Be careful, most cheap NVMe drives have low endurance. Llike, not “Oh, you’re just hand wringing about nothing,” endurance ratings but an actually and relevantly low number of terabytes that can be written before the drive becomes failure-prone. They also usually lack a DRAM cache, so certain operations can be as slow as a mechanical hard drive, thereby negating the major advantage of opting for solid-state storage.
For future proofing it can be worthwhile to get a pcie4 drive for a pcie3 machine.
That said, even if you have a pcie4 machine it may not be worth it to bother with pcie4 storage. I was annoyed about loading times with baldurs gate 3 and decided to try installing it to a RAM disk (yes, using 130GB of RAM)… Barely loaded any faster. Turns out the main bottleneck is elsewhere and my storage was not the issue
It was for a laptop. I’m not going to be changing the motherboard to a PCIe 4.0 compatible one. By the time I buy a new laptop, I may need PCIe 5.0. I’m not sure, but I don’t want to overspend now when by the time I need something it is cheaper. If PCIe 4.0 is more than $38 cheaper when I need it than now, then I saved money. And I doubt I’ll be in the market for a new laptop any time soon. Mine is only 2 years old and still kicks ass.
If you’re running a database server or something with lots of writing and data you don’t want to lose, I can see the concern.
But a drive for gaming is the best possible use case for a lower endurance drive. Even a poor drive can write the whole thing 200 times. I doubt many people would even get close to that.
I remember when Titanfall being 50gb sparked an outrage, it’s a good thing SSDs are cheap now.
I picked up a 1TB NVMe for literally $38 this week. Absolutely absurd how inexpensive SSDs are right now.
Be careful, most cheap NVMe drives have low endurance. Llike, not “Oh, you’re just hand wringing about nothing,” endurance ratings but an actually and relevantly low number of terabytes that can be written before the drive becomes failure-prone. They also usually lack a DRAM cache, so certain operations can be as slow as a mechanical hard drive, thereby negating the major advantage of opting for solid-state storage.
They were all that price unless I went up to PCIe 4.0, which my laptop doesn’t support. I got a well-known brand. But thanks for the heads up!
Well known brand like Sandisk?
For future proofing it can be worthwhile to get a pcie4 drive for a pcie3 machine.
That said, even if you have a pcie4 machine it may not be worth it to bother with pcie4 storage. I was annoyed about loading times with baldurs gate 3 and decided to try installing it to a RAM disk (yes, using 130GB of RAM)… Barely loaded any faster. Turns out the main bottleneck is elsewhere and my storage was not the issue
It was for a laptop. I’m not going to be changing the motherboard to a PCIe 4.0 compatible one. By the time I buy a new laptop, I may need PCIe 5.0. I’m not sure, but I don’t want to overspend now when by the time I need something it is cheaper. If PCIe 4.0 is more than $38 cheaper when I need it than now, then I saved money. And I doubt I’ll be in the market for a new laptop any time soon. Mine is only 2 years old and still kicks ass.
If you’re running a database server or something with lots of writing and data you don’t want to lose, I can see the concern.
But a drive for gaming is the best possible use case for a lower endurance drive. Even a poor drive can write the whole thing 200 times. I doubt many people would even get close to that.
Oh yeah, let’s create 250GB SSD cartridges per game because thry each cost about 26€
You know how ridiculous that sounds, right?
If we move to a new era of physical games with NVME drives instead of CDs, I’d love it on a mostly unironic level.
Better than the current state for PC games where you buy a physical release and its an empty box with a Steam code taped to the inside.
Yes, that does sound ridiculous, good thing I didn’t say it.
Yes, everyone realizes how ridiculous that sounds. Why did you post it?
Also, please don’t give EA any ideas.
I mean if you really wanna maximize your spending you can get 150 1gb flash drives and trick the OS to thinking its one device.
Or like just gets bigger drive that’s cheaper per GB like someone with a brain.
And like how would cartridge games work anyways? most PCs have really limited sata slots
Like this? picture