Drives

NVME

SSD/NVME Tier List

• I discovered this SSD/NVME Tier List from a YouTube video: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcrfpJKHkOf-Oi1DbuuQva2gT4/edit?pli=1&gid=0#gid=0
• Just websearch for "ssd tier list" and find the google doc if this url ever stops working
• Look up your ssd and find out all the specs you really want to know

DRAM-less NVMEs

• Beware DRAM-less NVMEs like the Crucial P3 Plus NVMEs I thought were good buys
• Turns out they're significantly cheaper because they lack DRAM storage used, as I understand it, for a cache for mapping your data in a fast way to facilitate wear-leveling that helps ensure your NVME lasts a long time
• DRAM-less NVMEs do wear-leveling, too, but apparently either use slower onboard flash memory or can use some of the host's own DRAM for this which is also slow because of data bus overhead
• Using the host's memory, and having to travel across the PCI bus, may be the reason performance can suffer especially after a short, fast burst at the beginning
• I had a bad experience with a DRAM-less Crucial P3 Plus on a PS5 that was much slower than a previous DRAM-enabled Corsair MP600 LPX. I suspect this was what was going on.

PS5 NVME Underperforming (Heatsinks)

• Heatsinks don't always help
• I bought a reasonable but low-end Crucial P3 Plus 2TB NVME for a PS5 but it was under-performing based on the speed of moving games back and forth from internal storage to nvme
• I initially had added a heatsink, then I tried re-seating the nvme, and finally I tried removing the heatsink altogether and that gave me a significant performance boost
• Before this, I was using a Corsair MP600 PRO LPX 1TB that came with a heatsink of its own and as I recall it had the expected nvme performance
  • The MP600 uses DRAM where the P3 Plus does not. This also likely part of the problem. See #DRAM-less NVMEs for details.
• So, beware even NVMEs can be tricky to sort through