Great price, as cheapest, next lower price is above $254.
Total Capacity:2TB
Warranty:Limited 3-year
Series:BX500
Product Line:Client SSD
Interface:SATA 6.0Gb/s
Form Factor:2.5-inch internal SSD
Read/Write speed:540 MB/s Read, 500 MB/s Write
Device Type:Internal Solid State Drive
Unit Height:7.0mm
Form Factor SSD:2.5-inch (7mm)
Package Content:Crucial BX500 3D NAND SATA 2.5-inch SSD, Acronis True Image for Crucial
Nvme would be better than this sata drive wouldn't it? Pcie 3 is around the same $/gb. If your computer can accept an m.2 drive, would a nvme be the better option?
NVMe is definitely a better interface with higher total sustained transfers, and all of these SSDs are limited by the SATA interface.
It's hard to see what flash that Kingston NV2 has, they seem to make a good effort in hiding that information, it's not even on their datasheet. So I would suspect it's QLC.
There's a few factors that make this a good buy, though.
1) It's outright the cheapest per GB SSD I've seen in TLC
2) Only the latest chipsets have multiple m.2 NVMe slots (so if you have 1x m.2, then that should be your OS drive with TLC and DRAM, while this can bump into a SATA slot)
3) Higher sustained transfer rates != it will be faster when you use it.
You can only hit those sustained transfer rates if you're transferring large files to another device with equally high sustained data transfer rates. Random IOPS is the most important factor and that's always WAY below the 600MB/s that SATA offers, meaning that the interface doesn't actually matter. Random IOPS governs the opening lots of tiny files in games and applications, copy and pasting text files, opening applications etc. A 27MB photo will open in the same amount of time with the same IOPS between a SATA and an NVMe SSD.
Massive sustained transfer rates is copying a movie from one NVMe SSD to another NVMe in the same computer (a 1Gb internet connection is 125MB/s absolute maximum). How often do you do that, and would you notice if a 10GB movie transferred in 3 seconds instead of 17 seconds?
Random IOPS is what actually makes an SSD faster than an HDD in real world and 99% usage. It's a rare day everyday people need to transfer tens or hundreds of GB at a time between storage drives inside a single machine. Any other scenario is bottlenecked elsewhere.
@danvelopment: Basically the advertised speeds on an NVMe SSD can be likened to the old days when marketing teams decided VRAM was how you could determine GPU performance and so they'd shove 4GB of VRAM on a GT 730 and sell it as a "gaming" computer.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/point-of-view-gt-730-4…
While the 780 Ti had 3GB
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gtx-780-ti.c25…
Occasionally someone would have a genuine use for that one very specific metric (mining? running multiple 4K screens for coding?), but 99% of the time it was absolutely no benefit whatsoever. But it was a very easy metric to boost and increase the price and desirability without increasing the BOM very much (such as using better controllers, fewer bits per cell on the NAND, adding DRAM etc on the SSDs, all of which are much more expensive than just switching to NVMe and advertising the higher sustained transfer rates)
@danvelopment: As always, when checking specs take a look at the SSD spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcr… . It's not perfect but it often isn't bad and probably the main problem is when manufacturers release new products with the same model number
The Kingston NV2 is most likely a DRAMless TLC using the Phison E21T. (Edit see below.) Although being PCIe it does have HBM of course, part of the reason DRAM less NVMe drives aren't generally as bad as DRAMless SATA, as exemplified with the excellent WD Black SN770.
Also why do you think this is TLC? Most evidence suggests Crucial moved to QLC with newer variants of high capacities as sort of reflected in the SSD spread sheet e.g.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewMaxx/comments/dp463s/crucial_sil…
https://www.computerbase.de/2019-10/sata-ssd-crucial-bx500-1…
https://www.pcworld.com/article/394337/crucial-bx500-sata-ss…
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewMaxx/comments/mav65b/ssd_help_ma…
IIRC from previous research, they do still sometimes use TLC, it just depends what they have available. The point of the BX500 is a low end drive at a low price and they use whatever they have that can meet their minimum specs in it. Ultimately TLC or QLC, it's DRAMless and being a SATA device it suffers as much as you'd expect. You just have to consider whether you actually need anything better.
Note that because the BX500 launched with TLC, you have to take a lot of care when reading about it. Even more since the switch to QLC didn't receive that much attention because no one cared much about SATA drives by that times. And also Crucial was very careful in their marketing to never say that their drives were TLC or anything like that, indeed they were always sold as an ultra budget drive. IIRC they always considered they'd probably move to QLC eventually. So people weren't as annoyed at them. (Also realistically these sort of switches never received that much attention before a confluence of factors cause the infamous SX8200 Pro switch to go viral and people started to pay a bit more attention.)
Actually while researching this I came across the TechPowerUp database which I'd heard good things about. It's clearer in the different versions and confirms several different QLC variants of the BX500 at 2TB
https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/crucial-bx500-2-tb.d95
Edit: Looking at the TechPowerup Database, it seems there are controller variants for the NV2 https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/kingston-nv2-2-tb.d119… but so far all seem to be the same TLC flash.
@Nil Einne: That's a good point, I didn't realise they did a switch. In which case I change my recommendation.
Unless you know what you're getting in advance, I wouldn't risk the BX500.
@danvelopment: The ADATA Legend 960 Max 1TB on PB for 170 looks almost like a price error. TLC with dram
This is perfect in a previous-generation Xbox One X/S, where you install once and read lots. If I hadn't already put a 1TB in mine I'd be grabbing this for it!
I'm thinking of getting it to put in an enclosure for my series x. I know I won't be able to play optimised games off it, but it'll be a lot quicker at transferring vs the HDD I'm currently using.
I have this exact set up but with a 512gb on a series s. It works fine and any non ootinised games can just run off the drive with pretty good load times. I don't do it much though since cloud gaming launched as my main wasting space was due to gamepass quests, I biw just keep a handful of games local and reinstall if I need to.
I have a 512gb one of these and had a lot of issues with it slowing when doing large file write. My OS would grind to a halt and stutter when it was my boot drive and as a storage drive it wasn't the best to write large files over to.
Since I stuck it on the Xbox I can't say I've experienced those problems but it's a drive I'd be weary of buying another one to use in a pc.
Would the Crucial P2 M.2 2280 2TB be better? PBtech are selling it for $29 more.
Yes you would get a bit more performance but only if your PC has m.2 slots
I would decide whether you are looking for a nvme drive or a SATA drive first, and then start comparing like for like. (don't get a sata m.2)
Also, on the off chance this helps somebody, if you bought an ideapad 3 from that no os deal on here at the end of last year, there is a space for a 2.5in drive inside. (check to make sure)
So this would be an extremely good way to add 2Tb of disk space if you were looking to do so. Note you may have to source some kind of obscure sata cable to add.
The space is definitely something to take advantage of. Laptop storage is crazy expensive, and with this you can get a laptop with the same storage as a $6000 MacBook for under $1000.
DRAMLess TLC.
Good for bulk secondary storage. Not good for OS or sole storage, you want TLC with DRAM for that (MLC or SLC is better but you won't find any of that anywhere).
10c per GB is a great price for TLC.
I'd recommend this over ANYTHING QLC (aka anything that mentions 4 bits, as some companies like to call it 4 bit MLC to avoid the poor reputation of the term QLC, 4 bit MLC is technically true, but abuse of the term. SLC = Single, MLC = Multi but understood as two, TLC = Triple, QLC = Quad, each level addition is exponentially worse than its predecessors, so QLC isn't 4 times worse than SLC, but anywhere between 16-100 times worse as the tolerances aren't perfect slices)