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  • oRAirwolf - Tuesday, June 1, 2021 - link

    I am happy to see another m.2 2230 option. Using a small (2230 or 2242) USB enclosure with these drives is super handy for very fast highly portable storage.
  • deil - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    yeah, a lot of times you dont have a choice as they are meant in laptops. I like them as they are expansions in places where you would not fit anything else. (my one have 2x 2242 drives, which is nice)
  • regsEx - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    Hope camera manufacturers will implement M.2 2230 instead of CFExpress. It's like 20 times cheaper.
  • sameerhiware - Monday, November 21, 2022 - link

    Won't work. SSDs are not designed to support camera use-cases.
  • Techtree101 - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    Is it safe on the drive's longevity to use these in external enclosures? I was hoping to get a 2TB external for occasional transport needs, but I worry the heat of this type of SSD will degrade them in shorter order.
  • solidsnake1298 - Thursday, June 3, 2021 - link

    NAND chips actually benefit from being a bit warm. Controllers, not so much. But, under typical single-user client work loads, controllers never reach temperatures that would be of concern. If you are installing it in an enclosure with little or no airflow and other heat sources, there are aftermarket NVMe heat sinks that should help.
  • mode_13h - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link

    > NAND chips actually benefit from being a bit warm.

    In what sense?
  • mode_13h - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link

    SSDs seem to have built-in temperature sensors and will throttle, if necessary. Most of the time, a typical user isn't hitting a SSD hard enough for it to get anywhere near throttling.

    The biggest benefit from good SSD cooling is performance, if you really *are* pushing it. Because that lets you push it further, before it starts throttling.
  • wr3zzz - Tuesday, June 1, 2021 - link

    Do Micron products differ from Crucial? I thought Crucial NVMe SSD use in-house controllers.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, June 1, 2021 - link

    I don't know about current products, but older products often (if not always) used the same controllers. The Micron Linux tools would usually work with Crucial drives, as well.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, June 1, 2021 - link

    That's how I'd usually "overprovision" them.
  • Billy Tallis - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    Crucial products started to diverge from Micron client drives around the MX500, when Crucial switched to using Silicon Motion controllers while Micron client drives kept using Marvell. On the NVMe side, Micron rolled out their in-house controllers to the client OEM products well before Crucial started using them, but now they're both using a mix of in-house and third-party NVMe controllers.
  • mode_13h - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link

    Thanks!
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    IIRC, Cruicial is for end users and Micron is for OEMs.
  • bug77 - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    Crucial is just the retail division of Micron.
    As for components used traditionally, that doesn't mean much these days where availability usually trumps everything else.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, June 1, 2021 - link

    Let's see some SLC or MLC drives, using that same NAND. I'd give up the capacity for better endurance, sustained writes, and longer data retention.
  • Wereweeb - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    Just buy the Chia mining drives. The "premium" ones are all essentially QLC SSD's in pSLC mode.
  • antonkochubey - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    What are you doing that necessities more endurance than those drives offer?

    More so, if your workload is really that endurance-heavy, why are you complaining about consumer-grade SSDs instead of looking at industrial ones (all of which, by the way, are also TLC nowadays)?
  • mode_13h - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    I just had to recover data of the PC off a former coworker whose machine had been unplugged for the past 2 years. If he'd had a QLC or maybe even TLC drive, that data would be gone!

    As for endurance, I've not burned out a drive yet, but virtually all of mine are SLC or MLC. Workloads include lots of software builds and database I/O.

    I don't like how we have to pay an extra premium for write-oriented datacenter SSDs, just to get SLC or MLC. It could even be a configurable option in the firmware, to put a SSD into SLC or MLC mode.
  • mode_13h - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link

    BTW, it was a Micron 1100 SATA drive, which apparently uses TLC. The drive had been powered off for about 3 years!

    I know it wasn't too far from the cliff, however, because some of the blocks that hadn't been written by the filesystem did indeed have read errors, when I ran badblocks.
  • Exodite - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    MSRP; twice what they're worth?

    I'm going to guess yes, as that's been the norm for SSDs for a while now. :(
  • shabby - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    Clearly there's some price fixing going on again, the price of 128gb usb/microsd cards has been the same for the last 5 years.
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    Price fixing and collusion happens all the time in the flash and RAM industries. They just rarely get caught.
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    "They just rarely get caught. "

    They just rarely get prosecuted

    If the various News and Fake News can suss out collusion, so can the various authorities. They just choose to look some other way. Do they get paid to? Only The Shadow knows.
  • Adramtech - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    I haven’t seen the media find any collusion. Only reports of the same law firm bringing up charges that don’t make any coherent sense. This lawfirm had their last collusion case thrown out by the judge.
  • Adramtech - Sunday, October 10, 2021 - link

    You clearly have no idea what you're talking about https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07B984HJ5?con...
  • HardwareDufus - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    I'm always hoping a variant of the RaspberryPi4 will have an M2. interface, even if it can only communicate via a PCI 2.0 1x channel... It would be nice to add an M2 22x30 256GB drive. :)
  • ICT Buff - Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - link

    In the meantime...
    https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspbe...
  • arashi - Thursday, June 3, 2021 - link

    Get the carrier board with m.2 and a CM4.
  • mode_13h - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link

    I don't get the preoccupation with NVMe, on these low-end boards. The Pi is slow enough that SATA vs. NVMe isn't going to make a big difference, if both are properly implemented (i.e. not over USB).

    However, you should keep an eye out for boards with Rockchip RK3588, due out towards the end of this year. Not only does it have PCIe 3.0 x4 (and built-in SATA), but also its CPU cores are much better (4x A76) and it's made on 8 nm in contrast to the Pi's 28 nm.

    https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/11/26/rockchip-r...

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