SSD Thread (Benchmarks, Brands, News, and Advice)

Do you have any links to that? I'd be interested.

 

See:
Intel quietly kills its face-melting Optane desktop SSDs | PCWorld

I was wrong.

I can't find the article that (I think) stated that products from elsewhere (Micron) may be showing up soon.

 

Micron is indeed working on its own lineup, but unclear if they will focus on the consumer segment (at least any time soon) as it's still kind of a niche product right now, and rumor is SK Hynix and Samsung will also enter the phase change memory fray but of course Micron and Intel have a head start.

https://searchstorage.techtarget.co...int-dominance-will-face-challenge-from-Micron

https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/iedm-sk-hynix-makes-pcm-based-3d-crosspoint-memory-0

 

SABRENT ROCKET 4 PLUS 2TB SSD review: faster than its shadow? cowcotland.com

Not to hide it from you, we had high expectations for this Rocket 4 Plusand we thought we had found the absolute SSD. But it is clear that if it sends heavy sequentially with a speed that can reach almost 7400 MB / sec, it is unfortunately not the racehorse that we absolutely wanted to have in our PC. If it is very good in sequential, it is a little less good when the files get a little smaller and above all, it does not manage to express its full potential in everyday life.

 

In summary, one of the cheapest drives is not the fastest

 

until it reach the point where laptop is currently at

we have expensive laptop, but low quality too in hardware, capability, quality control, everything. hope SSD won't ever reach that stage, which is also why im waiting for p5800x m.2 optane.

 

BGA
Locked Bios
Thin and lights

They are coming for your SSDs next (see Adata shenanigans on the SSD bait and switch) and you can't stop them

 

Component change: Adata SX8200 Pro SSD now in four versions computerbase.de | February 17, 2021

Yeah, it's a lottery if you try get the same as what you saw in the reviews.

 

I saw that reddit thread but in this case the 96L Sk Hynix is probably at least on par with the Micron 96L, putting v4 somewhere along side v2 in performance. There is a known issue using PCH rather than CPU, which means his results must be taken with a huge pinch of salt. Hopefully a more reputable reviewer can get hold of v4 for testing as well.

Still pretty terrible that an SSD has so many part changes without a new model number though, kinda shows that Adata is pretty much getting any parts they can to chuck it onto the SSD and call it a day.

e: the THW forum claims a 5th version with SanDisk:
https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...-pro-ssd-again-affecting-performance.3688125/

 

https://www.servethehome.com/wp-con...age-Moment-2020-Optane-P5800X-Performance.jpg

look at 5800x performance, especially the 512B size. if that is what I think it is, most of the weaker area has been addressed with 5800x over 905p.

random write, small file random/sequential read/write, lower sequential read/write all of them covered in a single upgrade except maybe power usage.

 

Been doing a little research on SSD since I am building a desktop video/photo editing system. The board I am using does not have NVME slots. I was initally bummed out since NVME is supposedly insane fast compared to SATA SSD. Well....Here are the results of a comparison between NVME, Sata raid, and sata SSD.
The three SSD are the samsung 970 evo 512gb at 139.00 CDN, and the Kingston a400 for 64.00. The evo is not even the most expensive in the samsung lineup and the difference in speed of all really is telling about two things. How technology progresses in order to get more money for you and how benchmarks do not tell the entire story of how machines run. Looking at benchmarks, you would thing you would be waiting all day for my A400 do do the same thing as the EVO, however, that is NOT the case at all.

 

if you're doing video editing on the same drive, go NVMe it is the best option by far. if you don't mind the speed, sata is fine too.

 

A second or two is not a deal breaker, if it were 30 secs plus, YES. a second, sometimes less...meh. I will deal with the Sata.

 

I'm assuming that wasn't what @ole!!! is getting at. It's getting pretty well known these days (at least here I guess) in daily general use SATA/nVME usually won't make a much difference in things like boot times, game loading, opening (most) apps etc. Honestly if they had tested with a better SATA drive like an Sk Hynix P31 or Samsung 860 EVO I'm sure those results would have been much closer as both have much better 4K random performance.

However work requiring numerous large file transfers / parallel IO work; large transfers like when working repeatedly with large video files that can be 10-20+ gigabytes in size the speed can matter for some, time saved is money made.

If merely doing video work for home and you aren't doing a lot of transfers at a time use, yeah it's probably not a big deal to go SATA. At the same time you can get decent nVME drives pretty cheap (1TB Inland Premium at $110 & 2TB at $215), somewhat close to SATA prices. These days SATA is losing its pricing edge.

Also just for reference, you can get PCI slot adapters that support like 4 nVME drives for ~$50 on Amazon, if you really want/need, and some times even cheaper. The following requires PCIE bifurcation support in the motherboard but MUX chip models are also there where you don't need to worry about that.
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-M-2-X16-V2-Threadripper/dp/B07NQBQB6Z/ref=sr_1_2?crid=14JDYUDCNI6SL&dchild=1&keywords=dual+nvme+pcie+adapter&qid=1614016608&s=electronics&sprefix=dual+name,electronics,170&sr=1-2

 

If you want consistency in your workflows for photo/video editing, intelligent OP'ing by up to 35% will be needed (for any 'scratch disks you may use).

If you're spending more than 4 hours a day doing this, an Optane solution is what is required to do the actual work on. All else is toys.

 

the premise is all wrong. in your post you mention about video editing and then proceed to post a SSD comparison in games, do you know how much of a difference video editing software vs game software are when taking advantage of SSDs?

that is why I specifically said that if you want it for video editing, go NVMe, as the video shows gaming and the rest of my comment says if do not mind the speed, sata is fine.

heres me quoting my earlier msg.

Im not sure if people reading comment are not reading the context, or perhaps they don't know enough about SSD & think the importance of context dont matter much, if the latter, then I can understand why the video review means more to them.

NVMe is few seconds at best over SATA SSDs in games, but will do many times better in video editing, unless you use crappy cheap NVMe SSDs, or render 360p videos.

 

Ahhh Now I got what you are saying. I wonder is there a comparison on video editing comparing the two. Would be very interesting to see.

EDIT: went to youtube and found the results were similar vs gaming. Within a couple of seconds of each other. Since I have 8 Sata ports I can have 2 Sata drives in raid 0 for programs, a Sata drive for cache, a Sata drive for scratch and 2 14tb HDD drives in raid 1 for storage. Again, No need for NVME. The price for performance difference is negligable. 2 seconds saving in time for double the price. Just not worth it. If it were WAY Faster using NVME, sure, but in reality it's not.

 

I'm not in that field, so no first hand experience with Adobe workloads. Roughly how much faster is Optane vs top tier nvme vs sata, in video/photo editing? I would imagine it boils down to more than just video render times e.g. clicking back and forth to preview in a large clip.

Even small margins of 'snappiness' might be enough to justify a more expensive storage over sata if the professional is paid highly enough/spending enough time on these workloads

 

Agreed, But for the average joe, NO. It's not worth spending twice as much on storage for a second faster rendering times. You would not notice the difference between a SATA ssd and an NVME drive if you were just surfing etc. Living in a place where video/photo work is limited because of population, I can't see spending 500 bucks plus on 2 drives when I can loose a second of rendering time, and save 250 dollars or more to go to other gear to increase my business. Now, if one starts making 100k or more a year on video work...yep, build with NVME out your butt.

 

What...Good SATA drives like the SK Hynix Gold are around $95-110 for 1TB... nVME prices for the decent drives like the Inland Premium ($110 /1TB & $209 / 2 TB) which has a Phison controller are pretty close to SATA pricing.

If you mean like even the cheapest DRAM-Less SATA models for like $80-90 for 1TB drives even those aren’t much value, usually close to standard drive pricing, terrible if doing a lot of writes in the first place....will be pretty terrible all round unless you’re comparing to a spinning hard drive.

 

If you watch the gaming video I posted, it is comparing the A400 sata SSD i am currently using in all of my computers, compared to the 970 evo nvme. They are so close in most situations that it's a non issue. So...Prices I quoted are pulled directly from amazon.ca

 

it depends on their test. you see, video editing software should store stuff into memory and process it then write back to the drive, but that dependent on which software you use, the settings in software, your memory capacity, source file size, render settings, output location. these are the thing you need to be looking for in the review and see if they come with these info, if not then most likely not worth trusting it.

computer hardware and software are so complicated the stuff I mentioned are just barely scratching the surface and I know next to nothing about video rendering. ontop of all that, you have no idea if they are read/writing drive to itself, or to another SSD, since SSD performance drops on mix workload to like 10-20% of it's peak speed (dependent on controller and firmware, or it's flash) and then theres sustained performance.

NVMe will be capable of handling higher bandwidth due to more powerful controller and less latency. you would not expect a drive at 1000MB/s mix workload to not out perform a SATA one at 200MB/s by a long shot at sustained writes, if the review can't get a proper software or settings to take advantage of it, there maybe issue with the review.

 

Yeah not sure about pricing across vendors in Canada. You’d still likely find decent nVME’s over there at relatively close prices to the A400. Here in the US, the A400 1TB is around a $100 and it’s a DRAM-Less drive with pretty low endurance. If getting more drives I’d implore you to look at better options even if going for SATA.

 

Will do, but I have had my drive for 3 years now and its awesome. I paid 100 bucks for my 1tb a400 and 59 for the 2 500 in my wife's and sons machines. I have no issues with them at all.

 

Im sure they can, but again, in real world use, not synthetic benchmarking, the difference is not that much. Proven by various videos on the subject.

 

To correct what I posted previously; what I meant below is 35% of the capacity is used (65% OP'ing). SSD's, SATA or NVMe based, are notorious for great peak scores and less than HDD performance levels for sustained writing. Optane surpasses them all. Hands down.

If you can get enough airflow + heatsink over a PCIe m.2 SSD to keep it below throttling temps (around 50C), it will be many times faster than any SATA with TLC nand is capable of.

Real-world use to me is consistency first and then at the highest level of performance second. I want to be able to deliver a job when I promise it. And I hate it when another SSD goes belly up because it was used, 'for real' workloads.

That 65% OP'ing is what gives regular SSD's their consistency for me (at least, some of them) when they're used as the temp/swap/scratch disk locations for the editing process.

 

I was looking at the temp swap scratch setup. Since my board has 8 sata connections and a raid double plug setup as well. I will probably do a Temp/swap/scratch setup in my box. I have more than enough room for all of them. Cooling will not be an issue in a large case in an air conditioned room. I may even go liquid cooling on the cpus and gpus as well to cut down more heat inside the box.

I took your advice and picked up a new dual CPU board with dual nvme slots and 8 sata. I will run programs on the nvme, and scratch/swap/temp on sata ssds. Storage will be handled by 2 14tb hdd in raid 1 backed up to a raid server I have here with 4 14tb drives plus another backup of that in my workshop in another building. Should be plenty of redundancy. For ram I have 8 32gb sticks of ddr4 3200, and I am looking at 12gb ram video cards now. Might have to buy used for that. I am under the understanding that SLI and Crossfire is useless for video editing correct?

For drives, I will be using 2 kingston a2000 512gb in raid 0 for programs (no document storage). and the scratch drives will be 1 tb a400s like I am using now in my notebooks.

She's going to be a beast, and old school looking in the thermaltake xaser III steel case. I am working on the case now replacing the fans with all new silent high flow fans compared to whats in it now. Going to put red lighting in it for S&G's!

 

I think you have that backward. Assuming you have excellent airflow on those PCIe SSDs, the A400's should be put out to pasture. The A2000's with their latest firmware (greatly needed, BTW) should be the program/scratch drives (forget RAID, one for Windows/Programs, the other for the temp/scratch drive).

Each A2000 would be OP'd by 65% in this case (with their low 650TBW endurance rating) to give them the best chance of giving the highest sustained speeds while also giving the highest longevity too in this 'too heavy' usage for them.

See:
Kingston A2000 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review - 8% Faster Thanks to New Firmware | TechPowerUp

See:
Quick Review: Kingston A400 960GB SATA SSD (SA400S37/960GB) | Gough's Tech Zone (goughlui.com)


As the A400 is not recommended to buy even for 'at home' purposes, I would think it is an extremely poor fit in a temp/scratch disk role.

Dump the red lighting too. It slows down SSD's. By making you buy less-quality ones.

 

If a cheap drive only gives an 'acceptable' performance level up to 35% filled is it really value for money compared to a drive which gives the same performance when filled more?

e: the 980 pro 2tb is on amazon for 400usd. Pretty tempted to pull the trigger...

 

No SSD, except an Optane drive, gives the performance expected unless it is OP'd, in any real-world, heavy use.

That is the true cost of SSDs, still.

OP'ing by up to 65% for a scratch disk, and at least 33% for O/S, Programs use.

If the experience expected is the highest sustained performance over the longest time.

 

Anyhoo. I have had great success with kingston drives, I am not paying 400 bucks for one drive. Sorry. I will take my money buy what I want. The red lighting set me back 10 bucks...hardly budget breaking. At this point I have 2200 dollars into this machine with two processors, motherboard, new PSU, SSDs, video card and some other odds and ends. This will handly out perform most machines minus say a 50,000 dollar macPro or other beast pro system. but it will do what I need it to do and fast.

 

Even if sticking to sata the mx500 is very slightly more expensive (100-105 usd on amazon) than the a400, but certainly a much better drive compared to dramless a400

For nvme the P31 is probably the best pcie 3.0 1tb ssd and costs 135, while inland and other budget options are still good performers near the 100 price point

 

thats also one of the problem, most of the reviewers simply dont explore and don't understand much and testing SSD in w/e fashion. I'd only really trust ones with their test method explained, because it shows if they taking advantage of their hardware and software.

 

Since you said RAID0 for programs I just want to add RAID0 isn’t going to boost your program or OS responsiveness at all, all it’s going to do is increase sequential performance. 4K random however (Already pretty terrible on the A400) which is what actually helps with responsiveness could in some instances actually take a slight hit in RAID0 and would just be a waste of CPU cycles for general use, granted not much with current gen chips. Additionally it’s an extra point of failure. I’d probably focus the RAID0 array for the scratch disk where data loss is not a big issue.

 

Because ADATA bashing is still hip:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13759/comparing-adata-sx8200-pro-vs-hp-ex950/10

They have also 'clarified' a whole lot of nothing - confirming the 5 versions of their drive seen in the wild and assuring that their performance is within the specs

https://www.techpowerup.com/279080/adata-explains-changes-with-xpg-sx8200-pro-ssd

 

Compared to the Phison E12 and the contemporary Samsung Polaris/Phoenix controllers, the Silicon Motion 2262 and it’s revisions are relatively weak, I agree other than empty drive tests it’s usually inferior at shuffling data especially in regards to full drive performance, that controller requires a decent OP of 15-20% to be competitive. Samsung used to be the best in regards full drive performance with factory just the default OP, with Phison E12 in the middle.

 

When will we see version 6 ? Can't just stop at 5

 

One of the posters on the second link in my post claims a 6th version. If you ever wanted to play SSD lottery...

 

This reminds me of Linksys, or better yet D-Link with 22 revisions of DIR-615 router model, at least they had a revision letter/number ie E1/E2/F1/F2... G1...etc....(with some even being down grades) listed on the box, yeah it even hit the letter T no kidding , wish A-DATA at least had the courtesy to do that.. so we know changes occurred.

 

im sure that honesty of going to letter T didnt do so well for them and rest of other companies learned and dont bother to show different model number anymore. sad world we live in.

 

Which NVME drives throttle @50c

I have 3 Sabrent drives and none of them throttle until 72c.

The rocket 4 plus will throttle at 72c and higher but i've only hit that once and that was after 15 mins of sustained write and something like almost 1TB of data transferred and that was in my MSI Stealth 15m with no cooling.

 

Looks like Micron is divesting it’s 3D-X Point business. Considering Micron owns the fab that Intel sources wafers from, for its Optane line and I don’t think Intel’s own fab is ready in Nevada yet, it will be interesting to see what transpires next.

I can’t say I’m surprised a part of me expected it, I suppose it makes sense as it’s still a very niche product. But after all this effort and now Samsung and Hynix entering the market, I expected them to keep developing it and reducing power draw while increasing capacities at lower cost, until it could some day semi compete with flash at least at the very high end sales wise.

Edit found source:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16558/micron-abandons-3d-xpoint-memory-technology

 

Micron to Sell 3D XPoint Memory Fab and Cease Further Development (Updated) tomshardware.com | today

Update: We've added responses from both Intel and Micron to the article below:...

 

Hynix NVMe's running 90c constant and paired with Alienware = Failure. And the morons at Dell tech support said this was normal, LOOL


Today's the day! Area 51-m R1 Switching both nvme drives to raid 1 array of samsung 980s.

 

thats bad news for us. means little to none possibility of optane dimm for AMD systems, unless intel want to somehow open that up and give away their advantage.

thank god intel is finally somewhat caught up on CPU with alder lake, they desperately need that out asap, hope we see HEDT CPUs for alderlake that work with optane dimms. I'll be getting them if CPU performance is decent.

 

@Papusan don't recent Samsung drives push into 90C as well?

 

Depends on the machine you use it in Golden award won't make the ssd fly (Most NVMe ssds will boil in Apple similar chassis design). Not all notebooks/desktop is designed equal.

 

I was on intel's website looking at the optane drive. Is it that fast?

 

worst thing is out of those graphs some are likely due to saturated cache and showing flash real write speed. hard to say if its temp, flash performance, or both. definitely bunch of mixes in there and this is why I hate QLC. but theres hope with the other article I linked they could get sequential up but who knows what other downside that comes out of this.

yea its fast but consumer probably have no real need for it. as a storage enthusiast I want to get it. for optane dimm, imagine everything you do is ram disk speed or faster, thats how fast optane dimm is. I could really use them for image restore and back up and stuff, optane dimm to optane drive, bottlenecked only by the PCIE latency and controller bandwidth lmao.

 

Why doesn't my Rocket 4 plus boil in my Stealth 15m?