I Iwonder when they'll start making 4TB versions of these. Or even 4TB EVO versions

Fox2232:

And that's the thing here. Technology that enables proper use of such storage in games is somewhere in future. And till then, buying drive this fast is pointless at premium price. It is not even future proofing, because at time one can actually utilize it properly, there will be plenty more at better price points.

If you have got a lot of extra cash, it's not pointless at all. It should be a jolly good SSD. It's not like you'd be held back by extra performance in PC tech. Who knows, some fancy IO heavy game ported from the new consoles could put it to good use. I also doubt this kind of SSD would be bought by a person with some underwhelming 4-core CPU. The bigger problem would be PCIe 4.0 SSDs not getting any cheaper in general in the near future. They are still quite expensive, partially because Intel systems didn't support them. Soon, however, both Intel folks and console users might buy them in larger numbers, which could affect manufacturers' interest in offering new, cheaper models.

Ill stick with my 1TB drive I got for $60 that is 4000 read and write.

Hope we get more 4+tb sizes this year (that aint qlc)

As Fox2232 said PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe is more of a bragging item right now. I have a WD Black SN850 (7000/5100 so 2 TB version which is slower than 1 TB version) but I really can't feel the difference in loading times between this and my SSD Samsung 860 Evo for games and normal use - maybe when I compile and run a simulation library from work I can feel that the process is faster and the system feel snappier using the same drive for temp files during compile and so on... The major difference for me is in temperature: WD black 51 degrees vs Samsung 28 degrees (idle)...in full load I've seen 75 degrees on WD...I will buy a custom heatsink since the one from the motherboard (thermal pad included) is not enough to cool this beast.

Heat and cost per gb or well tb at this point is why i wont have one these drive any time soon. I really hope the fact sony went to this extreme for storage on console it push the prices down on both Sata/NVMe dramaticly, but i higly doubt it Seriously storage that hot as gpu under load? no thanks. and that if I was even will to pay the 400$ price tag the 2tb drives have, which i wont If people got money for this for for, most people still have problems paying prices sata ssd have @ 1tb still, special when they see for that 100$ you can get4-5tb from hdd, and most people arnt creators or gamers or doing anything are heavy on i/o that they would notice it from there day to day routines at lest not enough to warrant such price tag

barbacot:

As Fox2232 said PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe is more of a bragging item right now. I have a WD Black SN850 (7000/5100 so 2 TB version which is slower than 1 TB version) but I really can't feel the difference in loading times between this and my SSD Samsung 860 Evo for games and normal use - maybe when I compile and run a simulation library from work I can feel that the process is faster and the system feel snappier using the same drive for temp files during compile and so on... The major difference for me is in temperature: WD black 51 degrees vs Samsung 28 degrees (idle)...in full load I've seen 75 degrees on WD...I will buy a custom heatsink since the one from the motherboard (thermal pad included) is not enough to cool this beast.

You don't feel it because games do not really use it, it's possible due to ps5/xbox going over to m.2 we might start to see games use it, it might also help with SAM or pcie addressable bar performance (But that we will have to wait for) Some games help with loading using the m.2 but it's quite small, like going from 20 seconds to 17, performance increase is there but clearly it's being bottleneck by game engines or something else. You can see the same on the new consoles, if you had say a ps4 pro with an SSD like I did, now playing with the ps5 the loading times on games not made for it is a tiny improvement, but then you get games like Spiderman remastered and you see the 1 second loading screen thats the Whoa factor right there.

JOHN30011887:

Hope we get more 4+tb sizes this year (that aint qlc)

honestly if you need mass fast storage, SSD's are more than enough for the majority of tasks, then have a smaller m.2 for newest of games that may benefit from m.2. Similar to how it was couple years ago with HDD for mass storage and SSD for modern games/OS

angelgraves13:

Not big enough for me

Then buy more ssd's and put them in raid-0 🙂 This is how I'm getting larger ssd arrays. I don't care about the higher sequential read and write, only the larger space. Looks like 980pro isn't very PRO compared to WD Black Sn850 https://www.diskusjon.no/uploads/monthly_2021_01/bilde.thumb.png.e8b1bc9c9e341da037b2c37a159c214a.png

angelgraves13:

I don't trust RAID-0.

Too bad for you, because all ssd's is pretty much raid-0 arrays of nand memory. So if you don't trust Raid-0, you are doomed to use something else than ssd's 😀 Userfailure is real, and a thing you should being worried about 😉

angelgraves13:

Well I only have 1 nVME slot, so I can't RAID-0 it.

I don't trust users with only one nVME slot 😛 So maybe you don't even need 4TB ssd anyway 😉

angelgraves13:

But I have a 4TB nVME right now from Sabrent!

Mayby you have the wrong motherboard? 😛

angelgraves13:

X99

Why not using pci-e m.2 adapter(s)? You have enough pci-e lanes 🙂

Ricepudding:

honestly if you need mass fast storage, SSD's are more than enough for the majority of tasks, then have a smaller m.2 for newest of games that may benefit from m.2. Similar to how it was couple years ago with HDD for mass storage and SSD for modern games/OS

Nah, iv got the 4tb Sabrent (tlc memory) for games only, plan to get another 4tb sabrent for games only (but would like bigger), and iv a 1tb samsung 970 evo nvme for os only, i plan to get a normal sata samsung ssd 4tb just for backup/music pics etc The price difference to me is so small between good quality 4tb sata and nvme that its better to just pay the small extra for faster nvme since my motherboard supports them fine.

Later this year we should have DirectStorage which will make better use of NVMe storage and improve load speeds etc once game developers start to use it. Whether or not it's compatible with PCIe gen 3 drives or requires gen 4 I don't know, but in the not to distant future we should be able to better utilise fast storage.

Fox2232:

Paying just in case is pointless.

I thought paying just in case is pretty normal in PC tech. And in fact quite a few other techs.

AStaUK:

Later this year we should have DirectStorage which will make better use of NVMe storage and improve load speeds etc once game developers start to use it. Whether or not it's compatible with PCIe gen 3 drives or requires gen 4 I don't know, but in the not to distant future we should be able to better utilise fast storage.

next year.

JOHN30011887:

Nah, iv got the 4tb Sabrent (tlc memory) for games only, plan to get another 4tb sabrent for games only (but would like bigger), and iv a 1tb samsung 970 evo nvme for os only, i plan to get a normal sata samsung ssd 4tb just for backup/music pics etc The price difference to me is so small between good quality 4tb sata and nvme that its better to just pay the small extra for faster nvme since my motherboard supports them fine.

Theres an 8TB for £1200. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sabrent-Rocket-Internal-Performance-SB-RKTQ-2TB/dp/B08957PT2K I'd wait a little longer. its not the best performing NVME either (R/W 3300/2900MB/s) but still trounces SATA.

nizzen:

Then buy more ssd's and put them in raid-0 🙂 This is how I'm getting larger ssd arrays. I don't care about the higher sequential read and write, only the larger space. [...]

Not recommended. A gaming machine usually isn't build to make use of RAID function. You will need a proper air flow for drives and either a dedicated RAID controller and/or a dedicated software raid solution. Speaking of which, since gaming pc's usually run Windows, Windows software raid solution isn't very comfortable and complicated to configure at the same time. I advice to use software raid solutions from linux and SAN distributed solutions instead. I assume that you're making use of the Fake-Raid function provided by the SATA-Controller or the M.2-Controller of your mainboard. This is not the conventional RAID that is used in enterprise solutions and is very unreliable. I wouldn'tadvice to make use of it even for home use. Given the fact that the mainboard controller drains performance from your CPU in order to build the RAID logics, you are also pretty much scrwed if the controller of your mainboard fails, which is likely to happen depending on the load you cause to access your logical RAID drive. In that case you will lose access to your data regardless if you have redudancy or not. Given the fact that mainboard controllers usually are very cheap, they tend to be unreliable and they also don't provide full utilization of RAID level benefits and performance gains from e.g. the stripe method given by RAID 0 or faster read-speeds due to mirrored data given by RAID 1.

nizzen:

Too bad for you, because all ssd's is pretty much raid-0 arrays of nand memory. So if you don't trust Raid-0, you are doomed to use something else than ssd's 😀 [...]

Excuse me? That's nonsense. SSDs and NAND memory is and works completely different from RAID, and there are not even similarities comparing both technologies... The only thing that matches is the sector/bits density from HDDs/SSDs and how they're accessed through RAID controllers. RAID is a redudant array of independent disks that exists to provide redudancy and enterprise grade gains from combining several physical drives into fewer logical drives while improving performance and mainly adding redudancy depending on RAID levels that are used. Since RAID 0 has absolutely no redundancy, it functions merely for improving performance with RAID level combinations such as RAID 10 or RAID 50, and logically distributing parity informations in even RAID 5 that originates from RAID 0's stripe method. RAID 0 alone is garbage, because it increases the chance of losing data when you have more drives that could potentially fail in one logical drive. Just one drive failure is enough to break all your files in there. RAID 0 exists because its logic is still relevant for the redundancy providing RAID levels.

Fox2232:

It is exactly as I wrote. That fancy game does not exist, yet. And it will take quite a few CPU cores to actually saturate decompression. Or Direct I/O. Paying just in case is pointless.

I tend to agree considering most of what we enthusiasts do is rate limited by random IO and that has not improved much if at all with these PCIe 4.0 devices. We are still looking at under 100MB/s for que depth 1 4K random IO and in this drives case its around 60 MB/s. This is where Intels Optane really shines hitting 450 MB/s at QD1 4K random io but it never became cheap. I'm sure some people have actual use cases for higher sequential IO but 90+% of use cases would never see a difference between a PCIe 3 or PCIe 4 NVMe drive.