Need suggestion for an inexpensive pci3.0 ssd

I’m replacing the boot m.2 drive of my old NAS machine for its next upgrade and I need a suggestion for a decent PCI3.0 nvme ssd. I’ve got this t-force cadera z440 coming tomorrow as it was pretty cheap on amazon, even though its also capable of pci 4.0. The write endurance is spectacular and the performance is good enough. Too good to be true for the price? I had initially purchased a Crucial P5 plus but that thing was as hot as the sun and I immediately sent it back.

Anything NVMe is overkill for a boot drive. Get some cheap 500GB for 30€. Kingston NV2, Mushkin Tempest…Samsung 980 or WD Blue if you like big brands.
You will never wear out a NAS boot drive no matter how bad the TBW is. It stores like 15GB of stuff and writes mostly logs.

I usually go with the more well known brand names but, like you say, its just a boot drive so when I found a 1TB pcie4.0 nvme SSD for $54 USD I decided I’d try it. The machine is more than a NAS. It runs some VMs and a plex server so the extra performance and durability wont hurt. I’ve just never bought anything from teamgroup before so I hope its not a mistake.

I don’t have any experience with the brand either. Checking on the stats seems to indicate Kingston NV2 levels of quality, maybe even a rebrand. Not much, but I’d use it as a boot/system drive in my NAS any time. It won’t win any benchmarks. But the only metric here is: Do the job with least amount of money.

But if you store VMs and stuff on that disk, things obviously change. I went with cheaper 3.0 drives (and even some SATA) for my stuff regarding Boot and Proxmox system drives because Random I/O isnt that different in practice and do I really need >3.5GB/sec sequential?

NVMe costs about the same as sata (at least here), so may as well go for NVMe. Just dont buy QLC drives

NVMe also costs PCIe lanes. And unless you run full server board, those are very limited. I certainly don’t have M.2 or PCIe slots to spare. SATA ports are free expansion. There are server boards out there with on-board SD/eMMC-cards and it’s totally fine.
But when using it for VM disks, applications and user data, that’s certainly worthy of PCIe lanes.

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