Discussion "Best SSDs: Q3 2019" - Anandtech

[UsandThem]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds

Maybe I am in the minority, but does anyone else not view Silicon Power as a "high-end" drive / brand? Silicon Power seems to have increased their warranty on some of their drives from 3 years to 5 years (with no TBW given), but I would personally place them in the 3rd tier of SSD storage (along with companies like Sabrent, Inland, etc).

They list the Silicon Power P34A80 1TB for $110 as the choice in the high-end NVMe category. While it's not the fastest drive out there it is not far off from drives like the 970 EVO Plus, WD Black SN750, and Adata SX 8200 PRO. However, I see brands like Intel, WD, and Samsung as being "high-end" products, in which you expect to pay a premium for. I would put this Silicon Power drive in the "entry-level" category, along with drives like the HP EX920, BPX PRO, and Intel 660P.

Am I way off in the way I look at Silicon Power?

 

[Billy Tallis]

I put the Silicon Power drive and other Phison E12 and SM2262(EN) drives in the high-end category because they offer high-end performance. They use 8-channel controllers with four PCIe lanes and full-size DRAM buffers. They can saturate PCIe 3 x4 with sequential transfers and have great random IO performance especially when operating out of the SLC cache. The performance differences between such drives and the fastest storage that money can buy are imperceptible on most real-world workloads.

The point of the buyers guides is not to tell people what's the most expensive product they could waste their money on. The point is to make reasonable recommendations that work for a broad audience. And for most consumers—even those who consider themselves power users—a cheaper 8-channel/4-lane TLC drive will work just as well as an overpriced Samsung.

The entry-level NVMe category is for products that have meaningful functional limitations: QLC instead of TLC, fewer PCIe lanes, little or no DRAM, etc. With few exceptions, the performance gap between those drives and what I call high-end are much larger than the gap between a Phison E12 and a Samsung 970.

I think many commenters put far too much emphasis on brand. Your inclusion of Intel in your notion of "high-end" makes little sense when their fastest consumer SSD uses the same hardware as the HP EX920 you consider "entry-level". Yes, Intel's QA is probably a bit better than the HP ODM's QA. But I've had the same number of drive failures from each. The difference isn't enough to warrant treating those drives as belonging to entirely different market segments. The companies that charge a premium don't necessarily deserve it.

 

[UsandThem]

The difference isn't enough to warrant treating those drives as belonging to entirely different market segments. The companies that charge a premium don't necessarily deserve it.

I admit, I can't find any argument against anything you wrote.

At this point in time with all the various companies who offer SSDs, there are many great choices. I've seen SSDs from the usual players (Samsung, Crucial, Intel, WD, etc), but I've also seen drives (at least branded) from non-traditional storage companies such as Hyundai, Kodak, Pioneer, Gigabyte, etc.

I also agree that there is not much performance difference between less expensive drives like the Adata SX8200 PRO, HP EX920, and Silicon Power compared to the "premium" drives like the Samsung 970 EVO and WD SN750. Back when NVMe drives first hit the consumer market, there was a noticeable difference between the top performing drives and everyone else, but that's not the case anymore.

It really just comes down to the perception of the brands. Non-enthusiasts know names like Samsung, Intel, WD, and Seagate. However, many of the "Average Joe's" probably aren't familiar with brands like Silicon Power, MyDigitalSSD, Mushkin, SK Hynix, Adata (or XPG), Sabrent, etc. Now that Silicon Power has increased their warranty (at least for the drive recommended in the article) from 3 years to 5 years, that helps with perception that their drives are good quality. I personally have a kind of a mental block on going with any SSD that doesn't feature at least a 5 year warranty (which is a kind of the standard between "good" drives and budget offerings).

Brands like Samsung and Intel just have a longer history of producing premium SSDs, as they were among the first to enter that market. While the performance difference is little to none anymore, there is an extra "value" in having a strong brand recognition.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've had a client with an Adata SX6000 (original, not SX6000 "Lite", with the updated controller), and that failed in under a year, and I've read one other account here on the forums, of an SX8200 not playing well with their motherboard, and I've personally had an SX6000 have issues with "disappearing", on a DeskMini (that later received firmware updates, specifically mentioning the controller on that SSD, so it might not have been that SSDs fault in particular.)

Had good luck thus far with Patriot Scorch M.2 NVMe (even though they are PCI-E x2, which is perfect for Athlon 200GE rigs), and Intel 660p, and the predecessor 600p (although that one was at times, slower than a good SATA SSD, it was a smaller size, and only did like 800MB/sec sequential, hardly better than SATA.)

 

[UsandThem]

Focusing on current NVMe (TLC) drives, the options for 1TB "performance-focused" from the cheapest to highest (Amazon prices) are:

Inland Premium $108 / 3 year warranty
Sabrent Rocket $110 / 5 year warranty
Silicon Power P34A80 / $115 / 5 year warranty
Adata SX8200 PRO / $125 / 5 year warranty
Corsair MP510 / $125 / 5 year warranty
HP EX950 / $135 / 5 year warranty
WD SN750 / $198 / 5 year warranty
Samsung 970 EVO Plus / $219 / 5 year warranty

Of course there are other options out there, but these choices cover most of the current market. Instead of one company being so much better than the rest (like Samsung was in the past), the focus now would be on things like brand reputation, warranty length, and support. Samsung has a great track record in SSDs, but I'm not sure that aspect commands such a price premium over competitive products in today's market.

There are pros and cons on several of the brands above. Corsair is a well-known brand, but historically don't release any firmware updates for their drives. WD also doesn't release any performance related firmware updates (they just release a new drive). HP simply licenses their name to Multipointe (who makes them and handles any support / warranties). Finally, Sabrent is a new entrant in the SSD market, so there isn't enough info about them on how their product support is.

So honestly, now that performance is so good amongst all the brands, and there's not much price difference between 6 of the 8 drives, the phrase "high-end" would shift over to something like Intel Optane and Samsung 970 PRO? NVMe drives are also priced very similar to SATA SSDs now, so maybe PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives are the new "mid-range"?

 

[Billy Tallis]

We might be getting close to where the consumer NVMe market can be split into three tiers. If I had to do so with the current state of the market, I'd define the "low-end" segment as the stuff that's at rough price parity with SATA, the "high-end" as the 4-lane/8-channel/full-DRAM controllers with TLC, and put the more premium stuff into something like an "exotic" category: the re-badged enterprise drives and Samsung MLC drives. That last segment is where you have trouble finding the full range of capacities, prices are clearly higher, and the performance benefit is nil for most non-benchmark workloads. In short, I wouldn't recommend anything in that category to anyone who cares about price; much like how I hardly ever considered a low-end NVMe drive to be reasonable until the Intel 660p came along.

In order for me to be willing to move the "high-end" label up to cover Optane and 970 PROs, I would need to see stuff in that category start offering real benefits to some widespread workloads. Currently, justifying the purchase of an Optane or MLC drive requires careful selection of the criteria by which you judge performance, or else the comparison against a good TLC drive is a wash.Otherwise, I think the "high-end" label would be implying a much broader audience than those drives deserve at the moment. I see them as having less to recommend them than they typical GeForce Titan product.