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Diamondragan
85
Jan 23, 2018
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For the uninitiated...
These are 3D MLC NAND drives. This makes their performance comparable to Samsung's 850 PRO. The 850 EVO is a 3D TLC drive.
In general, device read/write tolerance or "total bytes written" (TBW) describes how long you can use the thing before it fails. The MTBF figure in the stats is "mean (average) time before failure". Before 3D NAND was developed, it was simply SLC > MLC > TLC. If your storage drive is a bunch of little boxes, then SLC (single-layer cell) holds a "single" (one) block of information per box. MLC (multi-layer cell) holds two blocks per box, and TLC (tri-layer-cell) holds three blocks per box. Holding more than one block per box means that you can have more blocks per drive, but that also means that if you need to pick up all three blocks out of the same box, that box is opened three times because it can only grab one block at a time. The more times you open a box, the faster it wears out and breaks.
TLC is a good spot for consumer drives because they offer a lot of storage at a great price, and normal people aren't reading and writing their drives to death so fast. You might be thinking, "I want the better stuff that lasts longer," but MLC drives like this are not necessarily better. For the money, you can get larger and faster 3D TLC drives, or just save your money with an identically sized drive. I've been using this refurbished laptop of mine for over 3 years. SSD scans show that the remaining life of my drive is still "100%". So this will live longer than me at this rate. QLC or (you guessed it) quad-level cell drives would offer even more space, and those drives are currently being worked on.
In fact... https://www.extremetech.com/computing/262115-intel-leak-confirms-upcoming-ssds-will-use-ultra-dense-qlc-3d-nand
It might be this year!
The SATA3 interface of these 2.5 inch 7mm drives is limited to 600MB/s read and write speeds. Basically every drive on the market does 500MB/s now. The entire point of these drives is to get rid of hard disk drives that have physical arms and spinning platters that can break much easier, die to outside magnetic forces, are quite heavy, and are quite slow. But HDDs are super-duper cheap. QLC might be able to kick them out for good, though.
Unless you are writing new information to your drives over 200GB per day, every single day, and I do mean every single day with no breaks, chances are the market and/or tech will change to the point where you want to get a new drive anyway. That would last three years before being a moderate concern. There is no guarantee that the drive will fail, only an increased risk, and usage like that would fall out of the warranty-backed use case anyway.
After saying all of that, these 3D MLC drives are about as expensive as 3D TLC drives that use the new NVMe interface. SATA3 has that hard limit of 600MB/s, but NVMe drives can get around 2000MB/s read speed and around half of that for writes. Remember that this is for the same price. If you have a device that supports NVMe SSDs, that's 95-99% of the time a better option. Lots of people might "do video editing", but unless it's your life's work and you do it every day, you're still using your stuff about as much as someone that just watches YouTube videos constantly.
If you don't know if you need this kind of drive, you probably don't. You definitely don't. Don't buy it. People who know/think they need this have already bought it. Those people aren't reading some long-winded comment by some dude on Massdrop. They're doing other stuff.
Jan 23, 2018
Elzizo
520
Jan 23, 2018
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DiamondraganWell, I appreciated your long-winded post.
Jan 23, 2018
BigZ
4
Jan 23, 2018
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DiamondraganSo in your opinion, what’s the best drive for the money right now?
Jan 23, 2018
Diamondragan
85
Jan 24, 2018
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BigZWhat's the best drive for the money, in my opinion?
I am not qualified by knowledge or experience to say for sure absolutely, even as an opinion which doesn't have to be "right". I have, however, put an awful lot of time into looking at different benchmarks and prices. It's how I pass the time, and I occasionally use that information to fuel my own purchases.
The Samsung 850 EVO stands out not only as a remarkably great performer, but also as a market leader in sales volume. It's the world's most popular SSD ever. That kind of sale volume can lower the price relative to it's great benchmarks, and I would say it has. When I think about choosing an SSD, I think about the money I would pay for an 850 EVO versus a budget champion like the Crucial MX300 (3D TLC) or some off-brand competitor like the Mushkin Reactor (MLC). I personally aim for $0.25 per GB at any capacity, something that basically never happens below 500GB drives but also is rare in general outside of deals, used/refurb, and temporary sales, even on budget/offbrand/actually bad drives. The new trend of ultra-high capacity drives (2TB and 4TB) commanding a price premium per GB is incredibly disappointing and it makes me very sad. Drive slots are, after all, quite limited (for a laptop).
I personally tend to up-sell myself on tech purchases, "within reason". When something goes wrong, I don't want to suspect that it's because I skimped out on a part or a spec over a few bucks, especially when looking at the total cost of a machine. Because I will only ever own a few fancy, expensive devices in my life due to financial limitations, it's important to me that I don't end up spending money and being unsatisfied anyway. The Samsung 850 EVO could be said to be the best of it's kind, particularly because of the limitations of the SATA3 interface, and it's not really that much more money than cheap drives with remarkable weak spots that show up in benchmarks. Maybe I would never notice those few low specs in cheap drives. Heck, I am using a refurb laptop that shipped with a LITEON 256GB drive and all I can say is that it's great and beats the crud out of a hard disk. The MX300 actually benchmarks slightly worse than the cheapo drive they threw in this laptop, funnily enough. That said, Crucial just released a new MX500 in December and that's not even on userbenchmark.com yet. Maybe it's much better. Samsung also just released the 860 EVO yesterday.
If I had to take your money and give you something in return, I would simply ask you one question. How much space do you need? In SATA3 2.5" 7mm form, Samsung 850/860 EVO is the only drive that offers 4TB. Everyone else offers only up to 2TB. In NVMe M.2 form, Samsung doesn't even offer 2TB on anything except it's own best (and most expensive) 960 PRO. From personal experience, it's a sheer delight to have any SSD over a hard disk, and if you don't need that much space, I would simply buy the cheapest one for the capacity that you do need. The most common knowledge gained from real-world reviews and comparisons is that SSDs 'just work'. When you're not pining over every "lost" second during some file transfer job, or losing sleep over how fast Path of Exile loads each new instance, having literally any SSD is just fine.
Assuming you're a regular consumer person like me, I'd simply check Google for any stark warnings (like high rate/early failure), compare the drive benchmarks to the only one I'm really familiar with (http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/5988/LITEONIT-LCM-256M3S), and then buy whatever happens to be on sale.
Right now, that happens to be... the Mushkin Reactor 1TB ($250), Reactor 2TB ($495) or Crucial MX500 ($500) if you trust they improved on the MX300's relatively poor writes compared to the equally priced Mushkin gear (I personally don't trust that but there is no userbenchmark page so who knows), and then the 850 EVO as literally the only 4TB option. Talking from an amazon.com SSD search right this very moment.
If you can get an 850 EVO for those prices at lower capacities, then you should buy it instead. It's truly great on paper. This applies to just about anything that is plain better, like the new 860 series stuff, or the NVMe drives if you can use them.
An eBay search just revealed some "damaged packaging" listing for new 850 EVO drives at only $235 and free shipping. Someone bought one seven minutes ago. There are three left. Very, very fresh listing. https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-Samsung-Solid-State-Internal-SSD-850-EVO-1TB-2-5-MZ-75E1T0B-V-NAND/183034363294?epid=216334568&hash=item2a9db2bd9e:g:NTMAAOSws4JW7o7W
As an owner of roughed-up and refurb gear, I also have faith in used items, and that can save a good amount of cash.
Jan 24, 2018
Anzial
1494
Mar 4, 2018
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DiamondraganNice write-up. Just one thing worth mentioning is that the Spectre/Metdown patches kill NVMe performance, so it has much less of an advantage over SATA3 than before.
Mar 4, 2018
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