Bought this kingston xs2000 a while ago. It’s officially rated for “up to” 2000Mb\s read\write but slows to a crawl after 30GB have been copied. Fyi, I’m copying files from an internal nvme (samsung 980 pro) via a usb 3.0 cable, so this kingston ssd is the only bottleneck.
I don’t think that’s an nvme drive, am I wrong?
I agree with the other comment.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/kingston-xs2000-2-tb/2.html
The drive has no DRAM cache, 99% chance that it is using a portion of the flash as SLC “cache”. When the cache fills up it has to write it out to TLC storage.
For what it’s worth, I got a good deal on a Samsung T7 and it’s good
TLC flash and no DRAM will do that. 😢
I have seen some ssds for the steam deck listed as having no dram. So, I’m happy to see your comment, I had no idea that it was this important.
Should I just skip and ssd that doesn’t have dram?
DRAM-less is fine for the deck. Playing games is mostly large reads and small writes for saves. When writing you’re likely downloading which is going to be the slowest link in the chain. As you saw with this external drive, it could write quickly for 30GB. Getting bigger for less money is gonna be worth it, especially with the limited physical size of a 2230.
The key metric is game load times, which don’t change much even for desktop systems on drives that read 400MB/s or 5GB/s. So don’t worry about it too much.
Check reviews that test writes over ~15 minutes. This kingston holds out the longest but then has a very low floor https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/cqJ6pXctEd5BKJVLJN7TCD-1200-80.png
It’s a worst case senario for all drives though, and they will drop in throughtput. Caches run out, heat build up, power supply gets strained, it’s rough.
Don’t buy SSDs with no DRAM cache. Caching is half the battle when it comes to high speed transferring of data. If you need to transfer data frequently then you’ll want to spend a little more on an SSD with DRAM instead of SLC cache. There are lots of resources online with which devices use which kinds of cache.
