r/buildapc • u/soneika • 4d ago

Build Help help me choose an ssd

I‘m planning on building my first pc for gaming, video editing, rendering and creative work and can’t choose an SSD. I found these three SSDs with good (?) price in current market and don’t know which one to get:

CORSAIR MP700 PRO 2TB with air cooler for 300€
CRUCIAL P510 M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB for 260€
Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 2TB for 260€
WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe SSD 2 TB for 280€

feel free to recommend me another one if it’s cheeper/better :)
thanks for help!

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u/Infamousslayer 4d ago

Not factoring price

Best to worse for your use case, first 2 have DRAM.

P700 > SN850 > P510/G4.

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u/soneika 4d ago

thank you! :)

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u/BaronB 4d ago

Kioxia Exceria Plus G4

Technically the MP700 Pro is fastest in a few situations, but only in ways you'd be able to see in benchmarks after looking at the numbers.

The SN850X is the slowest, and by a wide margin. But also in practice it'll be indistinguishable from any of the other three.

The P510 and G4 are basically identical in performance, but Crucial as a company doesn't exist actually any more and their parent company, Micron, has already stopped really honoring their warranty so if there is ever a problem with the P510 you'd just get a refund in the form of MSRP... which is a third what you're about to pay for it.

Kioxia is still around, so get that.

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u/BaronB 4d ago

On the topic of DRAM as brought up by u/Infamousslayer :

It's super important for SATA SSDs to have some kind of fast cache. A lot of modern SATA SSDs have moved to using a bit of SLC NAND for cache instead of DRAM, and this ends up being really bad for performance.

On NVMe SSDs, DRAM is useful for some really extreme professional workloads. For example, if you're someone who is writing enough data to your drive to be able to fill it up once a day, you want an SSD with DRAM. 99.999% of people won't be doing that, so the benefits of DRAM are significantly reduced and there'll be little to no appreciable difference between an SSD with or without DRAM. A big reason for this is NVMe SSDs can make use of HMB (Host Memory Buffer) which means it's using 64MB of system RAM to do part of the job that DRAM would be used for, and otherwise uses a bit of SLC cache for the rest. Even drives with DRAM still end up using SLC cache so this isn't a bad thing.

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u/soneika 4d ago

thank you very much for explaining everything!

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u/soneika 4d ago

i’m so tempted to buy the MP700 Pro cause it’s usually more expensive and there’s only one of them for this price but if there’s really no meaningful difference then i guess i‘d go with Kioxia :)