Best Consumer M.2 NVMe SSDs for Plotting

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If you read the SSD buying guide, you will notice that I actually do NOT recommend using consumer drives for plotting, because generally, they are optimized for bursty performance, employ caching algorithms, are optimized for low power and battery life (even the high-performance desktop-only variants of M.2 form factor supports up to 8.25W compared with 25W on the U.2 NVMe), and most importantly have much less endurance than data center and enterprise SSDs.

I’ve had to buy a consumer NVMe for the NUC build, as well as my brother in laws build (since I had to get on Amazon prime quickly). There are a few models that are actually fairing pretty well so far. I also realize buying used data center drives on eBay is not everyone’s thing, so I’ll give a few easy options to order on Amazon for quick delivery (and speedy plotter builds!)

Beware of all these consumer models!!! There are a lot of different SKUs (variants) with slightly different names and different NAND, performance, and TBW (endurance). For instance, the MP600 has a European model off by one digit in the model string, and it’s half the endurance. The Inland Premium has another model called Platinum that is very bad for plotting. Please only click on the links or make sure you are searching for the right model!

Here are a few good options

Corsair MP600

Corsair MP600 2TB NVMe M.2 80mm

Here is the system I used

Windows 10 2H20

GIGABYTE Z590 AORUS Elite

Intel® Core™ i9-10850K Processor

64GB DDR4 3200

2x Corsair MP600 2TB NVMe M.2 80mm

Doing 8 plots from the Windows GUI to test on 2x RAID0 of 2TB MP600. This is 4TiB a day out of the box in Windows with no tuning…

Total time = 17194.226 seconds. CPU (144.460%) Mon Apr 19 22:22:50 2021
Total time = 17425.093 seconds. CPU (147.280%) Tue Apr 20 02:26:42 2021
Total time = 18024.871 seconds. CPU (143.810%) Mon Apr 19 23:36:42 2021
Total time = 15474.692 seconds. CPU (146.420%) Mon Apr 19 19:54:10 2021
Total time = 18469.125 seconds. CPU (140.920%) Tue Apr 20 00:44:07 2021
Total time = 15631.662 seconds. CPU (150.720%) Tue Apr 20 03:56:48 2021
Total time = 16473.111 seconds. CPU (151.050%) Tue Apr 20 03:10:50 2021
Total time = 16264.099 seconds. CPU (145.150%) Mon Apr 19 21:07:20 2021
Total time = 17880.898 seconds. CPU (144.280%) Tue Apr 20 01:34:19 2021

I’ve used these 2 drives to plot him 43.4TiB, and each drive has consumed 405TBW or 8%. This was done mostly on 1.0.3 so 1.8TiB per k=32 would equal 438 k=32 and approx 702TBW. Why am I consuming 810 total? (2x 405TB)? This is called write amp folks, read up about it in the SSD Endurance Wiki and the SNIA SSD endurance page (I’m the author).

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number:                       Force MP600
Serial Number:                      21028230000xxxxxxx
Firmware Version:                   EGFM13.0
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x1987
IEEE OUI Identifier:                0x6479a7
Total NVM Capacity:                 2,000,398,934,016 [2.00 TB]
Unallocated NVM Capacity:           0
Controller ID:                      1
NVMe Version:                       1.3
Number of Namespaces:               1
Namespace 1 Size/Capacity:          2,000,398,934,016 [2.00 TB]
Namespace 1 Formatted LBA Size:     512
Namespace 1 IEEE EUI-64:            6479a7 455020017e
Local Time is:                      Tue Apr 20 21:00:16 2021 PDT
Firmware Updates (0x12):            1 Slot, no Reset required
Optional Admin Commands (0x0017):   Security Format Frmw_DL Self_Test
Optional NVM Commands (0x005d):     Comp DS_Mngmt Wr_Zero Sav/Sel_Feat Timestmp
Log Page Attributes (0x08):         Telmtry_Lg
Maximum Data Transfer Size:         512 Pages
Warning  Comp. Temp. Threshold:     90 Celsius
Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold:     95 Celsius

Supported Power States
St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat
0 +     9.78W       -        -    0  0  0  0        0       0
1 +     6.75W       -        -    1  1  1  1        0       0
2 +     5.23W       -        -    2  2  2  2        0       0
3 -   0.0490W       -        -    3  3  3  3     2000    2000
4 -   0.0018W       -        -    4  4  4  4    25000   25000

Supported LBA Sizes (NSID 0x1)
Id Fmt  Data  Metadt  Rel_Perf
0 +     512       0         2
1 -    4096       0         1

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        36 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          5%
Percentage Used:                    8%
Data Units Read:                    884,709,353 [452 TB]
Data Units Written:                 791,078,494 [405 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 8,022,828,443
Host Write Commands:                6,863,072,435
Controller Busy Time:               15,869
Power Cycles:                       28
Power On Hours:                     556
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   17
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      10
Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0

Inland Premium

Inland Premium 2TB NVMe on Amazon (In Stock)

This one became famous in my NUC build. After many months of people claiming this drive to be good, I finally caved and bought one to test out with the new NUC, since I needed an M.2 80mm. I’ve plotted about 40TB on the NUC, which is nuts because I literally bought it just to play around with and do some testing. I have not seen any performance degradation or any variation in the plotting output on the NUC. It does not appear to be as fast as the Corsair MP600 in plotting but it has 3600TBW on the 2TB model, is M.2 80mm with no heatsink (so fits nicely in the NUC) and has some nice modern NVMe features. Overall, I’m actually impressed with this little guy.

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0n1
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number:                       PCIe SSD
Serial Number:                      xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Firmware Version:                   ECFM13.3
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x1987
IEEE OUI Identifier:                0x6479a7
Total NVM Capacity:                 2,048,408,248,320 [2.04 TB]
Unallocated NVM Capacity:           0
Controller ID:                      1
Number of Namespaces:               1
Namespace 1 Size/Capacity:          2,048,408,248,320 [2.04 TB]
Namespace 1 Formatted LBA Size:     4096
Namespace 1 IEEE EUI-64:            6479a7 4120300a54
Local Time is:                      Tue Apr 20 21:18:58 2021 PDT
Firmware Updates (0x12):            1 Slot, no Reset required
Optional Admin Commands (0x0017):   Security Format Frmw_DL Self_Test
Optional NVM Commands (0x005d):     Comp DS_Mngmt Wr_Zero Sav/Sel_Feat Timestmp
Maximum Data Transfer Size:         512 Pages
Warning  Comp. Temp. Threshold:     75 Celsius
Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold:     80 Celsius

Supported Power States
St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat
0 +     9.51W       -        -    0  0  0  0        0       0
1 +     6.47W       -        -    1  1  1  1        0       0
2 +     4.96W       -        -    2  2  2  2        0       0
3 -   0.0490W       -        -    3  3  3  3     2000    2000
4 -   0.0018W       -        -    4  4  4  4    25000   25000

Supported LBA Sizes (NSID 0x1)
Id Fmt  Data  Metadt  Rel_Perf
0 -     512       0         2
1 +    4096       0         1

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        27 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          5%
Percentage Used:                    17%
Data Units Read:                    1,626,085,234 [832 TB]
Data Units Written:                 1,524,434,185 [780 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 4,947,906,538
Host Write Commands:                1,581,467,338
Controller Busy Time:               30,718
Power Cycles:                       17
Power On Hours:                     991
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   6
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      10
Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0

I do not own either of these, but some community members have said they have had good luck with both of the models. The TBW checks out.

Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB all have 3600TBW

Seagate Firecuda 520 on Amazon (In Stock)