Capacity is the only SSD spec that matters
When shopping for an NVMe SSD for your PC, you’ll frequently encounter long lists of buzzwords and specifications. However, not all specifications are equally important, and even those that matter are often less relevant to most users than you might think. Here are some tips I follow when shopping for NVMe to get the best deal every time.
Capacity is still king
If there’s one golden rule to remember today, it’s this: it doesn’t matter if an NVMe claims to be the fastest in the world if its capacity is lower than what competing units offer.
Unfortunately, this is a common trap that new builders often fall into, as marketing can convince them to buy one of the fastest NVMe on the market, regardless of how much capacity they can actually afford.
But the simple truth is that at the end of the day, you buy NVMe for storage first, with the rest coming later. Whether it’s gaming, content creation, backups, or general storage, you want an NVMe that can store lots of files and, ideally, have free space for optimal health and performance.
As for ability to purchase, it’s hard to say given how often prices fluctuate due to the ongoing memory shortage. Anything less than 1TB is hardly worth considering, especially if you’re a gamer, and even then it’s not great value.
2TB is more usable, but when you factor in the price, it’s still poor value for money. 4TB might actually be the best value right now, if you can swallow the cost.
On the other hand, if you just need a fast desktop or laptop and don’t typically store a lot of files, even 240GB might be enough – that’s the amount I use on my laptop.
PCIe Generations Matter Less Than You Think
Generally speaking, the PCIe generation of your NVMe is probably the most important specification after storage. Each new PCIe generation roughly doubles the maximum theoretical speed, so a newer generation generally means faster NVMe.
NVMe PCIe Gen 5s are the fastest, with many models claiming sequential read speeds of around 15,000 MB/s, which is about the limit of the interface.
As impressive as these speeds may seem, they are of little importance in everyday use. If gaming is your primary goal, you may be surprised to learn that in most scenarios, there is virtually no significant performance difference between NVMe PCIe Gen 3, Gen 4, and Gen 5.
The only situation where you might see a small difference is in games that support Windows DirectStorage, which allows the GPU to get data directly from the NVMe for decompression, thereby improving performance.
Even then, the difference is marginal. Tests from YouTuber Compusemble show the total load time of a Gen 3 player for all scenes at 13.8 seconds, Gen 4 at 10.8 seconds, and Gen 5 at 10.4 seconds.
This shows that Gen 4 is at the sweet spot in terms of performance, even though prices have increased so much that Gen 5 drives often cost about the same. If you’re on a strict budget, it’s usually best to get the largest Gen 3 drive you can afford.
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Transfer speed is rarely a concern
Even though PCIe generations have some impact on performance, the transfer speed differences between different NVMe are of little importance to most users. NVMe are already much faster than traditional SATA SSDs.
In fact, NVMe is often the fastest part of your chain in most scenarios, which means you’ll almost always run into a bottleneck somewhere else: your Ethernet cable or adapter, your Internet speed, your smartphone, your USB stick, your external drive, or internal system limitations. Even internally, software, CPU, and RAM often limit performance long before NVMe itself becomes a factor.
The only time you’re likely to approach your NVMe’s maximum theoretical speeds is when transferring files from NVMe to NVMe (even internal file transfers are much slower). In these cases, do you really care whether it takes five or ten seconds to transfer a 50GB video?
Get single-sided NVMe when you have a choice
Unless you’ve already gone down the NVMe rabbit hole, you probably don’t know that NVMe can be single-sided or double-sided. This refers to the side that the memory chips are on: single-sided NVMe have their chips on only one side of the PCB, while double-sided units have chips on both.
Many NVMe 2TB or smaller use single-sided designs, which is a good thing because they’re easier to cool with the heatsink included with your motherboard. I always check if an NVMe is single-sided and prefer to buy them when I can.
Double-sided designs are more common on higher capacity NVMe because the manufacturer needs space to place additional memory chips. In these cases, you may need a heatsink that can properly cool the chips on both sides.
The price of DRAM cache is rarely worth it
You can think of DRAM as ultra-fast volatile memory for your NVMe. This is a useful feature that allows a drive to perform better in various tasks by storing the mapping table even as it fills up, but the downside is that NVMe with DRAM is often expensive.
An alternative to the dedicated DRAM used by many modern NVMe is the Host Memory Buffer (HMB). HMB allows NVMe to borrow a small portion of your system’s RAM instead of using the onboard DRAM to store the mapping table.
In the vast majority of scenarios, the performance difference between HMB-accelerated NVMe and those with DRAM cache is negligible, and given the high price of DRAM SSDs, they are generally not worth the extra cost.
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TLC is better than QLC, but it doesn’t matter
TLC and QLC are the two most common types of flash memory in consumer NVMe. TLC (Triple-Level Cell) stores three bits per cell, while QLC (Quad-Level Cell) stores four. Without getting into technical details, the key point is that TLC is generally faster and more durable than QLC.
However, the price gap between the two can sometimes be significant, while the actual difference is small enough that it is of little importance to the average user. If you can afford it or find a good deal, it makes sense to choose a TLC NVMe, at least for your boot drive and your most important files and games. However, for most use cases, NVMe QLCs will work just fine.
NVMe SSDs come with a surprisingly long list of specifications that can easily lead to choice paralysis. However, as long as you’re buying from a reputable brand and can get the capacity you need at a price you’re happy with, chances are you’re already getting a good deal.
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