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  • prime2515103 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Is it just me or are SSD review getting really boring? Every time I see a new one I think, "Maybe something new and exciting this time..." but it never happens. I think SATA needs to be put to rest.
  • piroroadkill - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Yeah, SATA3 is making everything boring as hell now.
  • ddriver - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    That's a limiting factor only on sequential access. There is still huge potential to be harnessed for random access, but nobody seems to be in a hurry to boost IOPS.
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    SATA, or more accurately AHCI, is the limit when it comes to IOPS/latency.
  • cm2187 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link

    I can only talk for myself but personally I could use more size than speed. There is very little of what I do that would give me a different experience at twice the speed of the current SSD specs. But give me a 4TB SSD as cheap as 6TB HDD are today and now I can replace all these spinning disks.
  • 0ldman79 - Wednesday, March 4, 2015 - link

    Agreed.

    I might keep a couple of mechanical drives, but I'd love for the price to be closer to the mechanical drives for the capacity.

    Too bad that's not the way our market works in much of anything these days.
  • Solandri - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    PCIe actually doesn't make that big a difference. Your perception of how fast/slow things are is in terms of seconds you have to wait. These benchmarks are in MB/s which is the inverse of your perception. If you plot these benchmarks correctly in sec/MB, all these SSDs are pretty much the same, and the PCIe SSDs only give you a small fraction of the speedup you got going from SATA2 to SATA3. e.g. Imagine you need to read 1000 MB.

    10 sec = 100 MB/s HDD
    4 sec = 250 MB/s SATA2 SSD (6 sec improvement)
    2 sec = 500 MB/s SATA 3 SSD (2 sec improvement)
    1.25 sec = 800 MB/s PCIe SSD (0.75 sec improvement)
  • nathanddrews - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    This is very true, but doesn't make me want it less. :-D

    What kills me is the lack of "affordable" 2TB+ drives. How is that we go from $400 for 1TB in a 2.5" drive to $1,500-$4,000 for 2TB? I expected that all these die shrinks and 3D technologies would have made 2TB+ SSDs possible in the ~$700-$900 space, but there's nothing to buy! FFS, what gives?
  • DanNeely - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    It's a giant game of chicken, and no one wants to be the first to kick over the enterprisy pricing gravy train. We saw the same thing a few years ago when 512TB drives started at $350 but the cheapest 1TB ones were well north of $1k.

    At the risk of sounding overly cynical; I suspect the first vendor to blink will be whoever is first to either get the higher nand density or the 32 chip controller needed to make a 4TB flash drive in a 2.5" form factor.
  • Cogman - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Mostly it comes down to demand. Nobody is really demanding 2TB SSD drives. As a result, there is little competition and little incentive to make a $800 drive (even though it is totally feasible).
  • nathanddrews - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    That didn't stop them from releasing 1TB SSDs for $800, which have conveniently come down...
  • rahuldesai1987 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Samsung 860 Evo is likely to be 2TB.
  • Christopher1 - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link

    Who would need all that space on an SSD save an uber-gamer? I personally put an SSD in my laptop but I download and store all my stuff to an external hard drive that is a USB 3 spinny disk.
  • Greg100 - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    What??? I am still waiting for Samsung PM863 - 3.84TB capacity in 2.5" form factor! The price doesn't matter. I will buy two or three of them.
  • Levish - Thursday, January 14, 2016 - link

    Mostly it comes down to supply vs demand, imagine if for example Samsung released a Hypothetical 1TB EVO SATA 6Gbps at $50 - $100 and a pro at $125 - $150 pretty much no one else would sell a consumer / oem SSD.

    What kills me is the pricing difference of M.2 NVMe disks, other than the initial R&D to produce they should be way cheaper than SATA varieties
  • Tom Womack - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    1TB is enough for most laptops, and few cases are short enough of space or SATA ports that you can't strap together two 1TB drives in RAID0, so there's very little pressure to produce 2TB drives at less than twice the price of 1TB drives; if you want 4TB of SSD tomorrow you can buy four drives and fiddle around a little with Molex-to-SATA-passthrough power adaptors.
  • Cpt. Obvious - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    There's also a big push for cloud services. Local storage is often seen as unreliable and inconvenient, especially when the user is supposed to be using several platforms to access the same data. And let's be honest, the cloud services are very convenient, when they work.

    The big problem with cloud storage, in my opinion at least, is bandwidth. For most people It's simply not efficient to work with large volumes of data over the internet. Even many popular games are running into several gigabytes. Recently I reinstalled a game that's a few years old, Borderlands, and the download from Steam was over 12GB. That's not something I'd like to run from a cloud storage. But even then I could fit 80 games of this size on a one TB SSD.

    Movies is another subject. A 1080p movie stored in a good quality can be about 20 - 25 GB, so that 1TB drive could house about 40 of these. However movies are generally read sequentially, and they don't need a very high transfer rate so they are prime candidates for storing on cheap HDD's in a NAS and / or using cloud storage.

    So where is the multi TB SSD demand in the consumer market today? I think 4K video editing is one of the few cases where consumers may need multi TB SSD's. Note that I say "need" not "want", because I for one sure "want" as large a SSD as I can get for a reasonable price. I might not fill it up, but I still want it...

    When it comes to professional use things are a lot different. If you work with huge sets of data you will need both large and fast storage. But then again that is already available, though at prices thats out of range for most end users.
  • cm2187 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link

    Particularly upload bandwidth. In my country most optic fibre providers only have upload speeds a tenth of the download speed. Most pictures today are 2-6MB out of the camera (mobile to DSLR). A photo roll from a birthday or a trip can be pretty long to upload. And we are not even talking audio or video.

    Plus there is the trust issue. Do you really want to upload all your private life to the internet?
  • Christopher1 - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link

    Actually, a 1080p in H.265 format (the one that people are switching to) should be only 1GB, tops for a two-hour movie in 23.9-24 fps at a pretty high Kbps.
    Yes, movies are usually read sequentially but the problem is that many drives do not store data sequentially.
    Every single time I download a TV show, I have to defrag the hard drive or the file itself to get it sequential on a spinny disk hard drive and play it's best.
  • Christopher1 - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link

    Local storage is one of the most reliable things in the world today, especially since a lot of cloud hosters are now doing the insanity of removing anything that is 'flagged' by their systems as 'possibly pirated'. I just would not trust them with my data.
  • Samus - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    The other performance "limitation" is program/file demands. The vast majority of files, program data, video files and game data are under 5000MB in size...so the difference between a 500MB/sec and a 1000MB/sec drive is a matter of seconds and sometimes milliseconds if reading files <1000MB.

    The spotlight for my SSD is loading Battlefield 4 levels. I noticed no difference when going from a SATA3 drive to an M2 PCIe drive. The limitation is somewhere else, possibly my 2 year old Xeon CPU? Who knows. But the only place I notice a difference is when unRARing lots of huge files. Since Windows 8.1 64-bit only loads about 800MB of data from the drive during boot (that's what I measured in NAND reads between reboots) again, the difference between a 500MB/sec and 1000MB/sec drive is virtually nothing for everyday computing.

    The demand will eventually come for faster SSD's in the consumer space (they're already in the enterprise space, they have been for years) but it probably won't come from Microsoft as their OS's are leaner and leaner every generation. Windows 8 had lower system requirements than Windows 7, and Windows 7 had lower system requirements than Vista. And Windows 10 will run on virtually anything, even Intel's Quark-based SoC dev platform (400MHz P55C "Pentium 3" based)
  • Uplink10 - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link

    It is true Windows 8 has lower system requirements but I tested latest Windows 8.1 with updates and Windows 7 SP1 with updates and figured out that Windows 8.1 is more RAM hungry, I switched to Windows 8.1 and I keep getting messages about closing applications because I am too low on RAM. The real potential of SSD over HDD is random writing/reading not sequential. For me 6 Gbit/s sequential bandwidth is enough because I care about random write/read which doesn`t come close to 6 Gbit/s.
  • Christopher1 - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link

    One of your applications must be seriously RAM-hungry then. I have 4 or 5 browsers open and a few other programs at the same time, with page file turned off on a 8GB of RAM system and I never have it squawk about needing more RAM.
    Now, when I open a serious game like Arkham City, THEN it starts squawking from time to time because AAA-games are seriously RAM-hungry.
  • Sabresiberian - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    You make a very good point Solandri, but the limit of the PCIe interface is far higher than the 800 MB/s figure you used; that is pretty much a bottom-end stat. Also, NVMe>AHCI. :)
  • Solandri - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    Mathematically, PCIe can *never* speed things up more than the jump from SATA2 to SATA3. If you look carefully at the chart I made, going from SATA2 to SATA3 sped the 1GB read by 2 sec (from 4 sec to 2 sec).

    Since the total read time over SATA3 is already 2 sec, the only way to increase read speed by another 2 sec is to go up to infinite MB/s. Even if you used the 8 GB/s limit of PCIe x16, the read time would be 0.125 sec, or a 1.875 sec speedup. Less than the 2 sec you spend things up going from SATA2 to SATA3.

    The vast majority of the speed gains that can be gotten from SSDs (with respect to read/writes which benefit from PCIe) have already been gotten. Further improvements will be nice, but never impact computing to the degree that the initial SATA SSDs did. Read my comment to bug77 below for where we should be looking for significant speed gains next.
  • Christopher1 - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link

    Actually, there is way to speed up things: By making a architecture that can handle bigger 'chunks' of data at a time. As games and other things are getting bigger, you need to load more data at a time in a shorter period. Therefore, increasing the rate at which data from the hard drive can get to RAM is the bottleneck and there can be improvements in that.
    Either by pre-loading data to RAM (inefficient) or by making it so that data can get from the hard drive/SSD drive to the RAM faster when needed/called.
  • bug77 - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    And that's not even the main advantage of SSDs. The thing the user notices the most is the nearly non-existent seek time. But you get that even from first generation of SSDs.
    As a refresher, try to remember what happened when you started multiple, parallel, copy operations on a single HDD: the transfer rate took a serious nose-dive and it was all because of the seek time.
  • Tom Womack - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    This. And it has wonderful second-order consequences; for example, you can still use your computer while it's doing a backup, so it's reasonable to schedule extremely frequent backups to hard disc.
  • Solandri - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    Yup, exactly this. Non-queued 4k read/writes are still mired around 30-70 MB/s due to limitations in seek time (generally imposed by file system overhead). While this is nearly two orders of magnitude faster than HDDs, it's still short of the SATA3 limit by an order of magnitude. So there's still a lot of improvement (time savings) which can be made on this front.

    Another way to think of it is that these 4k read/writes impact the time you spend waiting a *lot* more than the sequential read/writes. Again, because MB/s is the inverse of time you wait, the bigger MB/s figures matter less, the smaller MB/s figures matter more. Precisely the opposite of what MB/s seems to imply. e.g. If you need to read 1000 MB of sequential data + 1000 MB of 4k files over SATA3:

    2 sec = 1000 MB of sequential data @ 500 MB/s
    20 sec = 1000 MB of 4k data @ 50 MB/s

    So 90% of the total read time depends on the 4k read speed, only 10% depends on the peak sequential read everyone obsesses over. If you want a "fast" SSD, concentrate on getting a drive whose *smallest* MB/s figures (almost always the 4k speeds) are higher than the competition's.
  • Christopher1 - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link

    SATA3 does cause a little bit of an issue. It is the limiting factor on most drives now, no matter how much faster you make your driver, it's speed limitations bottleneck your hard drive. That is why M.2 is becoming so popular.
  • nandnandnand - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    I get excited over Samsung/V-NAND SSD reviews. But it hasn't resulted in a steep price drop yet
  • Uplink10 - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link

    That is because SSD`s are overpriced and people should avoid buying them because they are only giving fuel to greedy companies. I am still using 2.5" HDD in my laptop.
  • Kristian Vättö - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link

    The goal of a company is to generate profit for its shareholders, not to give away free stuff to random consumers. HDD companies aren't any different, the flood case is a good example of their greed.
  • Uplink10 - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link

    Yes but here we have a choice, if you aren`t intensive (power) user I suggest you stick to HDD for a while, while SSD`s lose price. But if you are power user and need SSD for virtualization (I try to hold back from buying one) I guess you should buy the cheapest one one there is (MX100) because if you really think about costlier SSD`s, Samsung 850 Pro is enterprise and 850 Evo is a consumer disc. Will you really have an SDD 10 years in a PC, probably not.
  • eanazag - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    I won't get excited again until NVMe/SATA Express starts to really take flight. I looked through the article just so I know the pitfalls of the drive and the controller. 450MB-550MBps speed drives are all over the place. Differentiation has to come from somewhere else.
  • Calista - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    Has it not more to do with the quick improvement of SSD drives which have removed one of the biggest bottlenecks, leaving the rest of the components to play catch-up. To explain, for literally 99.9 percent of computer users any half-decent SSD is more than speedy enough. Not so with any other component. A basic CPU will create situations with slowdowns from time to time, a basic GPU will prevent most modern games from running even if we drop the resolution and quality a lot, a basic WiFi chip will take a lot of time for basic operations, like say copying a gig of data.

    But for most people most of the time the slowdown caused by a slow SSD will be in the seconds range, i.e. Word may take 3 instead of 1 second to start, to reboot will take 20 instead of 10 seconds. Yeah, it all add up. But it's still just a few extra seconds during a normal day. Using an old Latitude E4200 its SSD drive is really slow by todays standards, like r/w performance in the 80-100 MB/s range. But while it feels slower than say my Samsung 840 it's really not that big of a difference, this despite the latter being like five times as fast.
  • antialienado - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    Somebody needs to test, so we know for good what is the best choice.

    But you are right. This is getting boring.

    It would be more interesting if Anadtech were testing the drives in the various RAID available, including the cheapest ones.

    I have an X58 system. It only supports SATA II.
    I would like to know the difference in performance between a BIOS RAID 0, a SATA 3 expansion card, a PCI-E SSD, and have it in a XY chart of performance vs cost.

    That would be far more interesting and useful.
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    Currently we don't have the manpower to do that. I'm handling all SSDs on my own and I already have more drives to review than I can possibly do. The topics you mentioned are all interesting, but require a lot of work because it's not enough to test just one motherboard/chipset and SATA 6Gbps expansion card. Once you start including a handful of each the workload increases exponentially and the testing alone would take a couple of weeks, assuming there are no issues.

    I agree that the current state of SSD market isn't all that interesting but trust me, it's going to get a lot more interesting in H2 when PCIe and NVMe make a big entry to the market.
  • HisDivineOrder - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    SSD's are boring because the best and worst SSD's are miles ahead of HD's in terms of the experience provided.

    The most important factor with a SSD is PRICE AND/OR SIZE (but definitely not speed) followed by warranty.

    That's why companies continue to slowly get dragged down to where pricing should have been FIVE years ago.
  • Uplink10 - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link

    I it hate when new technologies are overpriced. Same thing is happening with BD-R blank discs, they are costlier in terms of capacity/price than HDDs.
  • Shadowmaster625 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link

    That's because SSDs are old and antiquated. NAND should be right on the DIMMs with DRAM, sharing the same bus, the same memory controller, as much of the same hardware as possbile. It should have started 3 years ago and by now we should have had 4GB DRAM + 64GB NAND DIMMs for $120 a pair and 8GB + 128GB for $200 a pair.
  • akrobet - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    What is holding back the adoption of NVMe M.2 drives?
  • AnnihilatorX - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    I think: Lack of Chipset support, require most recent OSes, lack of boot support, competing standards -> general consumer confusion (SATA Express vs M.2), Rarity of motherboards with M.2, cost.

    There is not one specific reason holding back, but I guess you can just say with all new tech adoption will be low at first, and this would be the explanation.
  • galta - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    I boot with my Plextor M.2
  • dgingeri - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    The M6e doesn't do NVMe. It's AHCI, which restricts performance somewhat.
  • BillyONeal - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    The article says that you don't think the 850 EVO is worth 60 dollars more; but in the list they're the same price. Typo?
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Read the full sentence.

    "That said, if the prices go up to $450 again, the Reactor will become a better choice because despite the performance and features I don't find the 850 EVO to be worth $60 more."
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    I also edited it to be more clear now.
  • BillyONeal - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Makes sense. Thanks!
  • Andy Chow - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    A 1TB drive with 144 TB endurance? No thanks!
  • Hulk - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    When it's written as 131GB writes/day for 3 years it seems like more than enough.
    But cell endurance of 144 writes seems really, really low.
  • hojnikb - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    It doesnt work like that. 144TB for 1TB doesn't translate to 144 p/e flash. You have to factor in write amplification, which can be more than 1 on controller like this.
    Also conservative rating is nothing new with budget driver.
  • cm2187 - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link

    Stupid question: has anyone any experience with SSD reliability over time. I.e. is it reliable to store static data 3-5y+? Or does the 3y (or 5y) guarantee also means the data should be migrated out after that period even if the number of writes has been low?
  • hojnikb - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Its just a conservative rating for warranty purposes. Besides, other value drives are no better at this (evo is only "good" for 150TB).

    In reality, drives typically last many times the rated endurance.
  • DanNeely - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    More importantly, it's set low to scare off enterprise customers who'd subject the drive to an order of magnitude more IO.
  • toyotabedzrock - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    So if the endurance is 144TB on a 1TB drive, they are predicting the nand can only take 144 writes?

    That is a bit scary for even home use. I wouldn't trust my data to that.
  • zepi - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    There is not a single medium or drive out there that you should trust your data on. Only thing you can trust is redundancy.
  • hojnikb - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    No. Read my post above ^^
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    the 512GB crusial mx 100 endurance is only 72TB, yet people dont seem to be complaining. besides, as typical day to day use only accounts for maybe ~10GB or writes(3.65TB a year), the 144TB endurance will last far longer than the machine it is put in.
  • Murloc - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    yeah problem is that until it's broken, I'll keep moving it on to the next machine.
    But I write about 1 GB/week to the SSD so I should be safe, unless windows does a lot of that in the background, I don't know, I just deactivated all the bad stuff I read about.
  • Andy Chow - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    I just checked, my Vertex 4, 256 GB, has 72 TB of Writes from host (Raw value 36277402795) after a little more than 2 years (18461 hours) of use. I kind of expect it to die around the 350 TB mark, so I'm not that concerned. But with this drive I would be. I guess it's based on personal use.
  • Mark_gb - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    It is still Feb 9, 2015, and the price comparision chart shows this new Mushkin and a Samsung 850 EVO both at $390. Mushkin used to be a great memory OEM, but you don't hear much from them anymore. If the Mushkin was $60 cheaper, I would definately buy it. But with the two both at the same price, I would go with Samsung again. Never lost a bit, and it comes with the Samsung Magician toolbox.
  • Powerlurker - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link

    They still make memory. The problem is that there's much less justification to buy premium RAM nowadays.
  • KAlmquist - Saturday, February 14, 2015 - link

    The prices are only the same if you buy from Amazon. Newegg prices (including shipping) are $361 for the Mushkin drive and $404 for the Samsung 850 EVO.
  • djvita - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Speaking of SSD reviews, now I want to see this one!

    Crucial MX200 1TB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive - CT1000MX200SSD1
    Sequential reads/writes up to 555 / 500 MB/s on all file types
    Random reads/writes up to 100k / 87k IOPS on all file types Up to 5x more endurance and over 2x more energy efficient than a typical client SSD
    **Dynamic Write Acceleration delivers faster saves and file transfers** (might help in destroyer benchmark)
    Includes spacer for 9.5mm applications
    $446

    Just released on Amazon.
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    I will be getting my MX200 samples this week, so the review will come in the next few weeks.
  • rahuldesai1987 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Great! Keep coming up with the reviews.
  • fastasleep - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    I just ordered this one to put in my 2011 MacBook Pro optical drive bay, alongside an M550 boot drive. Any reason I might want to switch them and put the Mushkin drive as the main boot drive? I'm going to move my iTunes library and video editing scratch disk to the secondary drive and thought the power saving features of the Mushkin would make sense for a secondary drive that's not accessed as often, and the M550 looks like it has higher IOPS and slightly faster sequential read, but slower sequential write (so, a wash there?). Is there a clear choice here for a primary and secondary drive? (and yes the optibay is sata3 - I believe some models that year were still sata2)
  • gcb - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link

    The only drive in the same price range is the Crucial M500 960GB for $300, and it wasn't included in the comparisson?!!?

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