Amazon.com: Addlink S90 Lite 4TB NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 3D NAND Internal Gaming SSD - Read Speed up to 5000 MB/s (ad4TBS90LTM2P) : Electronics $198.44

Any idea on whether this drive has a good controller? Or if it has DRAM?

I'm not familiar with the brand so I worry what's under the hood.

The Amazon reviews are unhelpful, because the reviews are for different unrelated drives, not actually this particular 4TB specific model.

No DRAM on this model (generally any model with "Lite" in the name will not have DRAM). Controller is Phison E21T, which is a competent budget controller.

The 2TB model has pretty poor performance after it fills its pSLC cache (~145GB); sustained writes are only 200Mbps after the cache is full. So if you're going to be doing really heavy, sustained workloads, this isn't the right drive. (Unless this problem has been somehow addressed in firmware or on the 4TB variant.)

This is probably fine for a midrange gaming PC, or as a secondary storage drive (or extra capacity for a console).

https://www.tomshardware.com/revi...d-review/2

So would this work for storing games? I don't keep the multiplayer games on the slow drives

Yeah, you shouldn't bump past the pSLC cache with games, so it should be fine for that.

No DRAM on this model (generally any model with "Lite" in the name will not have DRAM). Controller is Phison E21T, which is a competent budget controller.

The 2TB model has pretty poor performance after it fills its pSLC cache (~145GB); sustained writes are only 200Mbps after the cache is full. So if you're going to be doing really heavy, sustained workloads, this isn't the right drive. (Unless this problem has been somehow addressed in firmware or on the 4TB variant.)

This is probably fine for a midrange gaming PC, or as a secondary storage drive (or extra capacity for a console).

https://www.tomshardware.com/revi...d-review/2 [tomshardware.com]

What's a good 4 TB with DRAM?

Was about to pull the trigger on this before I realized I couldn't find TBW specs for this anywhere…

What's a good 4 TB with DRAM?

I'd go further than that and say pSLC is generally mostly irrelevant for game storage since it's rare writing matters that much. I mean when you're initially installing the game, if you're transferring it from some other local storage this could theoretically be affected if the pSLC runs out. And for internet downloads/installs some of those old QLC, old controller drives especially with limited space (so limited channels) can be slow enough that they can be slower than gigabit fibre or similar.

But for most people and games these are such limited cases they're not important. Perhaps only the last one if you're playing some online multiplayer that regularly received massive updates but this is unlikely to apply here anyway since few people will have an internet connection capable of saturating a 200MB/s drive. (I'm not even sure many updaters would be able to even if the internet connection is that fast.)

When actually playing, writes are only likely for saves and caches for compiled shaders etc. But both of these are small enough that write speeds aren't likely to be a big factor or maybe no factor with decent write caching. And most compilations only happen one either when you first start up the game or when first encountered (e.g. a new area in game) If you're recording the game, this also needs to be stored but you have to be saving at some crazy bitrate for write speeds to matter and your SSD is going to quickly fill up if you're doing that.

Also it's quite common that stuff will be stored on the system device instead of the game storage device anyway. Note that because of various other stuff that your system might be doing in the background, writes can matter for the system drive while gaming and this is when we consider that even so, it's unlikely the pSLC cache will be saturated.

..... The WD 850X, the Seagate 530, and the Samsung 990 PRO are all very, very good drives, but they're expensive.....

Gotta love collusion. I paid $199 for my 4TB 990 Pro last year, shipped directly from Samsung.

I'm just guessing, but we probably won't see good prices again until very late 2024 if we're really lucky, or more likely 2025. Actually it would 2026 if the companies can continue the fake, BS, deliberate, artificial "shortage"......

Gotta love collusion. I paid $199 for my 4TB 990 Pro last year, shipped directly from Samsung.

I'm just guessing, but we probably won't see good prices again until very late 2024 if we're really lucky, or more likely 2025. Actually it would 2026 if the companies can continue the fake, BS, deliberate, artificial "shortage"......