Well, how about a 970 instead then?

Quoting: EikeDoes this apply to M.2 as well, or only to SATA plugged ones?
If it's (still) a problem with M.2 SSDs - what to buy instead?

AFAIK this problem only affects Samsung 860 and Samsung 870 series SATA drives. Newer ones and Samsung's NVMe drives should be unaffected. I've got an 970 EVO Plus myself.

I also have a Samsung 970 NVME drive. 3 years old, not a problem in sight. Highly recommended!

I should have done a little bit more research before posting.
I wasn't even aware that it's not the latest generation.
But still, good to hear you've got good experiences with it.
My first M.2 SSD is already on its way to me! :)
Thanks & stay safe!

Quoting: GuestAppears this may be a bit late, but I have a WD and have absolutely no complaints about the performance. If I was to buy again I may have bought he 1TB model instead of the 500GB. I do have a secondary 2TB SATA for video, music, and picture backups.

Western Digital WD BLACK SN850 NVMe M.2 2280 500GB PCI-Express 4.0 x4

Too late for me indeed, but maybe someone else reads around seeking for advice.

Quoting: GuestAppears this may be a bit late, but I have a WD and have absolutely no complaints about the performance. If I was to buy again I may have bought he 1TB model instead of the 500GB. I do have a secondary 2TB SATA for video, music, and picture backups.

Western Digital WD BLACK SN850 NVMe M.2 2280 500GB PCI-Express 4.0 x4

My wife's 1TB WD BLACK SN750 seems to do the job just fine as well.

Quoting: EikeI should have done a little bit more research before posting.
I wasn't even aware that it's not the latest generation.
But still, good to hear you've got good experiences with it.
My first M.2 SSD is already on its way to me! :)
Thanks & stay safe!

Just a tip: Don't format your new NVMe with btrfs. Use ext4 or XFS. While btrfs is great for spinning disks and SSD, it surprisingly stinks in performance on NVMe.

Samsungs should be OK. I recently got SK Hynix Gold P31 and it works fine too (this one is good for laptops especially).

A less known trick is that you can update NVMe SSD firmware using nvme tool. It worked for SK Hynix Gold P31 for me which only provide firmware image and tool for Windows for updating it.

Details: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive/NVMe#Generic

Last edited by Shmerl on 2 Jan 2022 at 9:14 am UTC

Quoting: ShmerlSamsungs should be OK. I recently got SK Hynix Gold P31 and it works fine too (this one is good for laptops especially).

A less known trick is that you can update NVMe SSD firmware using nvme tool. It worked for SK Hynix Gold P31 for me which only provide firmware image and tool for Windwows for updating it.

Details: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive/NVMe#Generic

Arch wiki can't be praised enough.
I often use it - as a Debian user.

Yeah, it was really useful. I was wondering whether I need to return the SSD since there was no clear way to update firmware for it, but then I found that method on Arch wiki.

Quoting: 14

Quoting: EikeI should have done a little bit more research before posting.
I wasn't even aware that it's not the latest generation.
But still, good to hear you've got good experiences with it.
My first M.2 SSD is already on its way to me! :)
Thanks & stay safe!

Just a tip: Don't format your new NVMe with btrfs. Use ext4 or XFS. While btrfs is great for spinning disks and SSD, it surprisingly stinks in performance on NVMe.

I'm intrigued by this. By chance do you have a source or more info?

I ask as I've had BTRFS on my NVME drive since 2018 and even with "natural bloat" of the system, it still boots up in, let me turn it on and count.... 13 seconds.

My only point of personal reference is computer it replaced with was all HDD (from 2006), so I'm really curious if I'm missing out on performance gains and just don't realize it.

btrfs with SSDs should be fine by the way. Just make sure to use noatime.

Quoting: 14

Quoting: EikeI should have done a little bit more research before posting.
I wasn't even aware that it's not the latest generation.
But still, good to hear you've got good experiences with it.
My first M.2 SSD is already on its way to me! :)
Thanks & stay safe!

Just a tip: Don't format your new NVMe with btrfs. Use ext4 or XFS. While btrfs is great for spinning disks and SSD, it surprisingly stinks in performance on NVMe.

Where does this come from? I have BTRFS on all my drives (a Samsung 970 EVO Plus as / and two WD Red 8T in Raid1 for /home) and cannot say that my performance stinks when compared with when I used ext4.

I'd say XFS is still the best, but if you want more features like compression, btrfs is still good.

There is bcachefs in development as a future replacement for it, but it's taking a long time to mature.

Quoting: F.UltraWhere does this come from? I have BTRFS on all my drives (a Samsung 970 EVO Plus as / and two WD Red 8T in Raid1 for /home) and cannot say that my performance stinks when compared with when I used ext4

Actually, how is the performance for /home for you? My main anxiety towards moving /home off of my NVME is that I'd lose out on performance in a major way.

Or in other words, how much difference does NVME vs SATA have in terms of games?

Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: F.UltraWhere does this come from? I have BTRFS on all my drives (a Samsung 970 EVO Plus as / and two WD Red 8T in Raid1 for /home) and cannot say that my performance stinks when compared with when I used ext4

Actually, how is the performance for /home for you? My main anxiety towards moving /home off of my NVME is that I'd lose out on performance in a major way.

Or in other words, how much difference does NVME vs SATA have in terms of games?

Never had /home on NVMe, I moved from single SATA for whole disk to Raid6 on 3 SATA for whole disk to splitting / and /boot to a NVMe and later moved /home from my Raid6 to two new SATA drives. Would have preferred to be able to have /home on NVMe as well but 8TB drives don't come cheap there...

While SSD's do make a very very small portion of my personal storage, I've had good luck with WD's and Kingston, I only run around 8TB of SSD storage though, which is a mixture of NVMe and USB 3.2 drives.

A word of warning on the Kingston A2000 though, you might get an occasional controller lockup using this SSD with steam games updating.. so far I've not observed it do it with any other SSD or application.. why? I don't know, I even updated the firmware, still same issue.

With that said, the kernel will successfully reset the controller and the drive will continue working.

But I can also speak highly of the Crucial X8 2TB Portable drives, I've got two of those and while they do get hot, they also perform well for games without and problems, so long as you have a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port.

Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 3 Jan 2022 at 12:11 pm UTC

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: 14

Quoting: EikeI should have done a little bit more research before posting.
I wasn't even aware that it's not the latest generation.
But still, good to hear you've got good experiences with it.
My first M.2 SSD is already on its way to me! :)
Thanks & stay safe!

Just a tip: Don't format your new NVMe with btrfs. Use ext4 or XFS. While btrfs is great for spinning disks and SSD, it surprisingly stinks in performance on NVMe.

Where does this come from? I have BTRFS on all my drives (a Samsung 970 EVO Plus as / and two WD Red 8T in Raid1 for /home) and cannot say that my performance stinks when compared with when I used ext4.

It comes from the Filesystem Roundup article in issue 283 of Linux Format. They in fact tested with an EVO 970.

The gist is use btrfs for HDD and SSD if you like those features (I like them), but stick to ext4/xfs for NVMe and USB stick. btrfs was 30% slower than the other filesystems on the 970 according to the multiple tests in this article.

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: F.UltraWhere does this come from? I have BTRFS on all my drives (a Samsung 970 EVO Plus as / and two WD Red 8T in Raid1 for /home) and cannot say that my performance stinks when compared with when I used ext4

Actually, how is the performance for /home for you? My main anxiety towards moving /home off of my NVME is that I'd lose out on performance in a major way.

Or in other words, how much difference does NVME vs SATA have in terms of games?

Never had /home on NVMe, I moved from single SATA for whole disk to Raid6 on 3 SATA for whole disk to splitting / and /boot to a NVMe and later moved /home from my Raid6 to two new SATA drives. Would have preferred to be able to have /home on NVMe as well but 8TB drives don't come cheap there...

Your /home is 8TB? What the hell. I don't know what makes up that storage consumption, but maybe you should mount other drive types inside a /home/[user]/subfolder and then use NVMe for the rest of /home. Take as much advantage of your fast storage as you can (including swap file if you even use one).

FWIW, this is how my storage is set up:
NVMe for OS
Another NVMe for games and development apps
RAID0 SSD for, yes, more games
Spinning disk for large, mostly static files

Quoting: 14

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: 14

Quoting: EikeI should have done a little bit more research before posting.
I wasn't even aware that it's not the latest generation.
But still, good to hear you've got good experiences with it.
My first M.2 SSD is already on its way to me! :)
Thanks & stay safe!

Just a tip: Don't format your new NVMe with btrfs. Use ext4 or XFS. While btrfs is great for spinning disks and SSD, it surprisingly stinks in performance on NVMe.

Where does this come from? I have BTRFS on all my drives (a Samsung 970 EVO Plus as / and two WD Red 8T in Raid1 for /home) and cannot say that my performance stinks when compared with when I used ext4.

It comes from the Filesystem Roundup article in issue 283 of Linux Format. They in fact tested with an EVO 970.

The gist is use btrfs for HDD and SSD if you like those features (I like them), but stick to ext4/xfs for NVMe and USB stick. btrfs was 30% slower than the other filesystems on the 970 according to the multiple tests in this article.

Looking at the article it seams to be the Intel 530 and BTRFS had the same performance increase going from SSD to NVMe as the other filesystems. But then I have just been able to look at the free sample pages so perhaps there are some missing from the actual magazine. Yes BTEFS is slower than every other FS but that is due to BTRFS sacrificing performance for features (most importantly checksumming). That ext4 was slowed on SSD than BTRFS looks to be some misconfiguration because it shouldn't be.