Which inexpensive SSDs have very robust garbage collection for use without TRIM?

[Eug]

How do I tell which current drives have excellent garbage collection, to use with an external drive enclosure, without TRIM? I don't care about write amplification. 120 GB is all I'd need.

I have a very old 2010 era Kingston V+100 that does heavy garbage collection, but that drive is quite slow for an SSD, even by 2010 standards. Anything more recent that does robust garbage collection like that, but overall performs better?

Here is the Kingston V+100's garbage collection in action:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-100-review

 

[Billy Tallis]

What kind of enclosure are you planning to use, and for what kind of workload? Newer ones that support UASP can potentially allow TRIM commands to be properly translated and passed to the SSD.

 

[Eug]

It's for an old iMac that has only USB 2 and FireWire 800, and I don't think there is any UASP support. (I do have a UASP-enabled USB 3 drive dock, but IIRC using that dock didn't give me TRIM.) I tried running off USB 2 without UASP and it was slow. I ran it with FireWire 800, and there was no TRIM there either, but it still ran much faster than over USB 2. I realize FW800 is a bottleneck but I'd have to get a new drive so having faster random read/write speeds and good garbage collection will likely help somewhat. I'm not too concerned about sequential read/write speeds, since I'd be limited to around 80 MB/s or something like that anyway.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Old Intel S3700 SSDs are hitting the 5-6 year old mark, and therefore are getting retired from Storage Systems. Being Enterprise drives, they have very robust steady state operation since they were designed to survive being used in RAID arrays and other early-gen Storage Systems that made little use (or no use) of TRIM.

In the US, 200GB variants are available for about $75-$100.

 

[Eug]

Old Intel S3700 SSDs are hitting the 5-6 year old mark, and therefore are getting retired from Storage Systems. Being Enterprise drives, they have very robust steady state operation since they were designed to survive being used in RAID arrays and other early-gen Storage Systems that made little use (or no use) of TRIM.

In the US, 200GB variants are available for about $75-$100.

Interesting. Never knew that. I was aiming more for a new consumer drive, but that's something I'll keep in mind. Yes, I see on eBay the 200 GB versions go for about US$75+.

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

Quoting myself from a similar thread:

" OCZ Vector 180

SanDisk Extreme Pro

Also SandForce drives may perform well due to the compression, the Intel 730 probably being one of the better options.
Have no idea how well compression would work for your intended use however.

Some modern drives:

Crucial BX300

WD Blue 3D/SanDisk Ultra 3D but you might want to skip the 250GB since according to my tests it can be slow to recover.

SK Hynix SC-series since it uses MLC NAND (like the ones above) paired with a LAMD controller.
LAMD used to (still do?) make controllers for enterprise drives.

Not sure how well any of these perform without TRIM however so take my advice with a pinch of salt."

The suggestion from thecoolnessrunt to go with an enterprise drive like the Intel S3700 is a pretty good one though.

 

[Eug]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll stay away from SandForce though. I'm not a fan of SandForce in general. I've even had problems with my Intel 330, which is an Intel SandForce drive.

Otherwise all I can say is my Kingston V+100 performed about the same all the time (even without TRIM), which is to say that while it was way better than a hard drive, it was noticeably slower than other SSDs of its era. Note that drive has the exact same controller as Apple's OEM SSDs of the same period.

In contrast, the Samsung 850 EVO runs rings around the Kingston V+100... unless it's near full and has had recent file transfers. Then it can slow to a crawl, even slower than what you get with hard drives. These Samsungs really need to be over provisioned and need to have TRIM.