[PREFACE: So, I bought a Lenovo Legion T5 tower with a QVO 870 8TB SATA SSD. To be frank, that drive drove me bonkers with how laggy it was. Every couple minutes it would literally grind to a halt waiting for the QLC NAND flash and/or the DRAM cache to "catch up," during which time, the system was nigh unusable. Couldn't even open the Task Manager or the Windows menu until it "caught up." Why someone would intentionally put that drive as the primary boot drive in a modern high-end gamnig / compute system paired with a Ryzen 9 7950X is beyond me. But, so it went.]
Once I figured out it was most likely the rubbish QVO SSD [with QLC (Quad-Level Cell) NAND flash (which is slow), and using the SATA bus (which is slow), instead of the NVMe/PCIe ans TLC or MLC NAND flash, and possibly also insufficient DRAM cache] causing the lag & general stuttering / flakiness, I immediately did some research and looked around for a proper NVMe SSD drive to install and set up as the primary boot / OS / app drive.
In the end, on price and performance, it came down to the Crucial T500 NVMe SSD and the HP FX900 Pro NVMe SSD.
In the end, I chose the HP FX900 Pro NVMe, because:
1) the Crucial drive was out of stock pretty much everywhere for like a month and the HP drive was available within a week, and the QVO SATA SSD was driving me nuts so I wanted it replaced ASAP,
-and-
2) I'd previously picked up the HP EX920 NVMe SSD [a Gen 3 NVMe/PCIe drive with pretty good performance] and it worked great in whatever I'd put it in [either my desktop, laptop, or both; I forget]. So, I figured this Gen 4 NVMe drive would be newer, better, faster. [It was/is!]
I cloned the QVO drive over to the HP FX900 Pro NVMe via a USB-C external enclosure/caddy, then installed it in one of the NVMe slots on the MoBo. Then I about had a heart attack and did some quick troubleshooting to figure out why it was immediately blue-screening on boot [it was user error; needed to disable the SATA drive first so Windows could only see one "bootable" drive and then Windows would add it to the BCD database, after which it boots just fine, sans "blue screens," as the primary "1st-priority" drive].
Once the desktop was successfully booting off the HP FX900 Pro drive, all the lag and flakiness disappeared. Now I can truly "enjoy" my new beast of a machine [9750X, RTX 3080, 64GB DDR5, and now the HP FX900 Pro NVMe SSD] without being driven up the wall by a slow SATA SSD with slow QLC NAND and insufficient DRAM cache making it laggy & nigh unusable every 2-3 minutes.
This drive uses TLC NAND flash memory cells [faster than QLC memory] and has a good amount of DRAM cache and a good controller. It's rated up to about 7000-7500 MB/sec write/read, if memory serves.
So, yeah, it's very fast on loading the OS, loading apps, file transfers, etc. And the price was pretty good for a mid-to-high-end NVMe drive. So, it competes reasonably well on that as of this writing [may have been priced higher when it originally came out, but right now it's pretty competitively priced, IMO].
So, yeah, overall, it does exactly what I needed it to do. Lag/freezing is gone, system is snappy, it's fast to boot / load apps / transfer files, etc. So, I'm happy/satisfied and give it a 'recommend.'
| Hard Drive | 512 GB Solid State Drive |
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