review: https://www.storagereview.com/review/hp-fx700-ssd-review
Add more words:
When I'm old and mankey.
I'll never use a hanky.
I'll wee on plants.
and soil my pants!
Apparently Ozbargain from Nov / Dec last year like it. Now even cheaper! https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/877224
I get it, 4TB and relatively cheap but considering we have seen TLC 4TB drives come down to this price range - its too expensive for what it is. Low $200s? Different story and could be recommended.
Just out of curiosity compared to this $279 drive, what 4TB TLC drive do you recommend at the moment and how much is it?
@Dollar Dreamer: The drive that I have mentioned did come to the same price give or take in the start of December 2024 https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/881082 but we are bound to see another deal in due course as the price of the NM790 has been on the down trend since.
@Dollar Dreamer: @Dollar Dreamer - hopefully Lexar team can offer the NM790s again around the $299 mark ( old posts: https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/881074 ), those were great value and hard to fault in terms of price to performance ~ $20 more but a much better drive compared to this offering
@Erisato: Since it is OZB, I think we should aim for $255 or lower:
Lexar NM790 SSD: 2TB $129, 4TB $255, 1TB $65 Delivered @ BPC Tech
It's ok for corn collections storage
Better recent choices
Deal expired, price still on with limited stock remaining:
Western Digital Blue SN5000 4TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD $339 Delivered to Metro ($0 MEL/BNE/SYD C&C) + Surcharge @ Scorptec
Corsair limited time deals:
CORSAIR MP600 Elite 4TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD's: White Plus Heatsink $360.76, Black $364.79 Delivered @ Amazon AU
The Corsair deals all of them either seem to be sold out now or jacked up considerably in price.
I wouldn't recommend this if you want something with good sustained write speeds for large transfers (IE people working with large video files).
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/hp-fx700-2-tb/6.html < this is a review of the 2TB, but I presume the 4TB would suffer a similar drop once the SLC cache is full
Write speed starts out at almost 5 GB/s, which is very good for single-threaded write speeds. These speeds are sustained until 54 GB have been written, after that speeds drop slightly to 3.5 GB/s. Once 460 GB have been written, the SLC cache is full and write performance drops a lot—down to around 130 MB/s, which is HDD territory.
Modern 3.5" CMR hard drives perform at faster than that. 130 MB/s is more like portable hard drive territory. So it makes that SSD write performance even sadder.
130 MB/s is more like portable hard drive territory. So it makes that SSD write performance even sadder
That's not the write performance of this drive - it'll happily write at between 5GB/s and 3.5GB/s depending on the size of your write operation.
The only way to see the sad 130MB/s is to write over 460GB directly from another SSD, in a single operation - in which case the drive will slow down for the rest of the write over 460GB.
If that's something you do, then this drive is not for you. For everyone else who doesn't do that, it's absolutely fine 👌
To put it another way, you could write 450GB, every hour, from now until the drive wears out, and you'll never hit the slowdown threshold.
I tried to preach this before, the nerds and geeks see QLC and think everyone transfers 500GB in 1 hit ALL THE TIME. Oh nawww it will slow down, bleh bleh bleh. They forget there is a normal usage world outside their nerd world.
@Dollar Dreamer: Would this drive do as a replacement for a small sized main drive in a budget PC?
I bought a cheap gaming PC from an OzB about a year or so ago that I want to upgrade to be able to get Drive Turbo racing build and a light gun build running on, plus other stuff.
Or am I better to keep the main drive in there currently and maybe add this as a second. Only issue with that is I'm not sure that there is a second nvme slot given it was a cheap setup in the first place.
@Dollar Dreamer: I have multiple QLC SSDs. You can feel the pain when it is writing in QLC mode. The main reason is that QLC SSDs generally use very aggressive pSLC dynamic cache, so by the time it needs to write in QLC mode, it also needs to re-write data previously written in SLC in QLC mode.
QLC SSDs can be used, but QLC SSDs need to be priced properly. A 4TB SSD should be <$200 ideally. Honestly, if we use NM790 4TB TLC $255 as a guideline, then based on TLC to QLC cell reduction, the target price for a 4TB QLC SSD should be $170.
The last page of your linked review gives this drive a "HIGHLY RECOMMENDED" award and a "GREAT VALUE" award.
The 460GB SLC cache is a complete none issue - approximately zero normal users will ever write a continuous >460GB block of data directly from another SSD, all in one go.
Even if you do manage to do this, it's only the data over the 460GB that slows down - write 500GB in one go ? Over 90% of it goes at full speed.
You missed the next crucial sentence.
This is a non-issue for most use cases.
Pausing the stream of incoming data will of course restore full write speeds, because the SLC cache has time to flush itself to QLC.
Also this is a review of the 2TB, so if it's a pSLC cache, it's probably double the size on the 4TB.
Hmm lots of opinions above. What I'm seeing is that this drive would be fine for most people who don't move 500gb files regularly?
If that's the case I might buy
Other options seem to be:
Silicon Power UD85 4TB - $322
Silicon Power US75 4TB - $332
Crucial P3 Plus 4TB - $329
Crucial P3 4TB - $279.20 (20% ebay plus)
Are any of the above options worth looking into?
If you need to buy a drive right now, the only option worth recommending is:
Subscribe to this tag if you can wait for a better deal
Avoid list for future reference:
Acer
Fanxiang
Fikwot
Klevv
Lexar (selected)
Patriot (selected)
Silicon Power
TeamGroup (selected)
Verbatim
Is this more from a drive failure point of view? or performance? or value for money?
No, that's not entirely correct. The SLC cache reduces in size as the drive fills up. You are looking at ~20%. Also, when the SSD is 80% filled, it is questionable how much SLC cache you will get (some SSDs don't write in SLC mode when the drive is filled above 80%).
Since data needs to be re-written back in QLC before SLC cache becomes available (and the SLC cache gets smaller each time), you need to wait for the SLC cache to become available, so it is not write 900GB, wait 1 second, then write another 450GB immediately. It's easy to get excited on the 4TB having double the SLC cache, but don't forget it will also have to take double the time during the foldback write stage.
The reality is that you still have to spend the same amount of elapsed time to fill the entire 4TB SSD. Just because you stop writing data after 800GB and wait 1 hour (or the amount of time to make the SLC cache to be fully available again), it doesn't really mean that 1 hour doesn't count. The reason why QLC SSDs are mostly useable for general public is because we don't have heavy disk I/O workload most of the time, especially for data writes.
Consider that the biggest files many people will see are game updates - they're limited by the speed of the internet connection anyway, and even the very biggest games are in the 100-200GB range.
Any old SSD can keep up with 200GB of writes from the internet.
Drives like this are awesome for Steam libraries.
QLC and with no DRAM? Hard pass