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jsimenhoff

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Jun 27, 2016
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We have a brand new giveaway lined up for the AnandTech community, courtesy of our friends at Toshiba.


We teamed up with Toshiba to bring you a giveaway for four brand new SSDs. Up for grabs this time are two units each of the external OCZ XS700 and the internal OCZ RC100. Boost your speed and power on the go and at home with these solid state drives. For your chance to win follow the instructions on the giveaway widget linked here.

No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Giveaway is only open to legal residents of the fifty (50) United States, and the District of Columbia, 18 or older. For a complete list of rules please see the Terms and Conditions on the Gleam Giveaway Widget. This giveaway is open until July 9, 2018.
 
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KillerBee

Golden Member
Jul 2, 2010
1,753
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Most important feature in an SSD is a good warranty - 5 or more years would be nice
 

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
16,220
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The most important feature in an SSD is that it works with your system. As I happen to have a M.2 2242 drive, and a motherboard that won't take any drive shorter than a 2280, I think I'll skip this giveaway.

Except maybe if somebody can vouch for the reliability of these adapters.
 

Paratus

Lifer
Jun 4, 2004
16,614
13,297
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The most important SSD feature for me is reliability. I love the speed of the new NVME drives as a boot disk, but the absolute last thing I want to do is rebuild the drive because the SSD failed.
 

schizoide

Junior Member
Sep 15, 2009
1
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Most important feature is reliability. I had a SSD fail in a disastrous way, instead of just stopping writes it stopped being recognized. Not fun.
 

crashtech

Lifer
Jan 4, 2013
10,521
2,111
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SSDs are so much faster than spinners, it's become painful to work on certain machines that have HHDs now.
 

HStewart

Junior Member
Jun 27, 2018
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1
I would say for this contest, SSD must have speed - as long as the speed does not effect the reliability of SSD - if so then speed is useless.
 

MrCommunistGen

Junior Member
Aug 4, 2009
8
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If I had to pick *only* one feature for an SSD it would be: Speed.

If not for being fast, a spinning drive wins on several metrics, at least on paper (capacity, price, and resultingly $/GB). But ultimately, the improved user experience from the speed of an SSD is what drives me to chose one. Even if the price is great, I'm not interested in a bottom-tier SSD.

But that doesn't mean that other factors aren't important. In no particular order:
  • Reliability&Longevity (separate from endurance) - If I deploy these in my work environment, I need to know they're not going to die and cause downtime. If something happens where a drive dies, a good warranty period AND GOOD WARRANTY SERVICE from the manufacturer are critical.
  • Capacity -- is it available in a large enough capacity for me (I'm generally buying 1TB or larger SSDs) is important.
  • Price/Value - $/GB and/or $/(GB+Performance)
  • Power Consumption/Efficiency - I have workstations where power consumption isn't important, but I also want to be able to put an SSD in a laptop and not have battery life decrease. Idle power needs to be competitive and perf/Watt is important under Active conditions. I realize that an SSD being suited for a workstation may be a *different model* than one suited for a laptop, but a company's portfolio needs to include both.
  • Endurance - Gone are the days of NAND (or rather NAND + controller combinations) with 10,000 P/E cycles -- but arguably for most non-Enterprise workloads that was never necessary. I feel like 1,000 P/E cycles is the absolute floor for anything I'm going to want to deploy for a consumer workload where the end-user is not tech savvy and is not managing how much they are writing to disk. Lower P/E (than 1,000), and they're no longer "deploy and forget".
I won't put this as one of my bullet points because it is much more of a secondary concern but I want to illustrate one of my only irritations with an SSD recently:

Performance when full - a bit of a corner case that I just ran into the other day while trying to transfer some Virtual Machines between 2 workstations. I was trying to copy a ~20GB VM to a 250GB SSD with ~34GB of free space, and ~8GB of manual overprovisioning (not part of any partition on the disk, but outside of whatever the drive was set up for out of the factory). About half way through the transfer, performance started to bottom out with the drive slowing to ~80MB/s with dips to 10/MB/s and even several-second long pauses with no transfers. At this point the drive was showing ~ 14GB free + the 8GB of overprovisioning. Clearly the controller had gotten backed into a corner and its garbage collection hadn't erased enough pages/blocks -- but this isn't a bottom-tier drive. I won't name names but the drive is NOT a DRAM-less model, and it isn't using slow planar-TLC. I know that performance can plummet when the drive gets full, but I was expecting more from this drive with this amount of free space supposedly remaining.

I actually ended up cancelling the transfer and switching to a different drive that I don't normally use for huge sequential transfers. I normally avoid it because its sequential write speeds aren't great, but I figured it wouldn't be worse than the terrible speeds I was getting on the other drive. Coincidentally, that drive is a Toshiba. It is an old 256GB Q Series Pro - which as far as I'm aware *is* DRAM-less - but at least for this example, the important factor was that the drive was virtually empty before I started the transfer.
 

MrCommunistGen

Junior Member
Aug 4, 2009
8
5
81
The most important feature in an SSD is that it works with your system. As I happen to have a M.2 2242 drive, and a motherboard that won't take any drive shorter than a 2280, I think I'll skip this giveaway.

Except maybe if somebody can vouch for the reliability of these adapters.

I've used a similar adapter to use a half-length mSATA drive in a standard sized mSATA slot. It is just a piece of formed metal and some screws so I wouldn't cite any "reliability" concerns. I pulled an old 24GB "cache drive" from a retired laptop and was just curious about using it.

I had previously pulled a half height mini-PCIe Wi-Fi card from a different retired laptop that actually had a full-length mini-PCIe slot for the Wi-Fi. As such it had a little formed piece of metal that it was using as an adapter to fit into the longer slot.

I attached the drive to the metal adapter, then placed that contraption into an mSATA to 2.5" adapter, and plugged *that* into a USB to SATA adapter cable -- all to play around with an old, slow 24GB SSD... yeah I think I have a problem.

I don't see a problem with those adapters, although they look like they're just stamped metal, and the ones I've worked with are a bit more "engineered" -- They look like they're stamped, cut, and folded in places.

Regardless, although it probably isn't *that* reassuring, mSATA and M.2 drives seem to actually work pretty well *without* being screwed down, as long as the drive is properly seated in the slot. Of course they stay in the slot a lot better when they're screwed down... but I digress.

TL;DR
I don't see a problem with those adapters.
 

neon

Junior Member
Jun 19, 2001
2
0
66
My favorite SSD feature is the speedvenience. I had to make that word up.
 
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