this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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I picked up a 1TB NVMe for literally $38 this week. Absolutely absurd how inexpensive SSDs are right now.
Be careful, most cheap NVMe drives have low endurance. Llike, not "Oh, you're just hand wringing about nothing," endurance ratings but an actually and relevantly low number of terabytes that can be written before the drive becomes failure-prone. They also usually lack a DRAM cache, so certain operations can be as slow as a mechanical hard drive, thereby negating the major advantage of opting for solid-state storage.
What low TBW numbers have you seen that give you concern?
They were all that price unless I went up to PCIe 4.0, which my laptop doesn't support. I got a well-known brand. But thanks for the heads up!
For future proofing it can be worthwhile to get a pcie4 drive for a pcie3 machine.
That said, even if you have a pcie4 machine it may not be worth it to bother with pcie4 storage. I was annoyed about loading times with baldurs gate 3 and decided to try installing it to a RAM disk (yes, using 130GB of RAM)... Barely loaded any faster. Turns out the main bottleneck is elsewhere and my storage was not the issue
It was for a laptop. I'm not going to be changing the motherboard to a PCIe 4.0 compatible one. By the time I buy a new laptop, I may need PCIe 5.0. I'm not sure, but I don't want to overspend now when by the time I need something it is cheaper. If PCIe 4.0 is more than $38 cheaper when I need it than now, then I saved money. And I doubt I'll be in the market for a new laptop any time soon. Mine is only 2 years old and still kicks ass.
Well known brand like Sandisk?
If you're running a database server or something with lots of writing and data you don't want to lose, I can see the concern.
But a drive for gaming is the best possible use case for a lower endurance drive. Even a poor drive can write the whole thing 200 times. I doubt many people would even get close to that.
This could be a problem for console players though, especially those with a Series S which can't run new games off an external.
Not if you have a PS5. I just added a $99 2TB Samsung 980 Pro to mine. Microsoft really shafted Xbox owners with their Seagate partnershit.
I completely agree, Microsoft shouldn’t have been greedy and used proprietary storage. Sony did it the right way by allowing you to add your own which lets you find a good deal.
Which is ironic since Sony spent two decades trying to make Memory Sticks, UMDs, and MiniDiscs happen. I think they've finally learned their lesson on proprietary storage.
PS5 will also support up to 8TB of additional storage. Series X maxes out at 2TB.
Don't worry, you can buy a Starfield themed external drive that can't actually run Starfield:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/seagate-starfield-special-edition-game-drive-for-xbox-5tb-external-usb-3-2-gen-1-portable-hard-drive-white/6547407.p?skuId=6547407