The Best NVMe SSD for Laptops and Notebooks (2020)

Such is the article title for AnandTech’s review of the M.2 2280 SK hynix Gold P31 1TB SSD (currently ~$135 @ Amazon, et al). https://www.anandtech.com/show/16012/the-sk-hynix-gold-p31-ssd-review

... “The drive's power efficiency is far above the competition; it uses less power than many SATA SSDs while delivering high-end NVMe performance. Thanks to good co-design of their 128L 3D NAND and their in-house NVMe SSD controller, SK hynix has completely redefined our standards for NVMe SSD power efficiency and turned in the most surprising benchmark results in my five years of working for AnandTech.”​

I custom ordered my new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme gen2 with the minimal 8GB RAM & 256GB SSD in anticipation of getting the second stick of RAM and larger SSD at a much lower cost than on Lenovo’s configurator. I’ve found my SSD: I ordered one of these from Amazon yesterday after reading the article. It’s currently the no-brainer best choice by quite a margin for this class of SSD performance, for mobile devices where power efficiency (battery life) matters.

 

Nice. TIL that SSDs can consume 6.3 Watts! But that's if "active", with the idle power more than a factor hundred less (< 50 mW). I'm curious what a typical user's average SSD power use would be throughout a session. I was thinking these are basically mostly idle because of their speed, but maybe not?

 

Yeah, I agree that a SSD is mostly idle for a typical consumer. I think he touched on that in the article. Also, on performance, he wrote in the comments: “...the real-world performance difference between the P31 and a decent low-end NVMe drive (or even a good SATA drive) is pretty small for most use cases...”

But then there are those times when I’m installing a multi-GB game or copying a ripped DVD TV series to another drive when it could be working at peak for a long time. Or playing games with lots of scenery & textures loading as I explore the virtual world. That can be fairly constant. YMMV

So, since it’s going for the same price as other NVMe SSDs in that performance range, why not choose higher efficiency?

Note: I’m an edge case; I am off-grid nearly all the time and need to budget my solar power. So power efficiency is something that matters even “plugged in”.

 

Does somebody know if the Micron X100 NVMe can be found anywhere for sale currently? (And at what price?)

https://www.micron.com/products/advanced-solutions/3d-xpoint-technology/x100

(I would call this "far above competition" in terms of speed because 3D Xpoint based, fast and resilient; but what would be the price and the capacity? Power efficiency, however, is likely to be terrible )