One of the main aspects that the units of storage internal SSD who use PCIe connect to the motherboard lies in the speed they offer, unlike traditional drives that connect via SATA, they are capable of allowing the user to have speeds that can exceed 10,000 MB/s. The creation of these units can be quite complicated, and even more so if we take into account that depending on the variant the performance will be better or worse, even when we are talking about SSDs that only have 1TB difference between them.
M.2 SSD capacity can influence performance
If you have ever thought that depending on the capacity of a storage unit the PC can do better or worse, you are right, because whether a unit is 1 TB or 2-4 TB has a lot of influence when we talk about M.2 SSD models. This applies to a wide variety of components of this type from different manufacturers, mainly due to the fact that units with greater capacity can also have higher speeds, which does not happen in versions that do not only include 1 TB of storage.
Obviously it's easier to understand with examples, so we'll do a comparison of the same storage units from two different brands with the 1TB, 2TB and 4TB versions so you can see the difference between them:
| Corsair MP600 PRO NH | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 TB | 2 TB | 4 TB | |
| Sequential reading | 7,000 MB/s | 7,000 MB/s | 7,000 MB/s |
| sequential writing | 5,700 MB/s | 5,700 MB/s | 6,500 MB/s |
| Shuffle Playback | 870,000 IOPS | 1.0 million IOPS | 1.0 million IOPS |
| Random writing | 1.1 million IOPS | 1.2 MIOPS | 1.2 MIOPS |
| TBW | 700 | 1400 | 3000 |
| Précio | 120$ | 207$ | 470$ |
As you can see in Corsair's case, the 1TB unit is the worst of the three in the comparison, as it has much lower random write/read than the other two, as well as the lowest resistance (TBW ), being the only good news is that it turns out to be the cheapest of the three. The 4 TB one, on the other hand, we can see that in addition to offering a greater amount of TBW, it also has a much higher sequential write speed, since there is practically 800 MB/s difference , even though it obviously costs $350 more.
Now let's see what happens with what is currently the fastest M.2 drive on the market, since it uses PCIe 5.0 instead of PCIe 4.0 like Corsair's:
| Crucial T705 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 TB | 2 TB | 4 TB | |
| Sequential reading | 13600 MB/s | 14,500 MB/s | 14,100 MB/s |
| sequential writing | 10,200 MB/s | 12,700 MB/s | 12,600 MB/s |
| Shuffle Playback | 1.4M | 1.55M | 1.5M |
| Random writing | 1.75M | 1.8M | 1.8M |
| TBW | 600 | 1200 | 2400 |
| Précio | 237$ | 390$ | 795$ |
Here we can see that the difference is even greater when comparing the 1TB disk with the other two, mainly because not only does it have a lower write speed than the previous one, but the speed of playback as well as both random speeds are very below. If we compare it to the 2 TB and 4 TB, it has 900 MB/s and 800 MB/s less in reading, while the writing it loses is the most serious, since we are talking about more than 2000 MB /s in both cases. case . All this, obviously without taking into account that the resistance it has (TBW) is much lower in both cases, although the price is obviously the most striking, since it costs a quarter of the price of the unit of 4 To.
So, what is the best choice for my PC?
As we have seen, 1TB disks are the most economical solution that we can find, but not the one that offers the highest performance in most cases, also having the problem of having practically the half the resistance in TBW that they offer. example, 2 TB disks. If we are considering adding only 2 TB of storage to our PC, it is better to opt for a model that has this capacity instead of two 1 TB models, because in addition to To be better, it offers us the possibility of reducing the use of M.2 connectors, since they are quite limited.
In the case of wanting 4 TB, we see that it would not be preferable to opt for a single 4 TB disk, because in addition to being more expensive, it also has worse performance (in the case of the model Crucial), so The best solution would be to opt for 2 units of 2 TB each.
This, as we can imagine, applies to a large number of storage units, but we have not covered each of them on the market, so in each case you need to check the speeds offered by each different capacity models. of the SSD unit you are going to buy, but in general, the 1TB ones always tend to be worse in terms of specifications, but better in terms of price.
