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.
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.
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.
I don’t think that’s an nvme drive, am I wrong?
I think your problem is, at least in part, due to the fact that you’re connecting via usb. No matter how fast your drive is capable of going, your machine has to negotiate the read/write speeds based on the number of lanes available for the entire system.
You can think of it like this: all of your usb ports share physical ‘data lanes’ that exist on your machines motherboard. These data lanes send information to and from your external device and the cpu. Additionally, most motherboard manufactuers hardwire various internal components into these data lanes as a way to save money without sacrificing hardware features. So now your external drive has to share a limited number of data lanes with all of your usb ports + anything else the manufacture decided to hardwire into.
When you connect your usb device to your machine, the device tells your operating system ‘hey, I can do 100000 writes per second’ then your operating system takes a look at all of the data lanes and determines how many lanes it can allocate to the external device, responding with ‘ok. This system is very busy so I need you to do 200 writes per second instead of 100000’
Generally, when people talk about how fast nvme is, it’s not because its just ‘better’ than everything else. It’s because its usually connected directly to the motherboard via m.2 slots. These m.2 slots usually (but not always) have dedicated data lanes to the cpu.
I know this stuff can be confusing and manufactures make it worse with how they advertise their products but I hope this helps.
USB-c is 10 gigabit. If it crawls after 30GB I’m guessing it’s likely counterfeit.
I know how most of these things work, but thank you for the detailed description. Still, 30MB/s is unacceptable.
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.
