Cheapest SSDs that you would recommend?

[knoober]

https://www.amazon.com/DISCONTINUED...479861198&sr=8-2&keywords=samsung+ssd+++120gb

49.99 for a used Samsung 850 evo. I bought 2 earlier this year (from the same seller) and they are fantastic. I still dont know what to make of "rapid mode" because it seems like it might just be a gimmick. Still, it seems a fair price for one of/the fastest drive on the market.

Here is a thread that has some of my results and a link to some benches for for the drive

 

[c627627]

Thank you.
To anyone reading this, out of curiosity, do those $8 M.2 adaptors really work, any cons to using them?
I will be comparing the used 850 to whatever is available this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

My Patriot Pyro 240 GB was a faulty POS. Its SMART allegedly said that it had too many writes already! And Windows gave me a random error through "kernel-general" about one of the registry files being corrupted and recovered, additionally, there was text saying that some of my data might be lost. So, I chucked it! Showed a sign of silent corruption! The SSD was busted and executed!

And it seemed to suddenly have strange lags at the end...

 

[wingman99]

Rjarrrpcgp how do you like the GTX 1060?

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Rjarrrpcgp how do you like the GTX 1060?

Good, so far...

 

[c627627]

Okay, you tell me if this isn't the best bang for fifty bucks, brand new boot drive in 2016:

First of all it is 256GB - not the 128GB usually found in the +/- fifty bucks range.
Second, this SSD uses Crucial's 3D TLC NAND and has a Silicon Motion Controller inside.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10601...800-ssd-smi-controller-3d-nand-sata-interface
"Thanks to higher endurance of 3D TLC NAND compared to planar flash memory made using thin process technologies, ADATA declares 2 million hours MTBF..." (Mean time between failures).

10% off Promo code EMCFFGM222
$7 Rebate
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$51.49 + Free Shipping + No Tax for me

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820215016

 

[Evilsizer]

nand flash could get changed later but is worth a gamble, doubt you would notice if they changed the nand flash. if it would really effect performance at all unless they really just went to some low end nand flash later on.

 

[EarthDog]

We reviewed the drive as well.. see front page.

solid bang for the buck drive for sure. As I think was mentioned earliwr, one would be hard pressed to notice a difference between sata based ssd because they are just about all hitting sata max... it's your 4k and Iops, that make the difference.

 

[c627627]

The ADATA Ultimate SU800 was reviewed by you:
http://www.overclockers.com/adata-ultimate-su800-512gb-ssd-review/

So you are talking about performance being similar on SATA based SSDs. I think I understand you.
(However, I do not understand Evilsizer's post above at all, maybe he can clarify) but rather than performance, which you say is similar, isn't 3D TLC NAND much more reliable than alternatives and so because of 3D TLC NAND, the ADATA drive is "better" then others in the +/- $50 range? [Since ADATA's Mean Time Between Failures is 2 million hours]


So here's what ended up happening to me. I upgraded family's laptops from mechanical drives.
I bought two Toshiba Q300 Pro 128GB SSDs earlier in the year for $40. They were MLC.
I though I could do better on Black Friday. Up until today I was concerned that I could not.

Although the ADATA is 3D TLC NAND - and although it is 256GB instead of 128GB...
that Toshiba drive was MLC, not TLC like most affordable drives today.

So those MLC 128GB Toshibas vs 3D TLC NAND 256GB ADATAs... What is the real life scenario of pros and cons there when it comes to longevity and performance between the two?




Allegedly Toshiba MLC has a MTBF 1,500,000 hours vs ADATA 3D TLC NAND 2,000,000 hours.
How can MLC have a lower Mean Time Between Failures than TLC?

 

[EarthDog]

Not sure what he is saying. SU800 is a new drive... I doubt they would switch NAND on such a new drive. Typically a NAND switch warrants a model # switch (unless you are kingston, lol).

If I was you, I wouldn't bother swapping out for a 'better' drive. You won't notice a performamce increase, the warranty is the warranty. Seems like a lot of effort and a waste of cash for the negligible differences between the drives. You can easily find MTBF values and data written. But even on tlc drives, you are looking at 10GB+ /day writes for the warranted life of the ssd. YOU, much less your family, won't come close to those values. So in reality, there isn't much difference at all.

EDIT (to your edit after i posted....): Let's do the math... 1.5M hours ÷ 24 = 65,200 days = 171 years. It should be clear that TYPICAL NAND failure won't happen for the offer of the drive. You usually tend to lose a controller or something else.

For most, it's clearly not worth the effort or cost to swap for any reason.

As far as why, I can't tell you specifically, but there are other variables involved such as wear leveling algorithms, write amplifcation, etc, that would play a role in MTBF.

http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-slc-mlc-and-tlc-nand-flash.html

http://www.hardcoreware.net/mtbf-ssd-what-does-it-mean-for-you/

 

[c627627]

Laptops are identical and I have one single master image for all of them so swapping drives is a procedure that takes seconds, I reimage the laptops all the time anyway since no personal data is kept on OS partitions.

For learning discussion purposes, if we for a moment side step the actual reliability time value and just ask which is more reliable, and just say more vs. "how much" more, then I would ask about the terms MLC vs TLC again.

For others reading this, a quick review once again about SSD types:
• SLC NAND is the only type which meets all OEM application requirements with high levels of endurance, long life cycles, high reliability and optional wide temperature ranges. SLC (Single Level Cell) NAND was the original NAND architecture and still is made today due to its much higher endurance over the MLC and TLC NAND.

• The tradeoff for the lower cost of MLC (Multi Level Cell) NAND is less reliability and 10-20 times less the number of times you can erase/write to the cell.

• TLC (Tri Level Cell) NAND's tradeoff is significantly less reliability, even less than the MLC NAND.



So based on that, what is going on with this unusual 3D TLC NAND that ADATA has? It is not regular TLC.
So much so that it appears that 3D TLC NAND is more reliable than MLC... and so even after you posted that Mean Time Between Failures values will have no influence on reliability in real life, how can that possibly be that an MLC drive is expected to fail before 3D TLC NAND?

 

[EarthDog]

As I said, there is more to it than just the NAND type in play. What that is specifically, I am not sure. But how the controller interacts and uses the NAND play a role such as write amplification, erorr correction, and wear leveling.

It is still TLC.. there is 3D TLC and MLC NAND. Other brands have 3D TLC NAND as well (Intel, Samsung.. OCZ will).


http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1327904

TLC NAND holds 3-bits of information per cell. This means there is a need to distinguish between 8 voltage levels to decipher the information held, and as such, endurance is reduced even further. The P/E cycle of planar TLC NAND is in the 1K range, and the technology was met with the same skepticism that faced MLC NAND when it was first introduced in SSDs back in 2008.

At the same time, it was apparent that the NAND industry needed a breakthrough in order to continue down its aggressive cost curve. A physical limit was being reached in terms of being able to shrink the geometry further (inter-cell interference, as well as the reduced number of cells available to hold charge). This is where Samsung led the industry by introducing 3D NAND. With 3D NAND, instead of further squeezing cells closer together, the 3D CTF (Charge Trap Flash) cells are stacked vertically on top of each other to increase density. This is a paradigm shift in terms of scaling density and cell structure, and is what will best allow the industry to continue along the cost efficiency curve.

A key benefit of 3D NAND technology is that it can use a larger process geometry and still get better densities than planar NAND. Larger memory cells have the benefit of yielding faster, more reliable NAND. It also consumes less power, related to the time required to program the flash. 3D NAND is what allows TLC to perform at levels comparable to planar MLC.

 

[c627627]

I feel good about the controller and about buying this 3D TLC NAND SSD instead of any TLC on the market and I also feel good about replacing my existing MCL Toshiba with it and doubling the storage as a bonus.
Thank you.

 

[c627627]

I do have another question for you.
Tell me how does a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO non Pro compare to 512GB ADATA Ultimate SU800 3D TLC.
Controller, performance and most importantly reliability.

 

[dejo]

almost all of the TLC nand ssd's use some sort of caching to help cover the deficiency in write speeds. they will appear to be basically as fast as an mlc drive until you use up whatever cache they have available. once that happens they will show you their worst cae scenario, not that its a horrible thing- they just tend to be a good bit slower than mlc nand. for some they will never see that worst case scenario as they may not ever write several gb in short periods of time.
people are foaming out the mouth for the 960 evo m.2 drives to become available- yet their worst case is worse than most mlc sata drives on writes anyway. but they will still be wonderful drives most/if not all the time.

dont let tlc worry you too much- its just cheaper than mlc and offers capacity that we wouldnt have in mlc and nowhere near the value in $/gb

 

[c627627]

dejo where does 3D TLC fit into what you are saying, in comparison with regular TLC?

 

[Evilsizer]

well hasnt it been in some cases that some drives get released with X nand, it shows up in a review. then they switch it to something less stellar then what was in the review and people never know. thus giving them an inferior product sorta speak then what was reviewed.

 

[c627627]

Yes, however vendor purchase pages did not specifically state this information or else that would be fraud?
In case of 3D TLC, this information is stated front & center, look:



↑↑↑↑ Featuring advanced 3D NAND Flash for high reliability & durability

Therefore there is no question that 3D TLC and not TLC is the selling point of this drive.
I would still like to hear people like dejo expand on their points, to include 3D TLC and not just TLC as far as talking about functionality vs. MLC.

 

[dejo]

I think that 3D just stacks the wafers higher to gain performance- similar to having more wafers on past ssd's. The more scary issue is the size of the wafers! The lithography ( namometer size) has always dictated a lot to the write count. Im not sure how truly accurate write count is- early slc nand was rated at 100k writes per cell, early mlc was rated 10k writes per cell, early tlc was rated 3k per cell.
Bottom line to me is that I would wager that the cheapest ssd of any type of nand is more durable than the recent platter drives being made. And also substantially faster for most things.
I dont have the cash to spend to keep my backups totally on ssd's but do all I can to rely on ssd's for all the storage I can. I have had an ssd fail (everything will have an early failure) not long after opening the package- I was transferring data to one over usb. I have also had several platters die on me over the lasst couple years

 

[EarthDog]

I do have another question for you.
Tell me how does a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO non Pro compare to 512GB ADATA Ultimate SU800 3D TLC.
Controller, performance and most importantly reliability.

About the same...what is their warranty? Like nearly every single product out there, we do not have real life reliability statistics. You can swim in the minutia of it all, or look at the warranty and go from there. I think samsung does have a longer warranty.

I've posted these a few times... best we have. Use Google translate.
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/934-7/ssd.html

You should see what I'm saying in that, outside of a stray model or two, reliability for ssd's are all quite high. And while it's interesting to know these things and try to slice it up for better understanding, it's not going to get you much at all 'more reliable'.

well hasnt it been in some cases that some drives get released with X nand, it shows up in a review. then they switch it to something less stellar then what was in the review and people never know. thus giving them an inferior product sorta speak then what was reviewed.

Kingston did this once... with slower NAND. Not sure anyone else was caught doing so. If a change is made which affects performamce, it's a model switch typically.