SSD Review — 8 NVMe M.2 Drives Tested — Which Should You Buy? — 2019 Edition

hello and welcome to tech deals which nvme SSD drive should you buy we have eight different drives today compared benchmarks and specific purchase recommendations from low end budget drives all the way to the premium Samsung 970 Evo plus which should you buy we're going to get into that today all the drives discussed today will be linked in the video description below to Amazon and Newegg if you like this content please consider supporting by using those links when shopping also remember to subscribe like and leave a comment below because YouTube's engagement is a thing ten years ago almost nobody was using a solid-state drive of any kind they were small and expensive five years ago they started to become mainstream for enthusiasts computers starting with excellent drives like the Samsung 840 Evo which I had in my house well machine and then two years ago I did two SSD comparison videos one for serial ata drives and one for the then relatively new and more expensive nvme drives at the time back in 2017 my advice for most people was to save your money and get a SATA Drive the nvme drives at the time were not worth the price premium for most people that was then and this is now nvme drives have now reached price parity or close enough that it doesn't matter for most people to SATA drives that nvme has become the new recommendation there's still about a 20% price premium but considering the performance that's not a lot to pay for substantially more than 20% more performance SATA drives still have a place either for game drives secondary storage or to give older pcs a new lease on life if you've never stuck an SSD into an older computer it can make a 5 or even 10 year old computer feel like new if it was previously running a hard drive but if you're building a new machine today if you've got a rise in or one of the latest Intel core chips then nvme is where it's at nvm e stands for non-volatile memory Express which is a really fancy way of saying flash storage via the PCI Express bus these are literally PCI Express expansion cards in an m dot 2 format as opposed to something that slides into what you would traditionally think to be an expansion slot they are x 4 or 4 lanes each now the nvme standard is a protocol it's the m dot 2 slot is separate from nvme it's just what nvme happens to use most of the time many people think of SATA drives as being two and a half inch drives in nvme as being m dot 2 but that's not always true SATA is also an interface most SATA drives most modern SATA drives use a HCI advanced host configuration interface you don't have to remember this I promise there will be no quiz on this tomorrow but it's important to understand that a HCI drives can be had in the m dot 2 format and nvme drives can be had in the two-and-a-half inch format that is what the U dot 2 standard was which nobody adopted and it's mostly gone at this point but those do exist or a couple of them do in any case this right here is a really good example of that this is 2 m dot 2 drives on an expansion card one is SATA and one is nvme so you can have both drives in the same format we today are only talking about nvme and frankly at today's prices that's what you should be buying here's the really short version without all the technical jargon nvme is superior in every way to HCI which you otherwise know as SATA the only reason it wasn't used for hard drives was because they wouldn't have taken advantage of it nand with it's much faster random access takes advantage of the superior nvme protocol which is why it's being used for SSDs the old interface was designed for hard drives and frankly it never was really that great for SSDs but we have nvme now and so life moves on a common question is how large of a drive should I buy well it wasn't that long ago that 256 gigabyte SSDs were standard and anything bigger was considered monstrous but those days are over you can now buy one terabyte of nvme superfast storage for right around $100 at that price point I genuinely don't think that most people should buy smaller than a one terabyte drive for a primary use daily computer a secondary machine a backup computer something that isn't used very much sure can absolutely have a smaller Drive but if it's going to be your daily drive or something that you use every day that you have games and apps and programs installed in one terabyte is where it's at even for sub $1000 computers because your boot drive is one of the hardest things to upgrade it's the biggest pain in the neck to change and so many programs apps updates games drivers and everything else want to be on your C Drive it's simply easier to have room there to grow it is also worth noting that unlike hard drives to a large extent SSDs get faster and have better endurance the larger they get one terabyte drives are generally a bit faster than the 500 gig versions they generally have double the total right life because SSDs do have a limited life although it's not a factor for most people and you generally have a better overall experience there's a larger buffer or a larger cache some of these drives actually have better onboard processors than their 500 gigabyte and their 250 gigabyte versions so now that they're down to $100 get the 1 terabyte version unless you are very very budget strapped 2 terabytes is not crazy but we'll talk about that in a minute one more thought regarding drive size games are getting bigger and bigger and with streaming textures and 4k textures they just continue to get larger in size and the stutter in games loading off hard drive is a real thing it's not a huge thing but if you don't like mic restarting the games especially open-world games or fast paced games or games that change their Maps off and then you want to install your modern games on an SSD otherwise you get those little texture pop pins and delays and load times that are just a little bit annoying in your modern game as for size call of duty black ops 4 is now 140 gigabytes in size even GTA 5 which is now a five-year-old game has ballooned to over 80 gigabytes in size and half of the games that are regularly benchmark are pushing a hundred terabytes each if you need any further evidence that one terabyte should be the new minimum amount of space that you buy for your boot drive not to mention your game and data drive I think that pretty much sums it up in my opinion to actually boot your system to an nvme drive you must have native support built right into your motherboard Intel started supporting nvme with the fourth generation of processors as well in 2014 with the ninety series of boards the z97 boards usually had one m2 slot on it although they were not full speed slots it does not matter I know because I have an nvme Drive installed on my z97 on my I 747 90k it was the z170 boards when they became full speed slots they're quite a bit slower for those older ones but it really doesn't matter anything newer should also have an MDOT to slot on it AMD started supporting nvme with Rison in 2017 better late than never but it's fine because the older chips are FX and I benchmarked those and well we won't talk about those anymore but if you do have an older system and you want to add storage and you don't want to put a two and a half inch SSD in a SATA Drive either you don't have a power cable another data cable another poor or you want to be future proof perhaps you want to add another SSD to your system now and you want to make it your boot drive when you upgrade your system at some point in the future not to worry for under $15 you can buy one of these cards this is a PCI Express 4x card to a m dot 2 slot because then I'm not two slot is just for PCI Express Lanes that's why these are under $15 it is a straight adapter to adapt the wires to your board you can install this in almost anything a 10 year old i7 920 will take this and you will be able to use it as a data drive not a boot drive but it down a drive so buy yourself a nice new end up to nvme SSD put into one of these put it in your old system use it for a while and when you upgrade you can take it off and make it to boot drive of whatever you upgrade to another advantage of that card for any system is the that it makes installation so much simpler with a two and a half inch drive you need a power cable from your power supply and the SATA data cable and a port on your motherboard you need four Drive screws of placing your system to put it and you have to do cable management with a card insert the card put the drive on you're done there's no power cable there's no data cable it takes a minute to install and it's very very simple even if you have an older system even if you have like an i-5 2400 with PCI Express - yes it's gonna run it technically half speed but for that you're gonna put a budget drive on and it really isn't going to matter even if you've got a seven eight or nine year old computer if you want to add storage that's a really easy way to do it if you have a PCI Express 4x lot or larger to put it in finally last but not least a very common question is what is the difference between SLC MLC TLC and qlc I'm going to talk about these a little bit in the benchmarks which we are getting to right after this part however that is a common question where people often misunderstand what they mean or misunderstand how important they are or are not so here's the really really short version SLC is one bit per NAND memory cell mlc is two bits per NAND memory cell TLC is three and ql c is for it actually gets exponentially more difficult with the voltage levels in the technology which we're not going to get into but ql c is substantially harder to do than even TLC however you get much more storage for the money which is why the drive manufacturers do it none of these drives are primary SLC drives we have not had SLC drives for a long time very early NAND was but they went to mlc very quickly most of these drives are TLC tri-level cell three bits per cell and two of them are ql c the Intel 660 P and the Samsung p1 they are natively slower however all of these drives use some form of buffering or cache which is why you're going to see the excellent write performance in random as opposed to read speeds but we'll talk about that during the benchmarks they use some form of cash the Intel 660 P for example sets aside part of its NAND memory as SLC or single level self sit one bit per cell how much depends upon what size drive you buy and how full it is because it shrinks a bit as the drive gets full but what it does is it use that to buffer incoming writes and it gets great performance though read speed and the write speed to the SLC cache is spectacular the actual native speed to the qlc memory on those is not actually all that great however unless you plan on writing hundreds of gigabytes regularly to the drive without giving it a break it doesn't matter and you will never notice planning on writing 10 20 or 30 gigabytes it's not an issue it's only when you try to do full drive writes that it becomes an issue if you do plan to do huge amounts of writes on a regular basis well then yeah it's probably not the ideal Drive you might want to pick one of the others but in the real world the SLC cache mask tip for the most part even the TLC of the other drives is really not as fast as the benchmark numbers might otherwise indicate because they either have DRAM buffers or some SLC cache of their own although it's smaller than the qlc drives in order to buffer incoming especially random writes to pick up and improve performance a good example of a true mlc drive is the samsung 970 pro these are expensive this is a true two bit per cell and this will right at its full sustain speed for the entire drive you don't need this most likely maybe like half of a percentage point of you do the 970 Evo is a TLC drive and it will not write its full drive length at full speed it will eventually start to slow down although not that much it has X Samsung make spectacular drives they're expensive but that's still a really really good Drive now I actually have this specific drive in my thread Ripper machine which is my primary content creation machine for YouTube I and I use it intensively which is why I have a pro drive in there but unless you're doing 4k 60 video for a living like I am you probably don't need one of these expensive Pro drives there's also total Drive write life to consider which kind of carries into the type and on here and this is something that many people bring up as a concern it's really not don't worry about how much right life the drives have unless you intentionally abuse your machine and if you haven't heard of it by the way all NAND wears out eventually unlike hard drives the name memory cells have a fixed number of rights that they can take but all of these drives have spare area set aside and where Levellers the controllers on board spread out the rights throughout the NAND to to basically even out the wear of the drives these will become obsolete before you wear them out I've owned SSDs since 2010 for nine years I still have my original drives from 2010 one of them is installed in one of my machines downstairs none of my drives have used up more than 10 percent of their total drive right life most of my drives are at 98 or 97 percent total drive right remaining so if you're worried about it rest assured it really isn't as big of a deal it just sounds scary but it really isn't well that's enough of me talking let's get to the benchmarks let's start off with sequential and then we'll get to random performance first up we have the sequential read and write numbers these are the big crowd-pleasing numbers where we go whoa look at this three and a half gigabytes per second we are super speed now compared to the 500 to 550 megabytes per second these are substantially faster transfer rates well at least for some of the drives you'll notice right away that the qlc drives the crucial p1 and the Intel 660 P are noticeably slower and oddly enough the sequential write speed of the Intel 760 P is half of all the other drives but effectively as much as it doesn't make any difference the sequential read and sequential writes speed of the other standard TLC drives the ADATA adlink Sebert rocket the samsung 970 evo plus and then the western digital black SN 750 who comes up with these names are all effectively between three and three and a half gigabytes per second it looks really impressive however unless you're doing direct file copies from one drive to another denticles either's transfer rate that often and does it actually matter in day to day use that's a subjective question although it can be looked at based upon loading times and launch times and application install times and other sorts of tasks I've used enough of these drives in daily used to tell you yes random is what matters more than sequential here are some random read and write speed still very impressive performance but naturally quite a bit lower this is where we get into the nitty-gritty of actual normal desktop user experience this is queue depth of eight thread count of eight this is not a normal workload this is not what you're gonna see on a single user desktop running a few programs having a web browser open watching a video playing a game this is intense high demand high workload activity it makes the numbers really impress if it really lets the drives multiple controllers multiple a data channels really get that throughput up but seriously this is not what you're gonna expect on a day to day basis now this is much more interesting we've increased the queue depth to 32 but lowered the thread count to 1 in other words one person is doing something and yes you might get a thread count of two of two different programs or accessing something but in general this is more indicative of a high demand work load being placed on these drives by a single program what we're looking at here is a very consistent level of performance across the board roughly 500 megabyte per second random read speed and roughly 400 to 500 megabyte per second random write speed notice all of the differences went away when we took away the thread count let's see what happens when we take away the queue depth count and there went our beautiful performance numbers this is much more realistic and real-world and you're never gonna see the drive companies advertise it because these numbers don't look pretty on the box or the packaging or the advertising or whatever you're looking at we're looking at a low of 45 megabyte per second on the Western Digital black for random read and we're looking at a high of about a hundred and forty-six for random write speed now the random write speed is higher because all of these drives have some form of buffer some sort of cash either a dram cache or they have a small amount of SLC high-speed inand that's faster than than the rest of the drive that allows them to buffer incoming writes so random writes coming in out of order the drive could take store in the buffer rearrange and then write out to the drive which is why the random writes B is so much faster than the random reads beat notice that even the spectacular Samsung 970 Evo plus only does 65 megabytes per second random read compared to the lowest drives on here december trock --it the add link s 70 and believe it or not the Western Digital black SN 750 that new drive which I was kind of disappointed with for how much they charge for that these are all real differences there is a legitimate difference between say the Samsung and the Sandburg rocket but will you really notice it in the real world maybe if you're doing intensive tasks if you're installing one of these drives and a high-end desktop sure maybe but the truth of the matter is any nvme drive is going to be better than any SATA Drive for normal consumer workloads on the desktop it's not going to make a substantial difference which drive you buy except to your wallet and the wallet is the one place where I think we really need to take a closer look at so let's do just that here's the price per gigabyte of each of these drives is the Samsung 970 Evo plus the best yes and if you just won the lottery last night why are you watching this go buy that drive it's amazing however the Sandberg rocket is exactly 50% the price of the 970 Evo plus and it's really close in performance it's not perfect it's not quite there it's a little bit lower here and there and Samsung does have the benefit of a longer warranty better endurance and better tools Samson magician software and the Samsung cloning software are excellent if you've got the budget for it rock on and get the Samsung they're wonderful wonderful drives but you can buy two terabytes of some of these drives to the price of one terabyte of the Samsung I have mentioned the crucial p1 and the Intel 660 P before they are great drives and if you prefer to buy from name brands crucial zon by micron and everybody knows who Intel is those are great drives with great warranties and great companies standing behind them but in terms of performance the simran rocket is actually the winner here the ADATA SX 8200 Pro is pretty close if it's price were just a touch lower it would be the winner here because a data is a bigger company and more well known and the add link s 70 is fine in and of its own right the Intel 760 P is a nice Drive but it just costs too much for what it is in my opinion and I'm really disappointed in that Western Digital black and one final look perhaps this is helpful to you you've got to be on a decent-sized monitor to read it but I put four of these charts up in quadrants so that you can see them all at the same time and look back and forth at the numbers and compare them I did leave off the queue depth 32 thread count of one because frankly there was virtually no difference across the board between any of the drives so instead I'm just showing you these four I will link to all of this down below but in my opinion the salmon trock it the Intel 660 P the crucial p1 and if you want a more performance oriented drive the ADA SX 8200 Pro are all worth considering but frankly you could put any of these drives in your computer and they would all provide wonderful performance and probably be far far faster than anything you currently have in short buy based upon price you can put any of these drives into your modern build and most likely you would be wowed and loved the experience and frankly unless you put them all side-by-side together and test them back-to-back you'd never notice the difference in fact even using them myself it is hard to tell the difference in normal desktop user workloads it is worth noting that I do have a pro drive as my boot drive on my thread ripper my primary content creation machine this kit a heavy heavy workout because I make 4k 60 frames-per-second videos for a living on YouTube however for my actual video files that I am editing I use for Intel 660 P 2 terabyte and vme drives on Anna soos m dot 2 hyper card on my thread Ripper these are in raid 0 that gives me 8 terabytes of scratch storage space this is not archive this is what I work with this video that I am recording right now will be copied to that array and that's where I do my editing and my cutting and trimming in Adobe Premiere Pro and I have multiple projects in progress at any one time and recorded benchmark footage and I put everything together and also just render out to it I used to render to a separate drive and discovered it didn't really make any difference because four of these have plenty of performance for that kind of thing it is also worth noting that as nice as the 970 Evo pluses it is over $200 at the time of this recording for a one terabyte 970 Evo plus it is less than $200 for a two terabyte 660 P that is double the storage for less money and in the real world 95% of you will never notice the difference between those two drives the Samsung is a bit nicer to be sure but 8 terabytes of the Samsung would be hellaciously expensive it's really not that bad to get 8 terabytes of this if you're a professional content creator so before you think you have to buy the best consider the value of some of these less expensive drives now I was impressed with drives like this ambient rocket in the adlink Drive they really performed remarkably well for their price at the time of recording and prices change which is why everything is linked in the video description below at the time of recording the sembra rocket was half the price or 110 dollars versus the 220 dollars of the Samsung and the performance is really really good the only downside is a shorter warranty and a company you've never heard of as opposed to Intel or crucial crucial zone by micron it's their consumer division which you know they're going to be around for the next five years in fact the in toss back tacular warranty so which one you want really is a personal preference you wouldn't go wrong with either one of them quite frankly if you want more mid-range performance as I mentioned during the benchmarks the SX 8200 Pro is very competitive performance wise not quite as fast as the Samsung but it's pretty close and it can be had for under 150 dollars at the time of this recording for the one terabyte size so that's pretty impressive choices are awesome as always questions comments thoughts feedback suggestions that's what the comment section is for below hopefully you're all subscribed and you've hit that Bell notification icon because those things help with the performance of the video and if you click that you'll actually get notified when new videos come out check the links in the video description as I've mentioned then all of these drives are linked down there using those links doesn't cost you anything extra and it does support the channel whatever you happen to buy it makes no difference but they'll all be linked down there as I mentioned the one terabyte size is the smallest most people should consider I do love the fact that 2 terabyte 660 PS are available for under 200 dollars that's amazing when you consider the historical price of SSDs regardless I hope this was helpful useful informative entertaining or amusing appreciate you all watching and I will see you next time

Channel: Tech Deals

Views: 621,179

Keywords: NVMe Review, NVMe Benchmark, Which NVMe Should you buy?, Which M.2 SSD?, which m.2 ssd to buy 2019, which m.2 should i buy, best m.2 ssd 2019, tech deals ssd, best nvme m.2 2019, best m.2 ssd, ssd comparison, best nvme ssd, best ssd 2019, best nvme m.2 ssd for gaming, Best nvme m.2 2020, best m.2, ssd review, Which SSD Should You Buy?, nvme ssd, crucial p1 1tb, crucial p1, Crucial P1, Intel 660p Review, NVMe, M.2 SSD, m.2 ssd, best ssd for gaming 2020

Id: GlGjd1GZWdo

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Bapu_Ji]

just get the 660p, cheap and gets the job done.

Unless there are others that cheaper that I don't know of

[u/Joebangalore]

Exceptional Video.

I have never been this gratified over my purchase of the Crucial P1 1 TB.

[u/abhiccc1]

I follow this channel for quality informative videos.

[u/ps_abhay]

Repost cuz original got deleted.