With the unfortunate news that Solidigm is exiting the consumer market, I’m left in a position where I don’t have a fast but power efficient SSD to choose that is heatsink optional. My use cases would include replacing a 2015 MacBook Air SSD with a riser card to M.2, or eventually using a Framework or System76 Pangolin.
Losing a industry leader in performance to efficiency is definitely not great. Phison seem to be chasing only speed and not both at the same time.
Edit: Should remind people that I live in Canada and would prefer to buy from brick and mortar. The SK Hynix Platinum P41 therefore is more of a headache to order.
If run to potential, 3.0 x4 drives require heatsinks to stay within operating temperature spec and process scaling is slower than speed scaling in 4.0 and 5.0 x4 drives. The SM2269XT (P41 Plus) and Aries (P44) controllers are both on TSMC N12, same as the Phison E25 (e.g. T500) and E26 (e.g. MP700). Pascal (990 Pro, 8 nm), Phison E31T (N6), and Piccolo (990 Evo Plus, 5 nm) offer a node shrink. So will the as yet unreleased SM2508 (N6).
The P41 and P44 are pretty typical for active power.
drive
PCIe
size, TB
max power, W
P41
4.0 x4
2
5.5
P41 Plus
4.0 x4
2
4.5
P44
4.0 x4
2
6.1
990 Pro
4.0 x4
2
5.9
990 Evo Plus
4.0 x4, 5.0 x2
2
4.6
SN770
4.0 x4
2
4.9
SN850X
4.0 x4
2
6.8
T500
4.0 x4
2
6.2
MP700
5.0 x4
2
11.6
MP700 Elite
5.0 x4
2
4.7
SM2508 engineering sample
5.0 x4
2
7.0
SN5000
4.0 x4
4
4.7
I’d +1 for WD if the thermal solution is going to be poor. 85 C max operating temperature (SN5000, SN770, SN850X) rather than 70 C like most drives.
Crucial T500/T700/T705 are in general very solid choices with good performance and thermals. Crucial/Micron also appears to have less firmware issues than Samsung and WD in general.
Didn’t know this, I usually just look at the “High-End NVMe” drives off r/NewMaxx and see which ones are available at the local brick & mortar (Also in canada).
WD has been great because its cheaper than Samsungs offering.
Yeah, I’m leaning towards the SN850X cause unless there’s a crossflash utility to flash a Hynix P41 into a Solidigm P44, I do need something easy to get.
Also avoiding QLC like the plague so the SN5000 is automatically out of contention.
Kioxia NAND. Operating temperature’s in the drive specs and it’s a minor amount of searching to put together the rest.
990 and 850X pricing periodically crosses over here. Few workloads effectively utilize either so usually it hardly matters which. Of the handful of tasks I run which do exceed SATA III or PCIe 3.0 x4 bounds the 990 bursts a little higher but the 850X holds up better in sustained throughput. Also haven’t had a 850X reach 70 C but I’ve had to stop jobs because a 990 hit its 70 C limit.
Only the 4TB’s QLC, though the TLC’s still just 300 writes. For most use there’s no reason apparent to avoid QLC (or HMB) but usually I see 600 write TLC (with DRAM) being <20% more. If it’s just a TB or two often that’s a borderline negligible cost difference.
It will get to 71 °C just idling with low airflow and crammed into something like that and the Icy Dock ToughArmor MB699VP-B V2. Temperatures did not improve even after replacing the stock fans that came with the enclosure with Noctua fans and spinning them at max speed. But it did take longer to reach 69 °C.
The SSDs started behaving weirdly (dropped out and stopped responding) around that temperature for an extended period, so I called the experiment quits.
Yeah. I should clarify I’m mostly measuring under HR-09 Pros with good airflow and Arctic TP-3 as the entry level TIM. Both the SN850X’s and 990’s thermal resistances seem dominated by the lack of IHSes on the packages used but I can get a few degrees lower with paste+putty+shim combinations.
Unless it’s a space constrained install M.2-10’s about the minimum I’d consider with a 4.0 x4. Though that can be relaxed if there’s airflow and the drive doesn’t need to read like a few hundred GB at a time at 4.0 speeds. In the TB range 990s pretty much need active cooling.