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

@ Papusan

Reminds me of the WD fiasco recently with drives getting wiped with RCE on the devices.

The best NAS is the one you build yourself though since you have to get your hands dirty to get it build you have more insight into how it functions instead of relying on some company to protect your data. A few benefits are you're only constrained by you budget on how you set it up. Take a case or a rack and mount the drives into it and go from there with adding the SAS/SATA connections and MOBO/CPU.

All of the off the shelf NAS options run Linux at their core so, figure out which one you feel comfortable with and install it. It's as simple as setting up a share for the drives to be accessible from your local network just like you would do with Windows... but, with *nix you can clamp down the security and there's no backdoors to worry about unless you put them there. You have a pick of different FS's to implement from just a simple EXT3 / 4 to BTRFS encryption. You can do single disks or raid at your leisure. You're not bound to using a GUI to make changes as you can SSH into the box and make them from CLI as needed.

Oh, and you can insert the fastest network cards whether you want to stick to run of the mill 1gbps or 40gbps. Flexibility is key here if you have a huge budget and want to go NVME all the way you'll need the bandwidth to make use of that speed. Designing your system for optimal throughput / expense makes it all worthwhile. The box I rebuilt with ADL as a router / NAS / firewall / etc. is runing Raid 10 and pushes 400-450MB/s in spinner speed which make s a 5Gbps the perfect fit + overhead to easily sustain high speed transfers. Now, the new NVME's push a WR speed of 5.1GB/s but, those are for the OS use.

I've been thinking about adding a couple of 8TB NVME drives for boosting the speeds across the data set but, ~$2200 is still a bit more than I want to spend on data. Once you get up to that capacity per drive you're either using SATA @ 600MB/s or NVME capped at 3GB/s as the higher speed drives / controllers haven't made it to those capacities yet. Gen 5 drives will be a whole different can of worms to deal with at those speeds and dealing with the heat generated with active cooling on the drives / controllers so they don't throttle.

 

Most Reliable PC Hardware of 2021 Pudget Systems.com

 

@ Papusan

Samsung is nice but, this is a limited reflection on the overall "SSD" market by one company. They tend to have agreements in place to use select vendors. I've used a couple of Samsung drives but, the other brands have held up just as well. In fact one of the SS drives has issues and now lies in a drawer due to errors with it. Having a mix of drives though is better than going single vendor for diversification and not having a batch of them all fail at the same time. Even spinners if you can space out purchases to get them from different lots is better than bulk buying for the same reason.

The bigger problem these days is there's only 3 major drive MFG's at scale for the majority of the marketplace. For spinners I tend to stick w/ WD because they have been more reliable than others. For SSD's I have a mix of different brands and they all handle data the same way. For the most part it's more important to find better warranty terms of at least 5 years as some vendors go as low as 1 year. The higher the capacity ~1TB drives tend to have better wear ratings with higher MTBF numbers vs their lower counterparts 500gb/128gb.

Obviously if you keep them cooled properly they will last longer as well. Conditions these drives are used in make a big difference in their failure rate and none of that's mentioned.

 

I didn't have much luck with Samsung SSD/microSD/SD cards/USB Flash they all failed mysteriously or became slow at random for no reason or even dead (RAW partition).
I don't get Puget's POV saying SSD is reliable component in a PC. What about SMDs, caps, VR etc.. Faulty components can toast every hardware. Unless the user has spare PC or new one and usually they can add old SSD to new PC or make it a external drive.

 

@ Vasudev

It's all subjective unless using identical systems in identical environments. System failures outside of the drives themselves probably aren't counted in the survival rate of the drives.

I look at all of the chips on the drives the same as they're all concentrated in a couple of fab setups anyway. The controllers are what make the difference in longevity / speed between different implementations.

For all of the other products you mentioned I don't stick to a single vendor either on those. I find Patriot for SD cards to be good. SanDisk for USB. Internal drives right now I'm running PNY, Samssung, MyDigitalSSD, and WD. I have a box full of 2.5" drives though spinner and SSD of varying MFG's as well. . I tend to try different controllers when implementing new drives. There's no one controller though that really outperforms any other IME.

 

I think failure rates for all SSDs are pretty low. I've had probably 20+ of them over the years and only had one fail after five or six years. Until I upgraded my Mac Mini in 2020, my old Mini had an OCZ SSD I bought it 2011 that still ran great.

 

I've got a couple of OCZ drives sitting in that box but, they're smaller 32/128GB drives that could be usable as a flash drive at this point but, not much else.

 

128GB is plenty for a OS drive. 32GB would work for Linux.

 

Yeah, but, they're SATA and 2.5". Everything I have runs in M2 / PCIE at this point. Min size being 1TB as well. Raid is running in 8TB HDD's. They don't quite fit into the overall scheme. I suppose I could do some JBOD setup and span across them and spinners in an enclosure but, I can picture that becoming a mess with mixing speeds / states. I was considering using them in the car to replace the MMI 2.5" drive but, the PATA interface on the MMI would require an adapter to SATA and I couldn't squeeze one between the drive / interface w/o doing some metal work to make room which would make for less support while installed.

They'll just be something for temp storage while working on other devices. It's hard to picture though since I have 1TB drives that push 1GB/s over USB in an enclosure. Might be able to squeeze more out of a 20gbps enclosure as more of those come to market besides the ASM chips currently out. I setup my server rebuild with a case that has a C port on it for the 20gbps header on the MOBO for testing enclosures. Hopefully with TB4/USB4 non-royalty devices come out the costs come down with them and open the door for 40gbps options w/o the apple surcharge.

 

I see people become fan boys of brands, and while i can somewhat understand it, there is no reason to be loyal to any, all are companies that are here to make money, and none of them are perfect nor have perfect products. I have a preference toward samsung ssds because of their total integration, and have bought 50+ over the past decade, a couple of weeks ago, none of them had issues, until a normal reset and my 980pro cant boot anymore, and none recoverable, very likely i was very unlucky, but it happens. Now im trying WD Blacks with very good results, and very interested on Seagate 530s, only time will tell how it ends, but overall buy whatever fits your budget that furfills you needs, most of today SSDs are really good even budget ones.

 

Brand doesn't mean much it's what inside that makes a difference.

Two components go into these and it's 1.) controller 2.) dram

If the controller is good /decent temps then the dram shouldn't make much difference. The issue I see with Gen 4 drives while researching them is they're not all created equally as the 1st releases only hit 3gb/s where the 2nd revision hits 7gb/s. Some controllers do well for the first 10-30 seconds of transfers and then fall on their faces. Sustained speed should be the standard but, it's not.

I can rely on my Raid setup to push 400MB/s and that's w/ spinners. Some SSD's can't even maintain that once they get warmed up. When I rebuilt my server I was looking at the next gen Phison drives with the E16 / E18 controllers and since I was testing in Linux from CLI I relied on a tool that didn't exceed a threshold that made the drives appear to be 50% slower than they should have been. I switched them out for SN850's and ran a test through a different CLI command and found them to hit the marketed speeds over a sustained test period.

It should get a little more interesting when Gen 5 controllers hit the market shortly. Active cooling to say the least will factor into the options.

 

Samsung firmware update for the NVMe SSD 980 PRO is available Improved random read / write values Jan 26, 2022

Briefly informed: Samsung has made a firmware update for the NVMe SSD-980 PRO available for download. The new firmware can be installed via Samsung Magician or manually.