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Bmock's NVMe SSD Recommendations

1/14/2023

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Bmockeg - Tech Specialist

Samsung has been known to produce some of the best NVMe drives out there. The new Samsung 990 Pro is Samsung's latest foray into the that space. The 990 Pro advertises blistering Sequential 7450 MB/s read and 6900 MB/s write speeds and random 4K up to 1400K read and 1550K write. It has a durability rating of 1200 TBW (Terabytes written).

The Samsung 990 Pro usually comes in at $289.99 for 2TB and $169.99 for the 1TB, this drive is the fastest and priciest of the group. This makes it my choice for best drive where cost doesn’t matter. This is the drive for those building trophy systems to show off on sites like Reddit and/or PCPartPicker.

Even though you won’t be able to see the drive itself in your build, showing that it is in there will turn some heads.

Kingston has been around since 1987 and in the storage business since 1993. It currently has a pair of drives that have great performance and provide tremendous value.

The 2TB model of the KC3000 comes in with Sequential Read/Write speeds at 7000/7000 MB/s and Random 4K Read/Write speeds of 1000K/1000K.

The 2TB Fury Renegade sports 7300/7000 MB/s for Sequential Read/Write and 1000K/1000K for Random Read/Write.

The major difference between the two is the endurance, or terabytes written. The KC3000 is 1600 TBW while the FURY is 2000 TBW. Either of these are a great pickup if you catch them around that $200 mark, and mark my best price to performance at the high end models.

Notable mentions to be considered depending on pricing are: (Speeds based on 2TB models)

Seagate FireCuda 530 PCIe 4.0 - Sequential R/W 7300/6900 MB/s and Random 4K R/W 1000K/1000K with 2550 TBW
WD Black SN 850X PCIe 4.0 - Sequential R/W 7300/6600 MB/s and Random 4K R/W 1200K/1100K with 1200 TBW
SK Hynix P41 Platinum PCIe 4.0 - Sequential R/W 7000/6500 MB/s and Random 4K R/W 1400K/1300K with 1200 TBW

Not looking for high-end NVMe's? Don't worry, we have you covered.

For those of you looking for an average gaming system and something dependable that “just works”, there are a couple of major competitors.

First up is the TeamGroup MP33 topping out at 1800/1500 MB/s for sequential R/W and 220K/200K Random 4K IOPS with 600 TBW. TeamGroup is gracious enough to offer a 5 year warranty on this drive but it does lack DRAM and HBM (High-Bandwidth Memory).

It receives strong competition from the Silicone Power P34A60 with sequential R/W at 2200/1600 MB/s and Random 4K IOPS 240K/250K with 600 TBW. Silicon Power also offers a 5 year warranty but much like the MP33, no DRAM or HBM.

This is not something that will affect gaming and load times in any way. People that would want to avoid these drives are those that move large multi-gigabyte files on a regular basis. These drives are some of the cheapest, while being dependable and efficient. The 512Gb models come in around $30, 1TB at around $52, and the 2TB at around $120.

Notable mentions to be considered depending on pricing are: (Speeds are based on 2TB models)

Kingston NV2 PCIe 4.0 - Sequential R/W 3500/2800 MB/s and Random 4K IOPS R/W 300K/300K with 640 TBW
Intel 670p PCIe 4.0 - Sequential R/W 3500/2700 MB/s and Random 4K R/W IOPS 310K/340K with 740 TBW
WD Black SN770 PCIe 4.0 - Sequential R/W 5150/4850 MB/s and Random 4K IOPS 650K/800K with 1200 TBW

And there you have it folks! A quick rundown of the top SSD's according to our wonderful Tech Specialist Bmock. As always, you can click the pictures or links that will take you the part to see pricing. We have a few more things for you here. Charts, charts, and charts.

The two charts directly below go over the Sequential Read and Sequential Write speeds measured at MB/s because, well, that's what you measure the speed at.

As you see, the Samsung 990 Pro tops the list in Sequential Read at 7450 MB/s while Kingston has two models coming in topping the Sequential Write at 7000 MB/s in the KC3000 and Fury RENEGADE.

Random 4K read/write IOPS we see the Samsung 990 Pro topping out again at 1400K read and 1550K write as the SK hynix P41 Platinum ties ole Sammy at 1400K read but is lower in write at 1300K.

It's no secret that Seagate has the most endurance out of any drive on the market today in the FireCuda 530 with a monster 2550 TBW with the Kingston Fury RENEGADE coming in at 2000 TBW.

We decided to throw our final chart here. And that's MSRP to TBW.

Just by looking at this we are in agreeance as a team that if you just take the MSRP and not any sale prices involved, the Kingston Fury RENEGADE or the Kingston KC3000 both Gen 4 NVMe SSD's are the best price to TBW.

It's good to remember that with sale prices, these numbers will obviously change. But for the sake of the cool looking charts that we made, we wanted to go with this.

Now if you catch the FireCuda 530 on a sale price around say a Black Friday or Holiday event sale and you are in the market for a drive that is high on endurance, then go for it.

We are just saying that 2000 TBW is an EXTREMELY large amount of data written.

If you are just looking for a good drive for storage, then check out the drives in this editorial. Some of you may have one of these drives! We'd love to hear your comments down below. As always, be respectful in those comments.

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Bmock's NVMe SSD Recommendations

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