Storage
The biggest sticking point for the entire build was what I would do about storage. In my Crushed build, not long after I got it up and running the large hard drive that I installed in it stopped working and eventually the second M.2 drive in it also died. Combine that with just how much space some games take up, and I was constantly removing games, even just to get updates for other games, especially ARK: Survival Evolved which constantly had huge updates. I didn’t want to be low on space, but with storage prices across the board going crazy, getting my hands on enough storage would be an issue. I wanted to have two large-capacity SSDs, with at least one being PCIe Gen 5. Our friends over at Patriot were generous enough to send over two of their 4TB Viper Gaming PV593 drives, which fit that bill perfectly. Enough capacity to not have to worry about what I had installed for games on one drive, and the OS drive is large enough to install everything else and use as a scratch drive when editing videos and photos alike.
Both drives are PCIe Gen 4 x4, and they have sequential read speeds of up to 14,000 MB/s and write speeds of up to 13,000 MB/s. Random reads are listed at up to 2,000 IOPS, and they have an endurance of up to 3,000 Terabytes written. They also have a five-year warranty, which is solid as well!
Both drives will be installed under the M.2 heatsinks on the Asus Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI, so it's good that they don’t have a built-in heatsink. They use the Silicon Motion SM2508 Gen 5 SSD controller, which is built on the TSMC 6nm platform, which should help keep heat down as much as is possible with a PCIe 5.0 drive. It’s all going to be hidden behind the heatsink but the drives have a sticker across the top with the Viper Gaming branding and the PV593 model name, as well as the drive capacity and a serial number as well.
