looking at the prices, it seems that the one I chose is at a reasonable price.

Thank you guys for all your help.

 

If you are interested or have already taken the crucial ones, know that they are very good value for money.
I recently bought 2 Crucial P3 plus, one 1tb and the other 2tb and I use the larger one for the same reason as you. At the moment with an ambient temperature of 30°c they work at 39°c and on hot days 38°c while I was transferring libraries they didn't rise above 45/46°c . I own an old case cooled by 3x120mm fans. Kontakt compared to the magnetic disk and ssd has improved tremendously.

 

Thank you for sharing your experience, all this information is important for me.
I havent bought it yet, but I'm decided to buy the Crucial probably next month.

 

prices jump heavily recently, biggest factor on the cost is (lack of) DRAM cache and multilayer flash architecture (QLC with 4 layers is least reliable and least performing, but cheapest per capacity),
lack of DRAM cache means SSD relies on your system resources (RAM, CPU) to handle caching, rather terrible to be honest,
QLC means each cell holds 4 bits, so it's much slower to write data and overwrite data, and much lower disk endurance/lifespan,

if you want PCIe 4.0 speeds, no worse than TLC and DRAM, see something like Kingston KC3000, its 2TB version is top performer, but its 4TB is ridiculously expensive, and also its performance does require slightly more power (and therefore outputs heat) which makes it kinda unusable in laptops especially

right now, I wouldn't buy a 4TB SSD at all,
only "reasonably" priced NVME models are all DRAM-less QLC: Crucial P3, Kingston NV2, Crucial P3 Plus,
and for SATA SSDs those are Crucial MX500 and Samsung 870 QVO (but given their outdated tech and speeds, better forget about them)

also depending on how much you actually need Kontakt and other libraries, I wouldn't waste budget on disk just for those

 

this is really important,
depending on cpu and motherboard layout, there's limited number of PCIe 4.0 (and 3.0) lanes to be used across system,
if you have a dedicated graphics card, that takes 16 lanes, and with most consumer cpus you have 4 lanes left, for one NVME SSD,
anything above that and you're hoping your mobo chipset provides some more lanes for additional NVME slots, but do note their latency will be slightly higher due to additional DMI lanes between chipset and cpu, and also note often additional slots give only 3.0 speeds,
NVME PCIe 3.0 bandwidth limit is half of what 4.0 offers, but it's equally important to have 4 lanes available for the M.2 NVME slot (but that's usually problem with cheap-ass NASes like Synology, not most desktop PCs),
that said, they're backwards/forwards compatible, so you can totally use 4.0 SSD in 3.0 slot - but there you'll be capped at 3500MB/s max which isn't that bad anyway, and disk will heat less due to not giving its max performance

 

Someone tells me to keep an eye always on:



and TBW (Terabytes Written). Have a nice shopping.

 

4TB Lexar NM790 M.2 SSD (PCIe 4.0 x4, 3D-NAND TLC, R7400/W6500)
MTBF 1.500.000 Stunden
TBW 3.000 TB

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 21, 2023

Got a Samsung EVO 860 internal 2.5'' for the mobile rig. Bought a separate enclosure for it and turned into an external SSD later on. Although there's always a risk of getting a faulty drive, Samsung's 860 series is a solid performer for me. If its about writing files on it less and reading from it more (using it for storage, libraries, etc.), you'll get minimal health tear, longer shelf life and no speed drops. But you pay a more for the brand name like someone else said earlier. They tend to get a little pricy from 1TB up. Hope this helps.

 

I had a failure on EVO 870 2TB just a month or so ago. I checked online and yp, it was one of the numbers of the bad batch(es) mentioned in this article page at the bottom:

Spoiler

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...-batches-prone-to-failure.291504/post-4955983

Got a new one in a couple of days. Only had 1.5 TB of (legit) libs on the disk so the only PITA was to DL and setup everything. I had to return the failed one though, so if there was any sensitive data on, I'd just destroy it and buy a new one..

I would not go for anything above 2TB with flash (just being paranoid now..;)) It can be a bad batch and it will fail eventually - it's just the nature of the beast (OTOH I have 10-15y old HDDs still spinning happily). It's really a lottery IMO.

My main drive is 980 PRO idling at ~50°C with no additional cooling, the 2.5 SSDs are at ~35°C. I did not have over-provisioning on (and now I have) and I don't know if and how much it matters (maybe someone can comment on this). Some ppl say these disks are already OPed by default, idk.

Anyway, when you get your new drive, update the firmware and check the health/status.

 

Very interesting, thank you.
These are my computer specs:

Motherboard: ASUS TUF GAMING X670E-PLUS AMD X670 - AM5 ATX

Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12-Core Processor 4.70 GHz / 5.6 GHz

Installed RAM: 32.0 GB DDR5 6000Mhz

Graphic card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GAMING OC 12G NVIDIA 12 GB GDDR6 PCIe 5

SSD M.2 2.0 TB WESTERN DIGITAL GREEN NVMe

So I want to add a second SSD.

 

that particular motherboard should have follwing layout:
directly from CPU:
M.2_1 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280 (supports PCIe 5.0 x4 mode)
M.2_3 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280 (supports PCIe 4.0 x4 mode)
from X670 chipset:
M.2_2 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280/22110 (supports PCIe 3.0 x4 - when used, ports SATA6G_1&2 will be disabled)
M.2_4 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280 (supports PCIe 4.0 x4 mode)



means, you should be good to go - in fact I'd think about buying two 2TB NVMEs instead - in theory they could give you better performance when used simulatenously within a project - but that's up to your workflows

 

I have almost the same setup and I bought 2 x 2 TBs to spread the workload on samples, I have these 2 x Kingston 2048GB KC3000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD M.2 2280, 3D TLC

 

My $0.02 :

SAMSUNG : Heavy read write daily; OS drive for sure; TBs of torrents, etc...; can use their app 'MAGICIAN'; I allocate SAMSUNG a NVME as the 'recording' (audio data) drive.
WD: 2nd choice for 2nd, 3rd m.2 inside system
CRUCIAL: 3rd choice for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, ....5th? m.2 inside system

TEAM GROUP: My best budget option. Great quality.

WD/HGST Mecahanical HDD : Best quality imo; I use x3 8TB HDDs to put my WAV, KONTAKT, LIVE, MPC, IRs, DECENT, BATTERY, UVI, TOONTRACK, BFD, you name it, libraries on.

****Important : If you go with SAMSUNG 980 NVME, you MUST immediately do a firmware update. There was a problem with multiple batches burning out due to bad code writing, or something like that. Google it.
Once the firmware update has been performed, then everything is normal, but the damage of using the drive with original firmware cannot be reversed (e.g months of using it).

 

Oly, where this is intended to be a storage drive (IE. primarily read only), as opposed to a system drive, *most nearly any decent SSD will serve you well. Generally, there is a massive difference between HDD and SSD speeds - even when it’s sata, not even nVme. Furthermore, if possible, I’d use two 2TB SSDs instead of one large 4TB SSD. Multiple sample libraries will load faster and more efficiently if the files are spread across two drives.

Generally, most nearly any *decent SSD will last a long, long time (longer than mechanical HDD) if you aren’t writing to it constantly (like you would do if it were your OS drive). It’s a really good practice to leave at least 20% of the drive space free - SSD requires a bit more free space than standard HDDs to function at their best.

For my system drives, I ALWAYS use Samsung EVO SSDs. However, I have had perfect success using Crucial MX-500 and WD BLUE SSDs for all my Toontrack, Arturia and Kontakt needs. That said, I strongly recommend that you steer clear of Crucial BX and WD SA-510 (Blue). Use Crucial MX and WD Blue (non SA510).

Luv ya, man. You’ve always been a AudioZ friend and a wonderful source of help. I hope mine (and others’) help is useful in return.

 

Thank you for the detailed advice.
I already have one see mve drive for the system. So that would be 3 drives. Is it ok?

 

Thank you for the advice. There are no Samsung see drive where I live.
Yes I also have something like 25tb of mechanical drives.

 

Thank you for your good words and advice.

 

So, conclusion, I'll search for 2 the SSD instead of one 4 tb. Also, I'll hsve to be careful about the Crucial model can't be B.
I'll get back and tell what I found.

 

I have a similar system except it's Ryzen 9 7950X (64GB RAM), and I use the onboard CPU graphics as it's enough to drive dual monitors. Does your system ever get near to maxing out the 7900X CPU on large projects?

 

I dont know, I dont have large projects.
I work as a composer mainly and most of my projects dont need more than 48 tracks.