Best Value 2TB NVMe PCI 3.0 SSD?

D

Deathwish238

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 11, 2006
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I need a 2TB NVMe SSD to replace my main drive. I'd like it to have a high probability of lasting at least 5 years. Mostly business use, some gaming but nothing serious where the speed difference matters. Occasionally copying large files of about 5GB between drives, but waiting an extra few minutes doesn't matter.

I do value speed, but it doesn't seem like the Samsung 980 Pro makes much real world difference over options closer to $200.

I'm a bit of a Crucial fanboy. But I'm willing to do go with something else. Would be nice to get Intel, just cause it's Intel. I'm wary of WD in general due to so many dead WD HDDs in the past. I'm a bit skeptical of smaller brands in general...but if there's good evidence that they're reliable then I suppose it's fine.

My current main drive is a 256GB 2.5" SATA MX500.

Seems like a 2TB Crucial P2 is a good bet for about $220? Is there a better value around?
 
Crucial infamously swapped out TLC memory for QLC in the later product revisions of the P2, I would avoid that unless you get a bottom bargain deal for it. Swapping out components is normal nowadays, but this sort of performance degradation went too far.
WD wasn't much better by the way, if you followed recent reporting on the SN550.

Given current prices, I'd say the Silicon Power P34A80 2TB offers the best price/performance. It costs $214.99 at NewEgg and Amazon.
 
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I'm running a Silicon Power SSD on one machine. It's only been around 6 months, but no problems. They are definitely a good brand if you want to save some money but also not get a piece of crap.

Samsung makes the best products, but I feel they are overpriced for what you are getting. I mean, if you want to spare no expense, fine, but there are other brands that are nearly as good and much cheaper.

Back before SSDs I always stuck with WD, but I feel like they fell off once SSDs became popular. They have tried to make a comeback, but they are not as good as people remember.

I like Seagate a lot more now, and never had a single drive fail. Also Crucial seems pretty solid. I don't think you can really go wrong. I thought Team Group was good (they are cheap) but recently had a SATA SSD fail after maybe 3 years. Might not buy them again.
 
I recently swapped an XPG SX 8200 2TB for a Samsung 980 Pro in my daily use/work from home system.

I went with this Samsung for the performance, reliability and future proofing (nvme 4).

I had a pair of the XPG 2TB's in the last two systems and decided to swap for the 980 when I swapped MB's. One was perfectly fine. The second suffered from performance degradation when working with large video files. I ended up using it as a game drive, using the "good" one as the system/application drive and vid capture.

I've had some issues with ADATA SSD's in the last year, having had to RMA a couple. Which is part of the reason for going back to Samsung.

No issues with the various Samsung, Kingston and SP's I have in use.

PNY seems to have one people like for ~$200.
 
I've had good luck with Mushkin SATA drives, and the NVMe Pilot-E has some decent reviews and a good price.

The most beat-upon NVMe drive I have personally is a Toshiba OCZ RD400 which doesn't have an up-to-date equivalent as far as I know.
 
If you live near a Microcenter or shop on Amazon, the Inland "premium" pci-e 3.0 drives are essentially Phison reference drives and are very good performers for the Money, TLC, dram cache, the works.
 
Few months ago I got A-Data SX8200 Pro 2TB for games after using 512GB variant for some time. 512GB model stayed as C: drive. It is preferable that games and OS are on separate drives.
In the shop I got them these drives were one of the cheapest and in reviews got very good benchmark results. No issues so far... but then again I did not torture these drives and they have only seen typical sunday gamer kind of usage.

There is some kind of lottery situation with this model but I apparently got one of the better ones. Performance differences between them are small and it is nothing to worry about. When I was getting 512GB model I also wanted Intel but Intel drives were either not very fast or very expensive. A-Data was much better performance/price.

For PS5 I just ordered PCIe 4.0 A-Data XPG Gammix S70. Again mostly because good specs/results and price... which was almost twice that I had to pay for 3.0 drive. yuck. Sooner or later I will put it to PC as system drive or something. Maybe not, depends on if I will want 4TB drive in PS5 or not :p
 
XoR_ said:
Few months ago I got A-Data SX8200 Pro 2TB for games after using 512GB variant for some time. 512GB model stayed as C: drive. It is preferable that games and OS are on separate drives.
In the shop I got them these drives were one of the cheapest and in reviews got very good benchmark results. No issues so far... but then again I did not torture these drives and they have only seen typical sunday gamer kind of usage.

There is some kind of lottery situation with this model but I apparently got one of the better ones. Performance differences between them are small and it is nothing to worry about. When I was getting 512GB model I also wanted Intel but Intel drives were either not very fast or very expensive. A-Data was much better performance/price.

For PS5 I just ordered PCIe 4.0 A-Data XPG Gammix S70. Again mostly because good specs/results and price... which was almost twice that I had to pay for 3.0 drive. yuck. Sooner or later I will put it to PC as system drive or something. Maybe not, depends on if I will want 4TB drive in PS5 or not :p
Click to expand...
make sure you get a heatsink for it if your putting it inside the PS5 or it will overheat and thermally throttle or just stop working when hot
 
Abula said:
If you want intel NVME at a decent price, i would consider Intel 670p 2TB, even though its QLC drive, its still perform very similar to TLC drives.

Another drive that i do like is SK hynix Gold P31 2TB, it one of the most power efficient drives in the market.
Click to expand...
I was researching drives today and that SK Hynix Gold P31 2TB seems like a no-brainer for a Gen 3 drive. Right now it's only $245 on Amazon.
 
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crucial p5 2 tb Nvme gen 3 is currently at 199$ at amazon.
I think i am going to get one myself, move from a 2 tb hybrid hard drive.
 
likeman said:
make sure you get a heatsink for it if your putting it inside the PS5 or it will overheat and thermally throttle or just stop working when hot
Click to expand...
This post is a few months old now and I don't remember if you are the same person whom I recently debunked on this sort of comment in another thread but------That's not really true and definitely wouldn't be, with this these S70 blade drives. (and the point here isn't to slam on you. Rather, its to inform people that the reality with PS5 is much better).

With SSDs, writing data heats up the drive much more than reading, does.

Toms hardware found that with Western Digital Black SN850, and a Samsung 980 Pro, with 1TB capacity-----they didn't run into any tangible performance issues while writing data, even with no heatsink and the PS5's SSD port cover installed (with the cover installed, there is little or no airflow). And even if the drives would ever throttle in this configuration, it would only ever be during a long, sustained write. Which you wont be doing very often. But it may not even be possible to have a long enough write, for it to really matter. As copying the entire internal PS5 drive, to one of these secondary drives, wouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. And likewise, "installing" a game (if it even needs to be completely downloaded and then explicitly "installed") would only take a minute or two. Its hardly long enough for you to perceive a performance issue.

The majority of PS5 usage, is reading data from the drives. This generally does not heat up the drives enough to even be close to throttling. And in that sense, even the worst case scenario of the drives being run with no heatsink, with the cover installed, is also unlikely to lead to longevity issues. Because they won't often be heated to a notable degree in terms of SSD specs.

and if you simply use the drives without the PS5's port cover for the NVME expansion port----you get airflow from the CPU fan and the drives run well within thermal specs, even while doing heavy writes.

Its a good article:
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ps5-ssd-upgrade-temperature-testing

And for the S70 blade, Techpowerup found that while the drive runs hot and does throttle even with the official heatsink: its not enough to matter, as it behaves well while throttling. And airflow from a fan takes care of it.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/adata-xpg-gammix-s70-blade-2-tb/7.html

Indeed, some SSD don't behave well while throttling and come to an effective halt when they throttle. Buuuut, I've scarcely seen one which throttles with airflow. Leave the port cover off in the PS5 and you have airflow. And most of the time, you'll be reading, anyway. So even a poorly behaved drive shouldn't be in danger of throttling, the majority of the time.

So, kind of the through line here is A. you don't really need an SSD heatsink in the PS5 and B. heatsinks cost extra and its often enough to eat up what would otherwise be a good discount on an SSD. $10 - $30. Sometimes the official heatsinks for a particular SSD model can command even more of a premium than that.
 
Not even going to bother trying to replace the SSD on my PS5, I will just delete a game, but that is very good to know.
 
Deathwish238 said:
I need a 2TB NVMe SSD to replace my main drive. I'd like it to have a high probability of lasting at least 5 years. Mostly business use, some gaming but nothing serious where the speed difference matters. Occasionally copying large files of about 5GB between drives, but waiting an extra few minutes doesn't matter.

I do value speed, but it doesn't seem like the Samsung 980 Pro makes much real world difference over options closer to $200.

I'm a bit of a Crucial fanboy. But I'm willing to do go with something else. Would be nice to get Intel, just cause it's Intel. I'm wary of WD in general due to so many dead WD HDDs in the past. I'm a bit skeptical of smaller brands in general...but if there's good evidence that they're reliable then I suppose it's fine.

My current main drive is a 256GB 2.5" SATA MX500.

Seems like a 2TB Crucial P2 is a good bet for about $220? Is there a better value around?
Click to expand...
Imho, good alternatives to Samsung drives, Mushkin Pilot-E, XPG SX8100, SP UD70, XPG GAMMIX S11 Pro, PNY CS2130 and Team Group MP34.

All are sub-$200 (USD) except for the PNY. Microcenter might have other choices for an even better prices but the suggestions above should be available at Newegg, Amazon and other online retailers that ship to your location.
 
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pavel said:
Imho, good alternatives to Samsung drives, Mushkin Pilot-E, XPG SX8100, SP UD70, XPG GAMMIX S11 Pro, PNY CS2130 and Team Group MP34.

All are sub-$200 (USD) except for the PNY. Microcenter might have other choices for an even better choices but the suggestions above should be available at Newegg, Amazon and other online retailers that ship to your location.
Click to expand...
You can sometimes get the Microcenter Inland Premium drives on Amazon for typical Microcenter pricing. You just have to look for them on Amazon and make sure the order is listed as being fulfilled by Microcenter.
 
Dan_D said:
You can sometimes get the Microcenter Inland Premium drives on Amazon for typical Microcenter pricing. You just have to look for them on Amazon and make sure the order is listed as being fulfilled by Microcenter.
Click to expand...
Oh okay. Interesting. 'Should be helpful to the OP. Btw, I made a mistake/typo - I meant to say Microcenter might have better prices on many of the same drives listed in this thread.
 
crucial p5 is nice!
The software was not so good.
Acronis true image by crucial kept stopping saying crc errors on my main drive.
Ran scan disk and no errors found , tried it three times.
Got aomei backupper pro and it worked no problem.
Also Macrium Reflect seem to work good for free option , using it to clone a 2 tb that is dieing. Less than 10 meg read speed on it (click noise).

PS.. Avoid the micron mvme drivers if crucial storage recommends. It crashed my sytem into a boot loop,untill i restored it.


Now after retore i was able to install the NVM drivers. That is with crucial momentum drive enabled
 

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