"Cheap" 2TB SSD?

I know cheap and 2TB SSD arent exactly a logical sentence but heres my scenario.

So, in the Ranger we have an HDD interposer cable that can replace the ODD interposer cable if you decide to use an HDD instead of the ODD.

I had been using the 5TB drive with this cable however, out of no where it seemingly died on me. It doesnt work with other drives and such anymore or at least Windows wont boot. I have purchased another one but I dont want to simply repeat the same scenario if the 5TB drive is going to kill the cable again. The 5TB drive uses more amperage than the average drive (.855ma vs .500ma) so my thought is the cable may not be able to handle the power draw.

So to combat this I will hook up the 5TB drive to the internal USB hub, but then I will need something to populate the now empty SATA input. I never had a large SSD before and thought this may be the opportunity to get one.

I am wanting to keep it as close to 250 as possible (or below). So I have seen that Micron and ADATA SU800 are pretty cheap. Are these bad drives or are these kind of drives satisfactory?

SU800
https://www.ebay.com/itm/ADATA-Ulti...h=item2873e252be:g:A58AAOSwpLdcPjfe:rk:3:pf:0

Micron
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Micron-2TB...h=item3d67f0c510:g:vJQAAOSwdIFbEMF-:rk:1:pf:0

Thanks for the insight everyone

 

Take the Micron, I have 2 of them and working perfectly.

 

Take the micron enterprise SSD just like Dr. AMK said. These sell like hotcakes in enterprise laptops. They're included in Precision,Thinkpads as SATA class 50 SSD.

 

Yep I have the Micron 1100 and it works great.

 

+1 for Micron.

 

If you have a pcie port, then look at intels 660p as it will perform far better then the micron.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16820167461

However if you intend on doing large writing, it will hit a snag and do that slowly.

 

No pcie slot in the Ranger.

Also I noticed that the Micron drive uses 1.7amps which is over double the 5TB drive I have.

I may to use my sata extension cable after all..

 

I've always wondered about using a MPCIE to M.2, and if that would work. Might have to try in my M6700, it's got 3 of them

 

If it's like the m4600 at all then it just won't post but you won't know without trying I guess lol

 

@Grant B Gibson you can use these adapters for anything but storage - M6700 doesn't support NVME, neither does M4600.

 

I was speaking more to sata in general, never mind nvme. Even with USB interface still probably won't work.

 

What kind of read/write speeds are you guys getting on the Micron 1100 ?

I was put off a little by the lower than average rated life time and 1 year warranty. Ideally I would like to keep the SSD for as long as it will last.

The SU800 2TB has a significantly higher rating for endurance compared to the Micron 1100 and is faster while being cheaper.

That being said, though not much reviews can be found for the 2TB variant other models had a weird "Flushing" issue with the writes. As someone who plans to use this mainly for games and messing around in UE4 engine in the near future, would this be a crippling issue?

I plan to purchase a 1TB 860 EVO mSATA to replace the 256GB Skhynix SSD I have as my OS drive as well, and will put that into an enclosure to be reinstalled into my chassis somehow.

 

@TheReciever I'd personally stay away from Adata regardless. Read some terrible feedback about the company and their warranty policies in particular back in the day, that completely ruined their brand image for me. Even using a good controller and reasonable quality NAND in their design, they can (and probably will!) screw up the firmware; I believe entry enterprise Micron 1100 will be much more reliable.

 

Um. A tad surprised that 855ma could burn out a cable. Absolutely sure that no system designed to handle 500ma will have a simple cable that will overheat to the point of failure at 850ma.

It just doesn't seem like the likely scenario. The cable could be mechanically broken. The 5TB drive could have shorted internally and be ready to destroy anything it is attached to. The power chain leading up to the cable could be dead because a 855ma draw could certainly kill one that was not designed for the job. There could be a fault just about anywhere.

So first thing get technical support to confirm the HDD was outside designed limits. Next figure out how to test the components in the chain without risking too much additional damage.

 

Would you mind submitting a screenshot of your 1100?

I see lots of screens of that drive with reads in the 300MB/s

Just seems a little low

Also the 5TB drive is hooked up now with a new cable and has been running for about a month no issue thus far (knock on wood)

Technical Support? This is Seagate lol

 

Bit confused. Screenshot? I don't have a 1100.

Wasn't suggesting suggesting technical support for a Seagate. It is whatever was powering it that was in question.

Anyway, glad to hear your 5tb is gainfully employed. So presumably you don't want it to go back regardless.
We can also reasonably assume that whatever went wrong won't damage the 5tb's replacement. That's good.
Have you confirmed that the empty sata input is now in working order with any sort of drive?

 

I saw your post before I submitted the inquiry to @Starlight5 so just threw in a response to yours at the end, no worries though. Also wouldnt get tech support for the machine powering it, its 6 years old now.

Yeah I confirmed that any other drive would still prevent the laptop from booting into windows, just loads forever never making it to desktop. I took the cable out and plugged the drive via usb port and booted just fine. The cable decided to kick the bucket I guess.

I replaced the cable some time last month.

Also I found some more screenshots of the 1100 and it looks to be comparable to the 850 EVO, so I will keep my ear to the ground for one in the near future and a 1TB 860 EVO mSATA (OS).

 

The Micron 1100 is rebranded MX300, which was a disappointing drive. It makes no sense when a 2TB WD Blue / Sandisk Ultra 3D (which is in the S-tier of mainstream SATA SSDs along with the MX500 and 860 EVO) is now $250.

 

Well the TheReciever has some decent kit there. It would be sad to mate it with junk.
Popped into this thread because I bought a 2tb SSD a few days ago and had to do the research.

Of the second tier brands the Crucial MX500 stood out. It was what I chose in the end but mostly because I found a good deal. When checking reviews it is well to remember that the smaller members of the MX500 series don't perform as well. That is often but not always true for other series as well.

It could be argued that the Samsung 860 Evo has a better warranty for not a lot more. Not convinced that it actually is faster or more reliable mind, just that the failure due to implausible amounts of writing is better covered. The warranty lasts the same 5 years.

What I wouldn't recommend is trying to get heavy service from any of the earlier models. At least not without thought. You can read them lots, but heavy writing will bugger them. Then there are the real lemons like the Samsung 840 evo where written data decays.

Oh. I had a fun few hours getting windows 10 onto the new drive. Learned this much. Setting boot options in the bios is critical. Both what it can boot from, and what it should not. Always worth checking that a machine isn't trying to boot from a non-bootable drive.

And Finally... upgrading the mSATA was an option for me too. Couldn't find anything like as good a deal. Finally decided that if the poor old 32GB Drive didn't bother me then I wouldn't bother it.

 

Have you tried steps mentioned in this thread? http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...werdefrag-free-space-consolidation.827436/You can do free space consolidation and slab optimisation on SSD if you care about SSD lifespan.

 

For some reason I get an error within nbr when I clock that link whilst on Android.

I'll try again when I get home from work though thanks for lookin out.

The micron will be fine for my needs. The 256gb ssd I have the OS in will become part of the internal USB hub. Installing windows 10 on a new drive should be relatively simple, I do it almost quarterly anyways for various reasons.

840 Evo was just a bad product and only with files that aren't used within a months time iirc. They band aid fixed it with a weekly flush or w/e but I was never on board with the evos until 860 Evo msata since it's about 160 I think.

 

@TheReciever I never claimed to own a 1100 FWIW. Waiting for m.2 4TB drives to appear, although I'd probably grab a 2TB 1100 or WD Blue 3D for a really decent price.

I'm outside US, though. Local prices are high, international shipping is expensive and to add an insult to injury some SSDs from Amazon do not ship here.

 

Well to be honest if I had been offered a micron at the right price I would have took it.

It is just that there has to be a scale between economy, performance and reliability. How much of a premium you are willing to pay for a better product depends on your needs but you would be a fool not to be willing to margin in some however small. So the trick to bargain hunting is to set your budget according to how long you are willing to wait for a deal and set your premium for the main contenders.

I may add that a poor product will cause you far more trouble than a superlative one will avoid.

 

The issue with the Adata product has nothing to do with branding and everything to do with the flushing issue with larger sequential writes.

The micron 1100 is slower but not perceptively slower compared to the SU800 or the Evo 850. Also this will not really affect much beyond the initial dump of games to the drive with the concern over write speeds and will be bottlenecked by 5Gpbs anyways. Any additions made in UE4 will be incremental I am sure so I am still not too concerned.

I also have yet to see anyone thoroughly thrashing them for one or more reasons as I have of virtually every.single.other.brand. Seagate has burned me more times than I can count, but they are the only ones with 2TB SSHD's and 15mm 5TB drives. Western Digital seems complacent and Samsung is bloated. They all got issues. That all being said any SSD from any of them would far exceed the performance of my 7200RPM HDD and the Micron 1100 despite its lower than average endurance rating should be fine for my uses considering my workloads are very much in the consumer realm and no where near the enterprise / server workloads. I can also backup my UE4 projects unto the 256GB SSD or just one of the 6 other HDD's that are in the system.

Due to the nature of everything else being new, their pricing is quite static save for "deals" of which I dont care for and dealing with companies directly, which is even far more detested. I can buy used on ebay with a warranty on top of it and actually get serviced via that method.



The drive will not be an OS drive, that will be the 860 EVO mSATA 1TB at some point.

 

Do you mean that drive slows down to HDD speeds under sustained loads? Have you tried turning off Write buffer flushing on the drive in device manager? Which Intel driver were you using? Some IRST drivers had the issue esp. 13.1/14.6/15.9.
Seagate worked for me always than WD drives.

 

I only know based on feedback from the drive, I dont have it, at present. I have seen speeds as low as 45MB/s but in that instance it lacked context so I cant confirm or deny. However that issue was noted in reviews, with no updates to if it was ever resolved. Another note of interest is that a few amazon reviews had also noted the awkward performance profile with write speeds, but due to their use case it wasnt an issue (they had priority of endurance over all else)

Well its nice that Seagate has been nice to you, but I have had about a dozen drives fail from various machines, and far more in the enterprise environments. They have been better of late, but they have had truly terrible QA for a time.

 

Flash memory is inherently write cycle limited. A good indication of the true limits would be the warranty on SSD's marketed for server farms. That because it can easily be very write intensive 24/7. So you could expect manufacturers to offer products for that market that are as durable as commercially viable and never, never, ever offer a warranty that is anything other than a honest assessment. Thing is I am seeing current products for that market with warranty for around 350 full writes. And that from Samsung. With the exception of Samsung's non-server farm products that sort of warranty is typical.

That leaves me with questions:

1) Are the Samsung 860's really as durable as their warranty's suggest? Could be the manufacturer is crossing their fingers and hoping that most will never be used that much.

2) Can a Hybrid driver ever be reliable? After all it has got to be writing to a small amount of flash extensively.

3) If 350 writes is the realistic limit from leading manufacturers how bad can the worst be? A SSD is sort of like a micro raid array. Lots of error correction and reserved memory to hot-swap in when sectors fail. That all mean that the memory it tells you it has is far from the total. Always going to be a temptation for a budget manufacturer to skimp a bit. Or a lot. Nowt stopping somebody repackaging the sort of cheap SD you would put in a mobile phone, or perhaps a bunch of them, and calling it a SSD.

 

Questions that will not likely be answered here. Sounds more philosophical really

 

There have been a few ssd endurance torture tests done over the years. Basically wearing out the flash is not something worth worrying about for any average consumer user as TBW ratings are all very conservative. QLC drives will be more sensitive due to the nature of the flash but they all have a reserve area for precisely that reason.

https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/e...o-comes-to-an-end-after-9100tb-of-writes.html

 

Really? Here are answers. Not necessarily correct answers, but life never promises those.

1) After Samsung displayed its integrity and moral character with the 840 series one would be a fool to pay an excessive premium for an 860. At least one based on their assurance of reliability.
2) The industry never developed a HD that was reliable and commercially viable. Now it never will. How can we doubt their willingness to add another path to failure to the mix if it results in reviewers reporting upped performance? The mating of HD and SSD was always doomed to produce an ugly bastard.
3) Doh. Of course somebody is going to flood the market with cheap and utterly unreliable SSD's. Given that it can be done human nature will insist. Beware.

 

The 840evo was always fixable with a full rewrite of data with DiskFresh. Samsung eventually figured it out and issued a firmware fix. I have 2.5" 256gb 840evo with a ~2yr old Windoze install with the fixed fw that works fine on my w110er.

The only thing I didn't like (other than the year or so it took for it to be properly fixed) was a couple of times I noticed my Internet was slowed to a crawl and Samsung Magician (ssd management/ramdisk app) was uploading - without notice or consent - hundreds and hundreds of MB to an IP that I figured out was a Samsung server in South Korea

 

Sshd is fine but the controllers were poor, same as the early ssd's.

Generalizing all Evo products based on one Evo product is a logical fallacy. You can draw inferences that should be considered but as anything else branding is just branding, individual product information is paramount.

You could beware for any and all products, in the end it would be best to buy nothing. That isn't what the thread is for, while it never hurts to make sure people are clued in, I don't have any rose color shades expecting the best.

Just the best under the scenario presented.

 

Bennyg

Those links led me to this one.

https://3dnews.ru/938764/page-2.html

Wow. Now I don't need to use inference and guesswork.
Not exactly an easy to use site, but can't deny it is definitive and comprehensive. Nerd heaven.

Must say that I'm going to use it before any more purchases, but despite the demonstrated Mx500's relatively poor write life expectancy I ain't going to beat myself up over buying one too much. I got a very good price, It is still way more write tolerant than expected use, and nowt wrong with speed.

Um, perhaps I should put that in context. the Mx500 started to fail at after writing about 4000x the capacity of the drive. Not the 350x I was expecting. It is just that the reviewers were hoping for more.

Still, I will be buying more and from now on I will check there first. Some SSD's really didn't do well.


Edit:

Well, this is embarrassing. The Samsung 850 and 860 ranges really are good. But there are a couple of surprises. The first is that the 860 pro deserves no premium on reliability grounds over the evo. The second is that the 850 pro is just about immortal.

 

I have purchased a micron 1100 2TB for an even 200 USD and also an 860 Evo msata 1TB for 166 usd.

The 860 Evo is now installed and the micron will be here in a few days. Which gives me time to Mod the ranger to accept two more drives in areas not officially supported lol.

3 hdd's and 1 ssd hooked into my internally stored and powered USB 3.0 hub. Have to trim the USB cables, which I was hoping to avoid forever but can't put it off anymore.

 

Cool.

Hope you looked at that Russian site in my last post but it showed the truth to be far more with you than me.
Looks like if your needs are not especially demanding just about any SSD of the right size will do. Plus if it hasn't come from something like a server farm and still works it chances are good a used one will keep going.

Paid £160 for 2tb Mx500 including transport myself but no idea how that translates across the pond. All told pleased with the deal. Should be fast in my daughter's new (to her. Actually 5 years old) laptop and, while not the most durable ever, should easily outlast the need. Still, had I bought better or worse, I doubt a significant difference in practice. Now looking for another for her other laptop which currently doesn't do more than run the bios and make dead HD clicking noises.

 

Nah I didn't look at it, just haven't had the time to look much more into it.

Last time I was in the ssd game sandforce controllers were mainstream so it had been a while. Just wanted to make sure the two options I was looking at weren't terrible like the 840 Evo was.

 

Well this is the gist of their conclusions:

"As for the results obtained at the moment, two important conclusions can already be drawn from them. Firstly, the SSD endurance claimed by the manufacturers is a parameter that has no relation to real reliability. This characteristic only applies to warranty service conditions, but in reality even the cheapest consumer SSDs are able to transfer overwriting such a quantity of data that is several times longer than the resource declared in the specifications. Secondly, modern drives, at least in the case of fresh and high-quality models from leading manufacturers, are no longer subject to sudden and unexplained death."

But I would go further. There are technical reasons why one drive is more write resistant than another but from the evidence there is little correlation to manufacturer, price, age or warranty. Its all about the particular model or sometimes ever version of the model.

But one less than amusing caveat. Was looking a amazon feedback for the 2tb SAMSUNG 850 evo. Seems like there were a few sold with the guts replaced with 120GB drives.

 

That happens with any product that is listed with a common name for different models.

 

Fraid so.

Certain amount of surprise to me. After all the fake SD and USB drives I was expecting far more organised cheating on SSD's than I have seen on the net.

 

Crossing my fingers... just won a well used 2tb SAMSUNG 850 evo. Paying £160 delivered. Much the same as for the 2TB Crucial MX500.

That Russian site gave me the guts to do it. Particularly durable and reviews have it as well behaved - somewhere around the same speed as the MX500.

With any luck I will have my daughters old laptop working next week instead of just clicking. The gods willing that it arrives in good order.

 

Just got mine in the mail, on my lunch hour though but will probably install tonight.

 

Did you need the msata specifically?

 

mSATA is what my Ranger is equipped with.

 

Never buy 850/860 evo M.2 garbage w/o firmware updates. I have a 850 evo that still has unbootable media firmware issue which was fixed in normal 2.5" 850 evo but m.2 wasn't upgraded to fix it. For M.2 Mx500/WD Blue/Seagate have FW updates regardless of form factor.

 

You can't flash that with Magician?

My son has the 860 EVO from 2 yrs back (although it is the 2.5" form factor), we flashed the BIOS to update it w/ out issues using Magician. Won't that work on M.2 drives too? For example, I was able to flash my 970 Pro NVMe drives using magician under my Win 10 boot as well.

 

Huh?

Um. The 2TB 850 evo is in the post so one way or t'other I gota get it to boot.

2.5 inch version so I can hope.
If no boot then will leave in the laptop and fit windows on a portable USB drive, then run Samsung Magician from it.
What I dare not do is update a bios to a drive hanging on a USB cable. The slightest jerk n the connection would be lost n the drive perhaps bricked.
That should be a fun activity. Not. So hoping if there ever was a problem the original owner updated it.

 

I tried that to no avail. M.2 850 or 860 EVO don't have FW updates and if you've got problems then you're on your own. Actually 850 EVO 2.5" has 2 versions which Samsung silently updated, first release was 48bit 3D TLC layer and now they switched to 64/96 layers on items sold after 2017 which kills the competition because of optimisation. This was confirmed by a member at win-raid and I asked if there's any way for m.2 FW patching he said these models can't even downgrade/upgrade FW.

 

Yep. 2 versions of the 850 at least. Maybe 3
Non too worried bout that though. They both review as decent.


My SSD has now arrived dated 2015 and perhaps the V2. Not sure but I suppose a V1 is possible.

Not touching it tonight. I am a firm believer in doing anything that might cause panic to the morning and after coffee.
Then I am determined to do things very very slowly n with the upgrade video repeated for every step.

 

Meh, my 2TB SSD was in 5 minutes after getting home.

 

Upgrade video? What? Uhm, why?

Download a current Win10x64 iso image directly from MS using the Create Windows 10 installation media tool. Download Rufus.

Use an 8GB USB drive or larger to have Rufus create a UEFI installer of the ISO you downloaded.

Remove the drive you now have. Install the new SSD. Insert the USB drive and boot from it.

Make sure you choose Advanced Install and partition the new SSD to 67% of the actual capacity it shows as available. Now, you're OP'ing with power!

Install Windows with the Ethernet cable connected (if possible on your system).

Let it finish setting up all its updates before installing any additional programs and customizations.

Enjoy!

Checking the list above... yeah; no video necessary.