Idiots Guide to NVMe SSD Guide - Before You Buy

[Music] hello and welcome back to another before you buy the video where we look at a particular subject in the world of data storage or networking or whatever and we go through all the very very very important things you need to bear in mind before you lay down the cache so today we're talking about nvme ssds the subject we talked about quite a lot in summer 2021 here on the channel because so so so many releases have gone out there and so many of you are finding yourself in a position where you've got to go out and buy one of these ssds for the very first time and it's kind of a whole new world this isn't like hard drives and stuff like that these are completely different kettles of fish compared to that of traditional hard drives there so in today's video i'm going to go through eight very important things that you need to bear in mind when buying one of these devices it's going to be a little longer than my usual before you buys the reason being is this is such a big subject that a number of you have genuinely come into with next to no knowledge and the knowledge you do have may be somewhat out of date so let's get straight into our first point the first thing to bear in mind is that although these ssds are available in a number of different places they're not all the same and indeed you may hear the letters m two or m two key in conjunction with one of these ssds and then think they are all the same and they're really not nvme ssds come in a multitude of different faceted versions that we're going to talk about later on but one of the key big distinctions where you're going to make one of your earliest and biggest mistakes is the difference between m sata and m2 mvme now m santa or m2.2 sata because in terms of size that can be mixed up these are very different protocols with m2 sata or msata giving you something in the region of around 6 gigabits per second connectivity which can max out at around 600 megabytes per second give or take m2mvme can reach the thousands currently up to around seven and a half thousand megabytes but that's because they use very different protocols they look the same as these but m sata as it makes as it may sound and then to salter utilize sata a very old connection that's been around since hard drives and is still used today now it means it's a lot more widely accepted and compatible because of that connection although internally it has to be said that they are a middle ground mtar m sata and m2 sata between sata hard drives and ssds and m2mvme so it's incredibly important when buying an nvme ssd do you look for one of two things one obviously the letters nvme but the other key one to look out for is pcie they are known as pcie ssds or m2 pcie if you see pcie next to the m2 you're looking at an nvme and not a starter one if you see the word sata anywhere on that one line next to that pcie or the m2 you're not looking at nvme there that is not what you need to go for so make sure you look out for that next it would be remiss to talk about pcie without going into more details yes pcie is what enabled these m2 ssds to really reach the bandwidth they got to now pcie in terms of pcs and computers have been around for decades it's a lovely little slot that allowed you to upgrade your systems indeed it was all the way back to the days of ibm releasing pcs that allowed people to customize them some might say that mate or made or broke that company it has to be said but pcie upgradability in pc chassis is what has allowed people to really change and adapt computers in you know even now in 2021 however in terms of m2 nvme the thing you really need to focus on with pcie is the gen you may notice most modern m2 nvmes right now are being broken into two different categories they are pcie gen 3 times 4 or gen four times four now there is an enormous difference in terms of performance between these two now pcie that bit at the beginning normally comes in generation also pcie gen one gen 2 gen 3 or gen 4 with gen 5 being danced around with right now in very early commercial stages now that is effectively the throughput that's possible there there's other things like power and handling and packets but we're just focusing on the performance pcie gen 1 is 250 megabytes pcie gen 2 is 500 megabytes pcie gen 3 is a thousand megabytes and pcie gen 4 is 2 000 megabytes now remember that at the beginning pcie gen 3 times 4 that means that that pcie bit there at the beginning john 1 2 gen 2 gen 324 is being multiplied there so in the case of gen 4 it's four times the original number so in the case of pcie gen 3 times 4 gen 3 is a thousand times it by four thousand and that's the bandwidth that's the maximum throughput possible on that pcie gen four lane it doesn't necessarily mean that this ssd is going to crack out 4000 megs and in most cases it definitely won't but pcie gen 3x4 allows that channel think of it as the pipe and think of the ssd throughput as the water going through the pipe okay so when you're looking at an ssd if it says gen three times four or gen four times four the difference there is four thousand to eight thousand megabytes per second bandwidth to play with there so when you're looking at an ssd it's important to know what is the pcie gen and times numbers on both the ssd you're buying and on the slot that you're occupying on your pc or console system there so it's very important to understand the distinction between those pcies because although they are completely backwards compatible if you stick a pcie gen four times four ssd inside a slot that's gen three times four it will immediately bottleneck in and you won't be able to get anywhere near the full performance that these ssds are putting out next a concern that's been thrown around for a number of years in the terms of ssd storage as performance has got harder faster and harder and just busier and busier is the question of durability now durability has never really been something people have looked at when it came to traditional hard drives or even early sata ssds because these ssds weren't really able to push through the kind of performance for most users where durability was a concern i.e how long it's going to last and how long it's going to maintain that performance and that's really the key thing nvmes being much much smaller and unlike these ssds that come in big heat dissipating cases with lots more heatsinks embedded on on top these ssds arrive they're great they're more bare bones occasionally you'll get heat sink included that we'll talk about in a bit but in most cases you have to factor in that these are going to get a lot of electricity pass through them and they do get quite hot the result is that the components the chips on board known as the nand the controller and the memory all that stuff there can over time wear down because of the heat that's been generated or more commonly in the case of nand had it been written to constantly slowly wears away at those components so in that case the lifespan of the drive and its durability will be affected but more importantly it is about the performance so as time wears on and these drives are written to constantly constantly constantly you can start to lower the overall performance and that big number they promised at the beginning can start to drop down now a lot of ssd vendors make a very clear point of highlighting two factors tbw terabytes written and dwpd drive rights per day now this is kind of a promise from the manufacturer that as long as you work within these guidelines this ssd will maintain that full performance for the full length of the warranty typically five years so in the case of terabytes written the number they present to you is in terabytes that number is basically them saying that this drive can withstand the writing of this much data with deletion in between of course throughout that five year period and it won't drop in performance or break in terms of drive rights per day it is presented as a decimal place 0.3 0.5 1.0 and that is basically at the fraction of the drive so for a one terabyte drive if the drive writes per day was 0.5 from a one terabyte drive that would be 500 gig so half of one terabyte the result is that they are saying that you can use this drive and write to it up to 500 gigabytes on this one terabyte drive per day every day for five years and it will work to the best of its ability but it's worth bearing in mind that the controller that little chip there on board that's the brain keeps track of everything that's done to that drive and manufacturers in order to enforce this and say that our drive will only last that period of time but if it breaks we want to know that you've not overused it they have now linked terabytes written to the warranty so once you have a drive if it has a five year warranty and it breaks it slows down it stops working and you send it back to the manufacturer within those five years they will check whether you have kept within those guidelines have you been writing to it every single day constantly with things like surveillance or live streaming or have you kept within those boundaries so it's important to stay on top of terabytes written and drive pipes to drive rights per day next up over provisioning a number of you may or may not be know that know that when you buy an ssd even though it seems pretty clear-cut you know 500 gig 1tb 2gb some ssd brands have a tendency to either say that their drive has 500 gigabytes of storage or they'll say 480 when you get to one terabyte they'll say 960 or one terabyte instead of 2tb it'll be 1.92 terabytes why do they do that well that is over provisioning some ssds in order to get better performance better handling of data internally what they do is they take a percentage of the storage inside that's available so say it deals 500 gig they take a fraction of that storage and then they use it as a kind of buffer zone to work within the ssd to help handling of tasks internally that's known as over provisioning and a lot of ssds arrive with over provisioning taken into consideration particularly drives are going to be used in more enterprise level settings the result being that often you'll see two ssds at the same price but one will show 500 gig and another will show 480. depending on more enterprise task or higher iops which is accessing lots of small things very very quickly otherwise known as individual input outputs per second it's sometimes useful and beneficial to go for a drive that includes over provisioning alternatively you can get a standard class drive and install software or have system services that will set up over provisioning for you but ultimately it's typically the same price for two drives in the same brand one without and one with over provisioning because the hardware remains the same next up i've talked about nand a great deal in this video but it's worth highlighting the importance of nand now of all the chips that are on here the big chunky identical ones are known as nand they are the chips that have the storage generally each block will be maybe 100 gig or 200 gig it depends on the capacity of the drive maybe even smaller that can also mean that some drives have nothing on the back and some of them have chips on either side now with nand nan comes in and with the storage that's on there remember going back to when drives are being read and written to quite a lot they have layers on them now that the cell that is the chip of nand that's on there can be a number of different kinds of cell now that can be slc mlc tlc and qlc currently slc single layer cell mlc multi-layer cell tlc triple layer cell and unsurprisingly qlc is quad level quad layer cell now the result of this is they can compact more data into these ssds if they have more layers there now it does introduce something called 3d nand where it works in two directions we're just going to bank that for now we're just going to focus on those four one two three four layer cells now the reason we're talking about nand is the first two slc and mlc they give you the lowest possible capacity they give you the best endurance and they give you the best performance but much much much smaller capacity and the price rockets up at the other end of the scale you have drives that are qlc these are ones that have got the most capacity they can fit eight terabytes on something like this really really easily however the performance is much much lower and the durability is much much lower the price is lovely and low too but its longevity its durability and ultimately its overall performance is much much lower that's why the industry standard and kind of the agreement between brands and consumers alike is tlc nand so if you look at an ssd and you want the best middle ground for price performance and capacity go tlc nand and of course 3dtl scene and much much you've got the layers here they've taken advantage of 3d architecture and build of data inside these so you've got a better way to get more data and performance inside but you can get 3d tlc nand and 3d qlc nand next this one is slightly less important because it's not a lot of people don't have a lot of control over this but it's worth remembering a lot of modern ssds they not only have firmware updates that you can install manually using a pc to upgrade what's on there but on top of that you've got nvme revisions so that little connector there at the top m2 nvme there the key that uh connector there that interface will be in its own revision now nvme is currently available in revision 1.4 and even there's revision 2.0 being spoken about at the time of this video but a lot of older ssds will have revision 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.3 c now these are still very good and they do the job but as time goes on the nvme revision just like hdmi for teles gets better usb for your ports and stuff gets better same goes for nvme they're able to get better performance better power handling and basically improving the interface between the drive and your machine now your machine your pc your console whatever has its own firmware updates it will have a certain revision inside which in a lot of cases but not all can be updated so do bear in mind that when you buy an ssd there's a good chance you're fixed at the nvme revision inside but not on your host system so it's good to make sure that you upgrade your system to the maximum nvme revision but on top of that if you can go for an ssd particularly in 2021 right now to go for an nvme 1.4 or higher because you will get the best kind of interaction performance and low latency from the drive that you possibly can and now we're getting into the home stretch just a couple of points left and this next one is about the length of ssds now you may notice that a lot of ssds arrive on the market now have four little numbers banned on the end two two eight zero two two eight zero corresponds to the length of this ssd nearly all modern ssds right now are two two eight zero in length now there are exceptions you can get smaller ssds much shorter and a classic example of a device that's using smaller right now would be the steam deck it's not been released at the time i've recorded this video but the steam deck utilizes a much shorter length i think it's two two three zero but don't come commit me on that might be two four zero length ssd inside that means these ssds have got less physical space to put all of the nand and the chips and their capacity is generally lower or when the capacity is higher they're much much more expensive than larger versions there another example is the xbox series x and x series s they use a proprietary uh seagate drive that is their expansion there's only seagate that supply them and they too use a much smaller length ssd they also use a pcie gen four times two drive which already as we've learned earlier in this video lowers the overall possible performance but in the other direction nvmes get longer now the longest kind of standard accessible length is two two one one zero it's the next one up from here it's about yay longer and that allows bigger capacities right now now conventionally at the time of recording you can get eight tb drives uh two two one one zero length ssds but not all current pc and particularly smaller pc builds can actually get that longer drive and you might buy a drive that's got more capacity but it won't fit in your system so double check what the lengths are available to you on your pc or console system and whether you can go for a longer drive and save you a bit of research ps5 does go as high as two two one one zero ssds also there are of course longer ones known as ruler drives some of them are 30 centimeters in length which have ridiculous um performance and capacity these are enterprise they cost tens of thousands of pounds and i don't have truck with them in this video finally it's a big consideration i've already kind of touched on it already heat these drives get hot the faster they get the better the bandwidth they've got the hotter they get anyone that's ever utilized a laptop that's got one of these inside or a console system that's quite small with without great fan control these ssds can get extraordinarily hot in use and that's why it's highly recommended that you use a heatsink a heatsink you can slot the drive inside there's some thermal padding either in and then when you put this inside your system this isn't a fan although some of them do have fans on side what this is to do is to draw heat from the components on that nvme and it pulls the heat into this giant uh sometimes copper sometimes aluminium largely metal design here and it dissipates the heat out sometimes there's a fan kind of keeps things cool and to help dissipation of the heat within the larger chassis structure of your pc or console but predominantly these are for dissipating the heat off of these nvmes to keep them working well why is that necessary well although the nand on these drives likes to be a bit warm warm nand works quite well the controller or the brain kind of like the cpu on a computer works at its best when it's as cold as possible and that's why these heat sinks will dissipate the heat to the benefit of the controller and therefore the nand's a little bit warm it's not so bad and keeps things working well now it isn't to say that when these things are hot they're not going to work indeed if you keep an ssd between around about you know lower than maybe 65c they should work well but it's worth mentioning that once you hit 50c um um celsius what will happen is the drive will slightly bottleneck itself internally not all ssds do but definitely after 50 some ssds will purposefully lower their performance internally because they don't want the negative degradation effects of the heat affecting the larger ssd there so make sure you either get a heat sink or a fan assisted heatsink or keep your pc or console system in a nice air controlled environment there and that will maintain the temperature and therefore the performance of your ssd but this has been before you buy about nvme ssds there's so much more to this subject than this video covers but i hope these eight points have helped you choose your right ssd if you still need help take advantage of the free advice section over on nas compares linked in the description below is you know you can contact me or edit the web guide there it's a completely free service you don't have to pay for it we don't do anything with your email buy us an email about what you need or you have a few queries about buying the right nvme ssd we can help you along the way and of course click like if you've enjoyed the video subscribe to learn more about this subject and i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 4,730

Keywords: SSD, SSD Drive, fast ssd, ssd 2022, ssd 2021, seagate SSD, WD SSD, SAMSUNG SSD, NVME SSD, NVME PCIE 4 SSD, PCIE 4 SSD, PCIE 4 NVME SSD, PS5 SSD, M.2 SSD, BEST NVME SSD, BEST SSD NVME, SSD DWPD, SSD TBW, SSD ENDURANCE, ssd for NAS, SSD for Gaming, SSD for video editing, SSD for mc, ssd for windows, Guide to NVMe SSD, NVMe Guide, NVMe vs SATA, WD Nvme, Seagate NVMe, Best PC SSD, Best PC NVMe SSD, Best PS5 SSD, What is SSD TBW, What is SSD DWPD, What is SSD NAND

Id: g3gEdxCdDHQ

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021