Picking a new NVME SSD for my laptop

 

# Choosing my SSD

I bought about half year ago an used laptop (Lenovo Thinkbook G3 ACL) for just about €220. I think it was a good deal. It only came with 8GB ram though and 256GB SSD.

# RAM

I upgraded the laptop's RAM with a spare 8GB ddr4 sodimm I had laying around. I think it's only 1,333mhz instead of the 1,666mhz the laptop is capable of but it will do for now. 8GB ram is to little for anyone with several browser apps open and or multitasking. Especially if you are using several electron based apps which are memory hogs. BTW I'm not sure about the memory clock speeds, I've not kept up to date on them and their meaning. 

# Dual booting

The laptop came with a Windows 11 Pro license but I wanted also use a Linux distro on it. I tried several (PopOS!, Linux Mint, Ubuntu) and settled on old trustful Ubuntu 24.04. I tweaked it a bit to make it look more like PopOS! (dashboard on bottom of screen). I may blog one day why I choose Ubuntu. 

# First Requirements

Dual booting has caused that my included 256GB NVME drive is to little. I keep deleting stuff to keep some room open. I decided to upgrade to a larger SSD but as this is an used laptop and next year I may buy a new PC (depending on what AMD/Intel release then) based on that I don't want to spend to much money on an SSD. However if I eventually upgrade my laptop to newer, I want to use that SSD in my homeserver (NAS/Proxmox) as extra data drive. 500GB would not be enough as a possible data drive, so I will look for drives between 1TB and 2TB in size.

My budget is around €110 for a 2TB drive and around €70 for a 1TB drive. 

My second requirement was speed. The best speed in read/write but also random IO I could get for that price range. Basically read speeds of above 3.500MB/s.

# First round

At first I went to the dutch website http://www.tweakers.net/ and compared prices combined with positive reviews of several 1-2TB drives.  I got a short list of three drives:

1. Lexar NM710
2. Kioxia Exceria Plus G3
3. WD Black SN770

Being lazy I didn't feel like reading all of their specs, user reviews and other website reviews to go compare them. So I used what todays technology gives lazy people like me, LLM AI's. So I went to http://www.pi.ai/ , http://www.claude.ai and http://www.perplexity.ai and asked their opinions on that short list.

Summarized I was told to go for the WD Black SN770 as price difference with the others wasn't that much (it is little more expensive though) but it has best performance benchmarks and WD has good reputation for support and making quality products. So good price/performance range + good support was why I was advised by a couple of the AI's to choose the WD one. At that moment the WD Black SN770 1TB is €76 and 2TB is €112 at cheapest shop. Add about €15 to get average shop price to each price.

# So 1TB Afterall 

I learned that most cheaper SSD's don't have DRAM included which, if I understand correctly, means that their sustained throughput eventually sucks. Meaning under continuous heavy load the SSD's may perform badly.  This means that me using the drive secondly as a data drive is not recommended. I had two choices:

1. Buy more expensive SSD with better continuous load performance.
2. Forget plans about using as data drive in server and just buy the drive I need NOW. Which is 1TB drive.

As I don't want to go over my planned budget to much I decided to stick to a 1TB drive then.

# Changing requirements

Then I just remembered as the drive is for my laptop which I move around with I used full drive encryption in the form of bitlocker on Windows 11 Pro and also want to enable in the future full drive encryption on my Ubuntu partitions. 

I asked http://pi.ai what about disk encryption (bitlocker and linux/ubuntu) on my SSD and performance. It replied that if my SSD supported AES-256-bit hardware encryption there should not be a performance hit. However if it didn't and according to pi.ai the WD Black 770N doesn't support hardware encryption then the OS has to do it and you can have a 40% performance hit. 

Well I don't want to buy a new SSD and just have it run at half speed due to unsupported encryption methods. 

So I asked the AI's which drives meet my previous requirements (budget/ mid class, speedy, linux support) and does hardware encryption?  This is the combined list of ssd's it says should support AES 256-bit hardware encryption:

1. Samsung 970 EVO Plus → The samsung ticked all the right boxes but was a bit more expensive and seems older model.
2. Crucial P5 Plus  → The crucial has some bad reviews for issues under linux (not desireable) although the reviews were older and the bugs might have been fixed for now I choose to avoid it. Also badly available
3. WD Black SN750 → Seems okay but a bit slower then other drives and maybe because it's older model it is badly available and a bit more expensive. 
4. SK Hynix Gold P31 → Unavailable for purchase
5. Seagate FireCuda 520 → Pricing is alright, speed is alright, no dram though 
6. Intel 670p → badly available
7. Kingston KC2500 → unavailable

# (not the) Conclusion

So hard pickings. Nothing really standing out. I decided to lookup what the modern version of the Kingston KC2500 could be and found that was the Kingston KC3000, which surprisingly was just around €81 for 1TB version at amazon.nl at moment of writing. More interestingly it supported hardware encryption and to top it off it was blazingly fast with very good reviews and linux support.

So at the end  of the journey I'm ordering the Kingston KC3000 1TB for my laptop. (The 2TB version now costs about €156 which is above my budget) 

# ⚠️Error, error, error

So I asked https://pi.ai for cheap, fast SSD what supports hardware encryption and it told me the Kingston KC3000 meets my requirements. Thankfully I decided to google it as well (actually duckduckgo as google sucks more and more nowadays) and reviews of the SSD stated it does not support hardware encryption. I asked pi.ai is it sure about hardware encryption and the KC3000 and it swore it supports it. Well another lesson learned don't trust AI's blindly.

I then asked https://claude.ai which cheap and fast SSD's support hardware encryption. At first it gave me wrong devices but when I emphasized that it must have hardware based encryption support it corrected itself and gave me a short list. From that list I took the Seagate FireCuda 530  and the Samsung 990 EVO.

The Firecuda 530 1TB is about €115 at the moment 
The 990 EVO 1TB is about €85 at the moment.

The Firecuda 530 has better maximum speeds and the 990 EVO is rated at 5000MB/s but in a review it averaged at around 3500MB/s for speed. 

Given that my laptop and NAS (for future use) only supports PCI-E 3.0 x4 for NVME it can't make use of the theoretical maximum speed of PCI-E 4.0 x4 NVME SSD's of 7500MB/s but only around 3500MB/s and that the Firecuda is about €30 more expensive. I will pick the Samsung 990 EVO as it's practical speeds are inline with PCI-E 3.0 x4 (the speed it will be running in my laptop) and it's €30 cheaper.

# (hopefully) Conclusion

So for my needs in older hardware (gen 3 pci-e) and due to budget reasons I will pick the Samsung 990 EVO 1TB as it supports my requirements. (price, speed and hardware encryption). But if your device supports pci-e 4.0 I would go with Seagate Firecuda 530 as it has better performance.