My question is if the P41 is actually worth getting if I already have a Sabrent Rocket 4 (2TB) or if it’ll only save a few minutes of battery life
Note the P41 is not the P31 (the efficiency champion). The P31 is PCIe 3.0, the P41 is PCIe 4.0 like the Sabrent Rocket 4. But it’s about the newest PCIe 4.0 high performance drive there is, so it benefits from the very latest flash, a new controller and lots of development time - SK Hynix was very late to the PCIe 4.0 party. By some metrics it’s the fastest PCIe 4.0 drive ever made - it certainly is in IOPS.
But it does get hot and it can consume a lot of power. The advantage is it can get through tasks so quickly it only consumes power in bursts while other drives will be at high power for longer.
Whether this has a meaningful impact on battery life I don’t know - my guess is that it would be marginal at best. If it idled at lower power it might, but the impact may again be marginal.
But there is a difference between the P31 and the P41.
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Just got this one for my upcoming AMD framework! I debated between the P31 and this one, and decided to go for the PCIe 4 version just because why not. It was only about $15 more for a 2TB drive with the ongoing prime day sale. It might get hot but hopefully not too hot under general use.
There are certainly some good options out there these days, hopefully prices drop for Gen4 as Gen5 increases.
Samsung 990 provides some faster speeds in both Seq writes and random write speeds while maintaining lower temps in average and high usage levels. The flash speed is faster too.
Samsung is more expensive (but is also on prime deal today), but it depends on how important those extra few MB/s are and trusting of the manufacturing. I think the larger die size helps with the heat dissapation too which will offset any “lower power consumption” the SK offers.
Just picked up a 1TB P41 on Amazon for $64 on sale. Deal probably ends sometime today. Just FYI.
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P41 Platinum 2TB still seems to be a tiny little bit more efficient while being a tiny little bit slower than the 990 Pro: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-990-pro-ssd-review/2. Both are certainly great SSDs.
Currently in Amazon Prime offers for 29% off, at least in Germany.
Leaving the problems I had with this SSD here, if you want to use the advanced 4K format, you can’t do this on Linux’s nvme-cli tool, I was using the secure erase feature of the Asus BIOS and successfully switched to the 4K block size.
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I just picked up the Solidigim P44 Pro (which is just the P41 Platinum under a different name, Solidigim is a subsidiary of SK Hynix) for only $50 for 1 TB with a great sale on Amazon. Link
Apparently the Crucial P3 (not P3 plus) has dethroned the Hynix offerings for most efficient write per watt, according to Tom’s hardware IIRC. Anyone have a Crucial P3 in use in an FW?
Do you mean Crucial? I can only find a Crucial P3 and that is a DRAM-less QLC PCIe 3 drive. Probably not great as a system drive in comparison to the high end PCIe4 ones.
Looks like it, at least this article article says it has a slightly higher mbps/w.
The p41/p44 still have better performance and write endurance.
TBH I am not sure the mbps/w measurement matters all that much to most users, the low power states and how fast it can get in and out of those is probably a lot more important to normal workloads people do on battery or what are you guys doing that needs lots of big reads and writes on an ssd while on battery?
Yes, I did mean that, but pre-caffeine brain mixed em up.
And yeah write efficiency is definitely not the only metric, nor the most important one to most people. But for me, battery life is more important than max performance 99% of the time. To answer your question, opening / modifying/ saving huge GIS projects during presentations to clients in very off grid / undeveloped lands is the use case that has me considering SSD efficiency so carefully.
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Editing/sorting RAW images in RawTherepee is my use case. I have folders with hundreds of files with 50MB each and sometimes opening those folders or applying some edits to all of them at once causes all thumbnails to be recreated, That takes some time with my current PCIe3 SSD with under 2GB/s reads. That is why I opted for the P41 with around 7GB/s read speeds.
Since I usually have power available maximum efficiency is not that important, but I would like the laptop to last as long as possible while not using the full might of the SSD.
Check carefully if QLC is what you want. Big writes will slow those down more than TLC drives after the pSLC-cache is full. For the P3 it has a relative big cache if the drive is empty, but perfomance will absolutely tank if the drive is more filled up. I’m talking slower than spinning rust.
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7GB/s is only for the sequential read speed of larger files, and the random read performance of 1000K+IOPS is more important for smaller files.
I did not see benchmarks of reading in 50MB files, but I hope that it is sequential enough to benefit. At least I do not see differences between reading 50/500/5000MB files with dd iflag=direct from a btrfs file system with my current ssd. Random reads get really slow with sizes in the KBs.
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Have you enabled compression？
No compression and file contents from /dev/urandom to prevent compression by the SSD-controller or other magic speed trickery.
That is probably exactly a case where you don’t want a qlc drive. As long as you stay under the cache it may be quite fast and the good mbps/w looks good, problem is the drive has to stay on after that to shovel all that stuff slowly to the non cache part whereas the tlc drive would be done at that point. So total power used for your workload is probably not actually better and likely a lot worse but workloads like that are quite hard to benchmark.
For a workload that does little writing and a lot of reading however qlc is mostly fine and the price does tend to make most of the shortcomings at least somewhat worth it.
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I have one. It is not good. I have the 1tb model and was hoping to use it as a external usb storage device. Once I fill it to about 200-250GB full (aka 25%) the write speed goes down to 50MBps. Definitely buy a different drive, especially for OS.
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