Drives: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:12, 8 August 2024

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

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 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.

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

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 * 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
+* 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 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.