drive half that time. Technically still under warranty but I removed their heatsink which had a bright red sticker telling me not to.

But the temperature as reported was kinda high for idle in winter ( 54c ). Nothing to be too alarmed about, but it gave me an excuse to open it up as it was 20c above all the other drives so I thought I would check to make sure they like didn't forget to put a thermal pad on or something.... It was connected fine, I think the temp sensor got busted at some point, later learning it shows same temp summer, winter, load, no load.... Plus its just so tempting like 'what are you hiding from me under there that you don't want me to see???" I knocked a star off its rating for that.

I don't live in the US so I'm not sure if I have protection from those stickers but even if I did I don't know if its worth the hassle with some chinese company which might very well just string me along and end up doing nothing. I knew it was risky from the beginning and I got some good use out of it.

Now the drive I will be buying will be in a 3x1 connection so sequential will be low. Max speed doesn't really matter here, as long as its ~1GB/s sequential. What made the nv7000 work so well in the 3x1 slot was the good randoms, compared to some other ssds I tried. Any suggestions for a drive that is good at that and relatively affordable? I think its probably not worth it to buy another high end pcie 4 ssd to get dram just to use one 3rd gen lane. But maybe I do have to spend to get those randos, idk. Thats what I'm here to ask. Anybody have any good contenders?

edit: Well I guess I should mention some of the cheaper drives available to me since they aren't as plentiful as some other places.

NV2/NV3.. which idk... NV2 is obviously very cheap and is appealing in that sense. Makes me think about getting 2 and and doing raid 0 but nah...
SP UD90, but the last time I had a SP drive I could not wait to get rid of it because of how low the lows were, but also, that was the lower end drive (A60).
990 evo or 990 evo plus (for an extra $10) though that is starting to get out of budget territory for a 1tb drive for the plus.
P3 plus obviously but idk about that one...
sn770 I suppose I could stretch for.
MP33, I keep seeing these everywhere
MP44 this one is also pushing the budget... but I could probably make it work if its the right tool for the job.

And more of course. Pretty much only have 3 sources, amazon.ca, newegg.ca, and memoryexpress.ca

 

[Dr. Dro]

If you want TLC for decent endurance and reasonable performance, considering Gen 3 slot, I'd be looking at a WD SN570 or SN580, you might find some still in stock. The SN5000 should be QLC already. W1zz had good things to say about the SN570 in his review.

WD Blue SN570 NVMe 1 TB Review - A Gem Hidden in Plain Sight

The WD Blue SN570 is priced extremely competitively at only $90 for the 1 TB version. While pricing suggests "entry-level," the drive is actually the second-fastest PCIe 3.0 SSD we ever tested, faster than the Kingston KC2500, ADATA SX8200 Pro, and HP EX950.

www.techpowerup.com

 

[iameatingjam]

If you want TLC for decent endurance and reasonable performance, considering Gen 3 slot, I'd be looking at a WD SN570 or SN580, you might find some still in stock. The SN5000 should be QLC already. W1zz had good things to say about the SN570 in his review.

WD Blue SN570 NVMe 1 TB Review - A Gem Hidden in Plain Sight

The WD Blue SN570 is priced extremely competitively at only $90 for the 1 TB version. While pricing suggests "entry-level," the drive is actually the second-fastest PCIe 3.0 SSD we ever tested, faster than the Kingston KC2500, ADATA SX8200 Pro, and HP EX950.

www.techpowerup.com

Thank you sir,

EDIT: This post was a mess, misread what I was responding to and that made everything not make sense. All boils down to... I've had a sn570, it sucked because of sustained write, but considering a 580 as it seems that problem was addressed quite well. Also watched a review from.... that lady on youtube that does the ssd reviews... and I can see why it suits this situation. Low sequential yet kicking budget drive butts in many tests. Just deciding if I want to pay a little more for a sn770...

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Ah damn it, as soon as I decided to get sn580, it turns out newegg has disabled orders to my postal code because:

Please Note, service to Postal Codes serviced by Canada Post will be temporarily suspended due to looming Canada Post Strike."

Sure used a lot of words to say Canada there.... And by suspend they mean you can't order anything, not like, they are paused until shipping is available.

Like... can't you let me decide that? Or maybe offer a courier service as an option? Even better you could offer one at no extra charge like I've seen other businesses do, my bank used a courier last strike just deliver an empty credit card statement, okay its just paper but point is, not that hard to find businesses that will deliver things for you. Might even win back some trust who knows....

There should really be some alternative though... not to mention... it still might make it if shipped right away... so how about just a warning? At least if its in the mail I know it will get here eventually. Otherwise someone else might buy out the stock. (kinda important when they don't make em anymore).
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EDIT: Alright, so I ordered two of them. Newegg didn't want my business and amazon had slim pickings for the 2tb model, so I checked out ebay but everything was used and what was new... I wasn't confident would pass as new if it came to warranty, but then I saw one under Newegg's ebay account (well I assume anyway - maybe they are just affiliated idk) well anyway I bought the 2TB one there (oversight? I wonder how they will handle this....) though it was $3 or $4 more, making it actually even cheaper after adding all of ebays fees in. And should work for warranty but...

I wasn't sure if I'd get that drive, if it was actually newegg... they might just not want to pay the damn $10 or whatever to ship the drive with a courier and who knows what happens then, I'm guessing they either just cancel it, or send it out later. So I bought a 1TB 'amazon warehouse' drive, I know, no warranty, but... cheap. I do have two free slots. Hope I didn't fry one with the Netac meltdown. And I did check the second adapter already - it seem to be fine. IDK. Maybe I'll just use this one as external storage or something once the 2TB arrives/if it does.

Btw there are a lot of these drives for sale used on ebay - they must be popular in the oem world.

 

[iameatingjam]

So the 2TB drive works well, thank you. Also newegg on ebay sent out via courier no problem, meanwhile I can't even place an order on their site, and since they are essentially the same price, I really don't get that, but w/e.... their loss.

But anyway, the 1TB, was... okay, it was getting stuck during transfers, like pausing for a moment before continuing, so even though its crystal disk mark scores were fine, at least during read+write operations, it was a fair bit slower. I don't know if thats because it has less nand to work with, or perhaps the reason it was returned the first time (being openbox).

I ended up going a little overboard and also buying a 2TB P400L for my laptop. Long story short, it didn't agree with the laptop, turns out the manual says it only supports up to 500GB ssds, I don't know if that means per or total, but in combination with its existing 640GB, this extra 2TB was causing all kinds of issues so I removed it, which is a shame because I made a custom 2280 mount for it. Apparently the weakness is the chipset or something I was reading, I'm not really sure, but I do know the non m.2 sata connector is also extremely picky about what drives it reads. Seems USB is the most reliable way to connect storage to this POS

But for this drive I didn't really care about speed or endurance, its only task was going to be storing media files and playing them back, with very little changing of its contents. So all I cared about was price, and it was on sale.

Never the less, I tried it on the desktop instead and seems to work good, about the same as the sn580 2TB ( both bottlenecked by connection at times obviously) but it was still faster than the 1TB one, at least during those read + write operations, plus it has a warranty, so I decided to keep it, even though its qlc, and return the 1TB. Its even 1200 TBW somehow. IDK if that means its actually more endurant, or patriot is just more generous with warranties OR if its just marketing and they do all in their power to skirt it. But, still the openbox only has 30 days so..... yeah...

Now just about everything you can plug into my mobo is full, lol. 7 SSDs

 

[LabRat 891]

You can use as fast/new of a drive as you want on slower/older generation PCIe. I've ran Gen4 990Pros and P41+s on Gen3 and Gen2, and Optane on Gen1.1x1.

Yes, it will be bottlenecked in peak performance but, there's few (if any) consumer NVMe drives that can actually sustain full Gen3x4 bandwidth. (Esp. in Random R/W)


For example: I went with used Intel Pro 7600p's (1TB drive, 1GB DRAM cache) for my microATX build that utilizes a Gen3x4->4xGen3x2 switched expander.
They never see their full 'peak' performance, but they sustain their Random R/W, in use.

Now just about everything you can plug into my mobo is full, lol. 7 SSDs

$45 on fleaBay,

Pardon Our Interruption...

$26 for the cable.

Amazon.com: Dilinker . . SSD, - Drive to . Host Adapter,U.2 SSD Converter -with Power Cable(50CM) : Electronics

Amazon.com: Dilinker . . SSD, - Drive to . Host Adapter,U.2 SSD Converter -with Power Cable(50CM) : Electronics

www.amazon.com