XPC Technologies 2TB M.2 2230 NVMe PCIe SSD Gen 4.0x4 Single-Sided Drive, 5100MB/s Read, 4800 MB/s Write SN740 Replacement (Upgrade for Steam Deck, Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 4)

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What I really want is a local shared Steam cache on my 10Gbit LAN, only one copy of every game in a houshold with nearly 10 Steam devices of various kinds.

Note that with a 2TB SSD, the pSLC cache could be up to 500GB in size for a completely empty drive. So, if you could do sustained writes at max speed and fill that up, and then had to drain it at ~100 MB/s, it could take over 1.38 hours just to empty the pSLC to QLC. LOL. (Related: The drives take a while to recover in our Windows testing, unless you just wipe/format them.) These days I just keep running my manual TRIMs when I do major updates and most of my SSDs never go near the 90% mark anyway before I expand or reallocate: prices below €50/TB evict quite a lot of lesser capacity drives natuerally, which interestingly have never gone near 90% remaining life in all those years. Revitalize and expand the storage of your M.2 2230 SSD compatible laptop such as many Microsoft ® Surface and Dell™ models. I guess even if the OS isn't really needed running, the OS will decide to put the SSD into sleep state and there is very little the SSD can do without risking to have its juice cut off, should it try to refuse. Get ready for an immersive experience with exclusive gaming features including PCIe ® Gen 4.0 3, Western Digital's nCache™ 4.0 Technology, and Microsoft’s DirectStorage Support.

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abufrejoval said:I guess the biggest question is: how do you ensure it's done steady-state processing before you turn the device off? I had ARK running once on Linux: It loaded ARK faster from a hard disk than Windows loaded it from NVMe... But then perhaps, you'd never trust it with your data again, when you see how badly even firmware can be written =:-O Take your large game library wherever you are with up to 2TB 1 of trusted Western Digital TLC NAND storage. Windows and Linux will see just a committed write, turning off the device won't loose you any data, it might just not have the opportunity to do the house-keeping and the SLC cache will remain permanently filled while the drive has to bypass it for new data resulting in HDD class write speeds.

While M.2 2230 SSDs have been in some laptops, like Microsoft's Surface devices, for quite a bit now, they aren't nearly as ubiquitous in stores or online as physically larger drives, though it's not impossible to find them. At the very least, potential customers that can't find what they're looking for can know they're getting these drives through a reputable source. It would be interesting to try testing this. Like, a decent SSD and controller should write initially to the pSLC cache, but if it's only at ~40 MB/s, the cache can then be immediately flushed to QLC and would perhaps never fill up (until the SSD is completely full). The problem is that writing even 100GB of data at 40 MB/s takes a while, about 40 minutes. I guess that would be the question: if write speeds are slow, like sub-100 MB/s, do the SSDs even use their pSLC caches, or do they just write straight to TLC/QLC NAND?

Please note:

Powering off (via a hard switch) in the middle of doing anything can be bad. Most drives limit how much stuff sits in volatile storage (RAM caches) for exactly this reason. High-end drives would have a super capacitor to store power so that they can flush things from RAM to NAND in the event of a power loss. For consumer drives, it's possible, if you cycle the power in the middle of writes, to kill an SSD. Probably very unlikely, and it would depend on the model, but I know in the past I heard of this happening.

At 2TB for your Steam stash, at least you won't have to swap games in and out as often, which significantly helps to lessen the write burden. It'd be like making a 5kg washing machine that only works if you put exactly 5kg of clothing in it, if you put 4 or 3 or 2 or 1 kg it just refuses to operate ... At 2TB for your Steam stash, at least you won't have to swap games in and out as often, which signficantly helps to lessen the write burden. It would be interesting to try testing this. Like, a decent SSD and controller should write initially to the pSLC cache, but if it's only at ~40 MB/s, the cache can then be immediately flushed to QLC and would perhaps never fill up (until the SSD is completely full). The problem is that writing even 100GB of data at 40 MB/s takes a while, about 40 minutes. I guess that would be the question: if write speeds are slow, like sub-100 MB/s, do the SSDs even use their pSLC caches, or do they just write straight to TLC/QLC NAND?Yup, it's at that point when you want to start reading the controller's source code.And when the firmware has to deal with things like host buffers, that require interaction with host firmware that could be buggy, too, and simply sprinkle your most critical data structures with random bits, you wonder if these firmware engineers might have burn out or a drinking problem, especially since these junior guys only get to work on the cheaper entry level products, which are much harder to handle than when you've got everything fully under your own control. But... I've also had some very old Android tablets die on storage that seemed to reprogram flash at EEPROM speeds, never giving up ...before I did.