SABRENT Q4 2230 M.2 NVMe Gen 4 2TB Internal SSD 5000MB/s Read PCIe 4.0 X4 M2 Solid State Drive Compatible with Steam Deck, ASUS ROG Ally, Mini PCs [SB-213Q-2TB]

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Powering off (via a hard switch) in the middle of doing anything can be bad. Most drives limit how much stuff sits in volatile storage (RAM caches) for exactly this reason. High-end drives would have a super capacitor to store power so that they can flush things from RAM to NAND in the event of a power loss. For consumer drives, it's possible, if you cycle the power in the middle of writes, to kill an SSD. Probably very unlikely, and it would depend on the model, but I know in the past I heard of this happening. Generally, we would expect BiCS5 to be less efficient than B47R. In our testing, these drives largely peak at 3-4W when something like the 2TB SN740 is rated for a peak of 6.3W, a substantial difference. Our 2TB SN770 reached a peak of 4.91W, which is noticeably less efficient at 1TB and 2TB. In practice, the difference probably isn’t massive as long as you have a newer controller, though - the TN436’s E19T is objectively much less efficient.

I guess even if the OS isn't really needed running, the OS will decide to put the SSD into sleep state and there is very little the SSD can do without risking to have its juice cut off, should it try to refuse. But you still need the other screw thread, not near the middle but rather near the other connector, for the case when you use one full-size SSD instead of two half-size. I had ARK running once on Linux: It loaded ARK faster from a hard disk than Windows loaded it from NVMe... Windows and Linux will see just a committed write, turning off the device won't loose you any data, it might just not have the opportunity to do the house-keeping and the SLC cache will remain permanently filled while the drive has to bypass it for new data resulting in HDD class write speeds. While M.2 2230 SSDs have been in some laptops, like Microsoft's Surface devices, for quite a bit now, they aren't nearly as ubiquitous in stores or online as physically larger drives, though it's not impossible to find them. At the very least, potential customers that can't find what they're looking for can know they're getting these drives through a reputable source.At 2TB for your Steam stash, at least you won't have to swap games in and out as often, which significantly helps to lessen the write burden. You're after the best value for money: 1TB 2230 NVMe drives are simply better value for money than this 2TB drive right now.

abufrejoval said:I guess the biggest question is: how do you ensure it's done steady-state processing before you turn the device off? Get ready for an immersive experience with exclusive gaming features including PCIe ® Gen 4.0 3, Western Digital's nCache™ 4.0 Technology, and Microsoft’s DirectStorage Support. Note that with a 2TB SSD, the pSLC cache could be up to 500GB in size for a completely empty drive. So, if you could do sustained writes at max speed and fill that up, and then had to drain it at ~100 MB/s, it could take over 1.38 hours just to empty the pSLC to QLC. LOL. (Related: The drives take a while to recover in our Windows testing, unless you just wipe/format them.)

QLC flash doubles the capacity of the original Rocket 2230.

The problem there is that a single 2280 m.2 SSD is longer than two 2230 m.2 SSDs, so you wouldn’t be able to have a second m.2 slot unless the aforementioned second slot is past where the 2280 m.2 SSD would normally lay. What I really want is a local shared Steam cache on my 10Gbit LAN, only one copy of every game in a houshold with nearly 10 Steam devices of various kinds. Though if you fill up this drive's capacity, or throw a lot of big files at it at once without giving it time to write that to the slower QLC, it will drop dramatically to near hard drive levels of performance. You really need that pseudo SLC buffer to keep that QLC from taking the brunt of the write job. Revitalize and expand the storage of your M.2 2230 SSD compatible laptop such as many Microsoft ® Surface and Dell™ models. These days I just keep running my manual TRIMs when I do major updates and most of my SSDs never go near the 90% mark anyway before I expand or reallocate: prices below €50/TB evict quite a lot of lesser capacity drives natuerally, which interestingly have never gone near 90% remaining life in all those years.