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Would it really matter to buy a high performance SSD compared to a mediocre SSD?

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I'd rather buy an older, albeit more mature designs, than the latest/greatest. SSDs are dirt cheap. Being a manufacturers' beta tester isn't my "job".

Even on SSDs that were thought of being rock-solid, there's been bugs discovered. ie: the queued TRIM problems which caused such to be Linux kernel blacklisted on the Crucial drives.
 
VirtualLarry said:
The Ultra II is TLC, with an SLC-mode write cache feature.
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Correct, but its snappy compared to Crucials and other TLC's with inferior controllers like Phisons which are laggy, i mentioned it for its low price and snappier real world usage compared to inferior alternatives.
 
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Imho, low latency and steady state performance are the no.1 factor for a good ssd and not max read/write peaks. I would avoid anything Sandforce,Phison and Silicon Motion inside since they are laggy to current mature generation of controllers, only Samsung,Sandisk and OCZ have the ssd's that excel nowdays.
 
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Hi guys, just to give you an update, I bought a Samsung 750 EVO. The speed difference between a mechanical drive and an SSD in boot-up and application and file loading is worlds apart. SSD's are blazing fast. I am pretty amazed.
 
Battousai01 said:
Hi guys, just to give you an update, I bought a Samsung 750 EVO. The speed difference between a mechanical drive and an SSD in boot-up and application and file loading is worlds apart. SSD's are blazing fast. I am pretty amazed.
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You should've paid 10 bucks more for the 850evo which used v-nand. Since the 750 uses the same memory tech as the 840evo - planar tlc, it will face performance issues after a short while, which hasn't been given a good permanent fix by Samsung.
 
bononos said:
You should've paid 10 bucks more for the 850evo which used v-nand. Since the 750 uses the same memory tech as the 840evo - planar tlc, it will face performance issues after a short while, which hasn't been given a good permanent fix by Samsung.
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Source? Performance on my 840 evo has been consistent since their 2nd fix.
 
VirtualLarry said:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10189/the-ocz-trion-150-ssd-review/10

OCZ Trion 150 review on the main page. Looked halfway decent (for a dreaded TLC drive). Seemed like a viable budget option, and made me regret the purchase of my unopened BX200.
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The comments section 2nd page of the Adata SP550 review had a post+pic from someone "after just one month it started showing cell voltage drift and on the 2nd month it gotten worse"

showb1z said:
Source? Performance on my 840 evo has been consistent since their 2nd fix.
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At the cost of longevity and possibly performance. The 2nd fix is a brute force fix that rewrites data periodically.
 
Battousai01 said:
Hi guys, on a different note, have you got any real world information on how long SSD's last? I have just read an article and based on tests SSD's could "last a lifetime"?

http://betanews.com/2014/12/05/modern-ssds-can-last-a-lifetime/
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The tests Techreport performed was about writing to the SSDs until they stopped working and do not really test data retention.

And in the link you provided they discuss write cycles as if running out of write cycles is what is going to cause a SSD to die.
But that is just one factor and something that rarely happens to consumers.

There are other things that can put an SSD out of commision however like if the controller stops working, if it suffers power loss at the wrong time or firmware-related issues.

But regardless of how reliable any storage medium is you should backup anything you find important.


In summary: High endurance is not the same as long life and remember that backup is not made redundant by having an SSD.
 
Battousai01 said:
Hi guys, I am choosing between a Samsung EVO SSD and Kingston V300, I have read reviews and there are reviews saying that Kingston SSDs are not performing as fast as Samsung's but the question is, since they are both SSDs running SATA III, will it matter if I bought a Samsung EVO over a Kingston? will I notice a "noticeable" difference in performance when playing casual games and doing everyday work?
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For casual? Likely not. Of course that depends on the person.

For me the only difference between X25-M(SATA-II 300) and Intel SSD 530(SATA-III 600) is that the latter's awesome TRIM software. It makes a huge difference when you use the optimize feature if you don't use it for so long. Let's say 6 months. The former I can't do anything about that.

As a storage, I'd think even NVMe drives won't make a difference. You'd need a *real* leap, like an Optane DIMM(yes, I know its far ways off not even in planning in roadmaps).
 
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probably not with modern ssd's, but I do remember buying earlier 64gb crucial v4, it was kind of garbage, with 4k read/writes dropping to as low as 1mb/s. I've seen spinning disks that were faster just doing normal tasks like updating software was super slow.
 
Battousai01 said:
Hi guys, on a different note, have you got any real world information on how long SSD's last? I have just read an article and based on tests SSD's could "last a lifetime"?

http://betanews.com/2014/12/05/modern-ssds-can-last-a-lifetime/
Click to expand...

If you're asking about write endurance, the samsung 750evo specs says 35Tbw which would mean filling up your 128gb ssd about 300x.

By comparison an mlc ssd like the Transcend370 lists the endurance at 150Tbw so roughly over 4x greater endurance compared to the 750evo.
 
I heard a lot of hype about SSD's and in the end I got one. But I never noticed any speed difference between my HD and the SSD. It is like less than a second difference to the desktop.. Where I do notice a difference is when I have 500 windows open in my browser.. The HD takes a second to display while the SSD is instant. Not really counting towards anythign since it takes you more than a second to scrool over.. These days HD's are almost as fast as SSD's in most respects.. Although SSD's have sub m/s access times, HD's with 11m/s might seem slow but that only comes into play when dealling with a lot of small files.

Now some SSD's are badly made as can be seem with how samcung can beat most others using TLC which is like 3-5 times slower than MLC. So software and the CPU makes a huge difference to the drive performance. So buying a cheap SSD would be like going backwards to a fast HD as even the cheapest SSD is far more expensive than a HD. Same reason why small files are stored on a pen drive by readyboost.. No matter which drive you get, unless you have thousands of small cache files all over the place that is constantly being accessed you wont notice any difference. Even compiling code which requires a lot of dependencies would see small differences as the cache inside the operating system makes a huge difference to performance.

Ofcourse copying large movies between drives would be the other place you would see a difference.. HD's topping out at 230mbs while SSD's with 500mbs would see the time taken to copy large files cut in half..

So unless you have specific needs, like using it in a laptop since those laptop drives are very slow, using an SSD for most purposes is a waste. Considering many SSD's used in laptops in previous years were also slow. Just replacing the SSD there with a new one speeded up the system a lot. And replacing the slow HD would make the biggest difference but this is only for laptops.. Desktop HD's with 7200rpms and 11ms access times are plently fast for most systems.
 
AlienTech said:
I heard a lot of hype about SSD's and in the end I got one. But I never noticed any speed difference between my HD and the SSD.
Desktop HD's with 7200rpms and 11ms access times are plently fast for most systems
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May be true on some systems. I recently refurbished an E3300 (C2D dual-core 2.5Ghz) rig, that had a 500GB WD HDD that was new in 2011. Not a really slow drive, fairly speedy.

Well, I upgraded it to Win10, and added an SSD. I had to use a SATA6G PCI-E 2.0 x1 controller card (also for the AHCI support) to add a SATA port. The slot was only PCI-E 1.0, so it was limited to 250MB/sec bandwidth (both directions). The SSD doesn't seem to have quite the random-access "snap" that my other rigs that use an SSD have, when using a native chipset controller. In fact, it seemed to me that opening programs with the SSD, might have been slightly more laggy than the HDD was.

But things like Malwarebytes scans really benefit from the SSD. You can see that they are like 5x faster with an SSD. That's what really got me into SSDs in a big way, when I was actually able to quantify the performance increase like that.

I noticed something else. Having been used to a HDD's limitations, I would unconsciously limit my multi-tasking, as to not bog down the HDD.

Having a decent SSD installed into the system, you don't have to really worry about that anymore. You can burn a DVD, while copying ISOs over your LAN, and listen to streaming internet media, and web browse, all at the same time, without worrying about buffer underruns.
 
lyssword said:
probably not with modern ssd's, but I do remember buying earlier 64gb crucial v4, it was kind of garbage, with 4k read/writes dropping to as low as 1mb/s. I've seen spinning disks that were faster just doing normal tasks like updating software was super slow.
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That SSD might be from an era where there were still "unacceptable" MLC controllers. It was really Intel with X25-M that brought life to the performance SSD market.

I heard a lot of hype about SSD's and in the end I got one. But I never noticed any speed difference between my HD and the SSD. It is like less than a second difference to the desktop..
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Umm, I kinda felt disappointed when I spent $900 for an 80GB X25-M. But then I noticed that every other system was slow. For some people they notice that the system is radically faster, but some like me will notice it really only when we start using non-SSD systems.

In the long term though, SSD retains performance better. I also remember for some relatively rare situations it makes a huge difference. In Anno 1404, I saw it loading on my friends otherwise fast system but the loading was so slow. It would take 3-4 minutes and the developers must have known that since you can read the messages they put in the loading screen. With my X25-M system, it would load in 20-30 seconds, and I couldn't really read the messages.
 
i have two V300, one here and one in the OSX system i built, they are as fast as any other SSD system i put my hands on. the benchmark difference will be unnoticeable in real world applications.
 
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