Posted 19 November 2023

2TB NVME SSD with heatsink for PC gaming - which is my best option?

I've currently got a hodgpodge of SSD's being used to prop up my game collection - MSFS is taking over 300GB alone. I'd like to consolidate and also reduce the number of drives running, hoping that'll have some small effect on power consumption (is that naive?)

I need a heatsink as my motherboard only has one NVME slot with a built in heatsink.
And I'm thinking gen4 is probably slightly more future proof.
Beyond that though, I'm just looking to keep costs down. £100 hard upper limit, but less is better.
I've been looking through current deals and have seen reference to DRAM vs. HRB, but have no idea how much difference DRAM makes.

Crucial P5 Plus 2TB is £100, the discount for the 1TB doesn't scale.
Netac NV7000 2TB is £88 (I note from another thread it uses HRB rather than DRAM.)
Adata S70 is £95.

I'm struggling to see any other options, and I'm not sure if the Crucial is worth the extra either. Any thoughts?

Side question; if I disable a drive in Device Manager, will that drop power consumption - or do I need to physically remove the power connection? I'm not planning to remove my old SSD's after, I'd rather have the ability to chuck them back in the mix if I need them.
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  1. Pájaro's avatar
    1 - I wouldn't worry about ssd power consumption. What tends to be the case is that drives use very, very little power when they're idle, and while Windows will place the occasional workload upon them when the devices (and volumes) are accessible to it, you're generally just talking about a few seconds of activity, with only occasional power use peaks. Your entire array probably comes in at under 1w, or maybe 5-20w during the briefest moments in which windows is hitting the drive. Annual consumption is likely to be little more than a quid or so.

    2 - You might not require a heatsink. NVMEs generally don't, unless they're being hit with heavy workloads. Aftermarket heatsinks are cheap anyway (like, £5-£10), but I'd stick with just the integrated heat spreader unless you witness thermal throttling issues. Flash actually likes to run hot, so the conventional wisdom of loading cooling upon it might not actually be beneficial.

    3 - Buy whichever drive has DRAM and the best TBW or warranty, or the least 1-star reviews on amazon. Similar-spec drives will perform about the same as each other in all but benchmarks. Gen 4 does, in my experience, perform better in real world tasks than Gen 3, but between my drives it was more a 20% difference, not the 100% difference the respective box specs would suggest.

    4 - if you want a free option for drive consolidation, do check out Storage Spaces. It's a feature in windows that lets you combine multiple drives into a single volume, allowing you to consolidate storage space and gain the benefits of redundancy. It's not a perfect system, but I quite like it as a means to make use of my spare SSDs for low-prio relative bulk storage.
  2. EndlessWaves's avatar
    Excessive minimum processing power demands is generally a much bigger problem for energy efficient gaming than drive requirements. Some games require CPU and GPU with close to triple digit power draw just to run acceptably, a watt or two difference between drives is irrelevant in that context.

    As far as I'm aware games also don't tend to demand much from drives, so just go for whatever is cheap and well supported.
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