Which is the best SSD of these options?

Looking for the best overall SSD in terms of speed, power consumption, garbage collection, etc. These are all potential options for configuring a Clevo W230SS that I am looking at:

mSATA:

Crucial M5 mSata
Samsung 840 Evo mSata
Intel 530 mSata

Also these options for SATA III

Crucial M5 SATA III
Samsung 840 Evo SATA III
Samsung 840 Pro SATA III
Intel 730 SATA III

What do you all think is the best? I want reliable drives (slower ware and good GC, etc.) and lower power consumption as the most important variables. But open to all opinions.

 

If your priorities are power consumption and reliability, you probably should go with the Crucial M5. All the drives listed will have good reliability, and the Crucial and Samsung drives have low power consumption (when idling). When you compare the M5 and the 840 series, you find that the M5 has extra capacitors to provide power to write any unwritten data from the buffer to NAND if there is a power shortage. While this is unlikely with a notebook, it does make the Crucial SSD more reliable because it covers that possibility, whereas the Samsung SSDs do not. Also, it (like the 840 Pro) uses MLC NAND, as opposed to the TLC NAND used in the 840 EVO. TLC has lower write capacity before failure, and although you're unlikely to come anywhere near it during actual use, one can say TLC lowers reliability.

The Intel 730 has the best performance, but it's designed for desktop and workstation use, not for mobile. That means it has higher power consumption and therefore does not meet your criteria.

 

Your best bet is a 2.5" EVO of the highest capacity over 500GB you can afford.

Don't consider any of the mSATA options: the nand channels and nand interleaving is not optimal and in the case of the EVO, TRIM simply doesn't work for that model as far as I know (check the Anandtech review for any changes on that front).


The one I can recommend is the 1TB EVO with ~280GB capacity left as 'unallocated', oh and forget RAPID too.

The M500's are not my first choice because of heat issues and the throttling that will entail in the storage subsystem - especially in a higher end notebook with discrete (hot running) GPU(s), powerful QC cpu's and a ton of RAM.


Good luck.

 

mSATA: I assume this will be the boot drive or storage?

M5: below average read, write and burst performance. Dislikes being filled up as performance tanks. Best suited if this is to be a storage drive and if the price is reasonable

Samsung 840 EVO: excellent burst read and write performance, awful sustained performance, proven reliability. Best suited as a budget performance, high capacity, low power boot drive.

Intel 530: Probably best in class reliability, excellent burst and sustained performance provided data is mostly compressible. Due to Sandforce limitations, best suited for high performance, high reliability boot drive only.


SATAIII

M5: the 1TB drive is probably the only worthwhile model to look at, cost effective high capacity storage, average performance. Basically same as the mSATA variant but slightly faster, best suited for bulk storage. TGS Opal encryption supported. Power Loss protection supported (highly recommended if high reliability and storage are required).

840EVO: Well balanced drive, again, try to get the 1TB model. Faster burst performance than the M5, slightly worse sustained performance, quite proven. Suitable for boot or storage applications. Excellent energy efficiency.TGS Opal encryption supported.

840PRO: Expensive, extremely high (possibly even the best) burst performance, excellent sustained performance, very very poor consistency unless at least 25% provisioned. Extremely well suited for boot drive, cost prohibitive as a storage drive. I guess one advantage is also that you only really need the 256gb model if you are interested in optimal burst performance as boot drive and don't care about consistency. Good energy efficiency, not quite as good as the 840 EVO.

Intel 730: Unsuitable for laptops due to extremely high idle and load power draw. But I'll analyse for completeness. Excellent sustained performance, highly predictable latency, consistent but below average burst performance. Also extremely cost prohibitive, I don't recommend this drive, even overclocked, the burst performance is awful. TGS Opal encryption NOT supported. You might as well go for the enterprise DC S3500 as it is cheaper and has the exact same sustained performance (besides, if you are seriously looking at this drive, burst performance isn't your priority).

 

Thanks all for your advice and input. This is good info. My intent was to use two mSATA drives in RAID 0 for the operating system and use the SATA III for storage. Does this change any of the feedback? I guess I'm concerned about the mSATA EVOs not supporting TRIM. Is there other garbage collection? Do the other drives all support TRIM (and in RAID 0--maybe that's a deal breaker for TRIM)? I don't pretend to be an expert on this. I'm very noob on this topic, so go easy on me.

 

See:
AnandTech | Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review


See:
AnandTech | Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) Review

Note that writes get to less than 70MB/s - ouch.


The first mSATA RAID0 I saw was an MSI with 3 drives - I wanted to throw the computer against the wall (but this was a store demo. ).

The lagginess of the system had me arguing with the sales person whether the drive(s) were HDD's or SSD's - yeah; that's how bad it was.

I would predict that the mSATA EVO's would be worse in a RAID0 arrangement after a few weeks.


If you're intent on using the mSATA slots: think DATA no performance.


Good luck.

 

Can you help me understand the issue of configuring mSATA drives in RAID 0? I have always been very impressed with the RAID 0 configuration of my Sony Vaio Z (see sig--three 64 GB drives in RAID 0), though of course those SSDs are not mSATA, with which I have no experience.

Is it advisable to instead use mSATA as storage only (either in RAID 0 or not) and use the SATA III drive as the OS drive?

Sounds like I should stay away from the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA given the lack of TRIM support? Are the other mSATA options (and the SATA III options too I suppose) okay in this regard?

 

Sorry, I have sigs turned off (slows down my forum browsing speed).

I would not recommend mSATA as an O/S drive when you want maximum performance. As I've stated before, the physical limitations of the smaller package limits the performance of the nand installed.

I'm not sure how Sony sets up the RAID0, but unless you can compare that identical machine to a single 1TB EVO (for example) I think it would be hard to judge the true performance of that array. With 64GB drives though, I know I would be sorely disappointed (slowest capacity SSD's you can buy today and the capacity is still to small for a proper C:\ drive for me at this point: I now set up my systems with 150GB of actual capacity for C:\ (and with 30% additional OP'ed and with an additional DATA partition too).


What are you doing with your system? Is it video/photo editing? Is that why you want the high sequential speeds of a RAID0 array?

If you're not doing anything like that; a single SSD in AHCI mode is highly recommended.

Even if you really needed those sequential speeds: a proper M.2 drive equipped notebook is what I would be recommending instead (with single SSD speeds above a RAID0 setup without any of the drawbacks).

 

Nah, I'm actually pretty basic with what I do--productivity software, browsing, and games. Based on all of this feedback it sounds like a better configuration would be to do the 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SATA III, and skip the mSATAs altogether (and I assume save on the power draw and the $$ to boot). And if I did spring for the mSATAs, probably better to just use them as independent storage drives. And it sounds like the Crucial M5s (which are the cheapest mSATA options of the ones I listed) would probably be enough for what I'd do with the system (the throttling and heat you mentioned above applied to the Crucial M5 SATA III and not the mSATA, right?). If I'm off base with any of this, steer me in the right direction. Thank you for all of the help!

 

The info still stands, the only additional advantage of RAID0 is you get much faster Sequential speeds at the cost of slightly worse Random speeds. Given Tiller's link, I would avoid the 840EVO mSATA until the TRIM issue gets ironed out. mSATA tend to be slightly slower and have less possible capacity than the SATAIII drives.
Generally to interpret the data.
Boot drives should have extremely high burst speeds (sequential speeds are more optional), decent consistency and reliable garbage collection + TRIM. Capacity and power consumption are more secondary.
Storage drives need high reliability, ideally power loss protection, good sequential speed, decent capacity and low idle power consumption. All out speed and consistency are secondary.


If you want maximum capacity, then you get a Fast mSATA boot drive, a slower high capacity mSATA and a High capacity SATAIII.
If you want the best balance, get a fast SATAIII boot drive with 2 mSATA as storage (Possibly Windows RAIDed if you really want that extra sequential speed)
If you want best reliability then get the Intel 530 mSATA as a boot drive, and a Crucial M5 SATAIII 1tb for storage. The Intel drives are extremely reliable and the M5 has power loss protection to safeguard your data.
If you want cost effective, get the Intel 530 as the boot drive and a 7200RPM HDD for the SATAIII bay.

 

gee I wish Sandisk would come out with a 1TB version of their extreme II already.

 

Especially since Sandisk has the Optimus Max 4TB Enterprise SAS SSD with bigger coming.

 

I've been through much the same dilemma that you're going through - albeit around a 2-bay 17" notebook, so mSATA has not even been considered... The notebook - an Asus N750JV - is shipped with the Intel HM86 Express PCH chipset which supports up to 4 x SATA6G (SATAIII) ports. From what I've been able to ascertain, Asus have only configured the two 2.5" drivebays to use SATA6G and the optical drive bay is connected to one of the six available SATA3G (SATAII) ports. As a result, I would advise against using the optical bay with a drive caddy to hold a SATA6G SSD as the controller is only SATA3G and you won't get the full benefit.

So, check with your notebook supplier to ascertain which PCH chipset is used in the notebook and which PCH ports have been allocated to disk drive bays and optical drive bay.

The approach I've adopted is as follows:

C: Samsung 840PRO 256GB (single partition) - as system drive (no data - all "My Documents folders" moved to D: drive)
D: Western Digital 2.5" Red (WD10JFCX) 1TB SATA6G HDD (single partition) - as Data drive

Having had a scare with the SSD on my desktop (OCZ declaring bankruptcy before being bought by Toshiba), I opted for Samsung 840PRO due to a combination of performance and local support capability over other drives from manufacturers with no actual direct local presence.

The WD 2.5" Red is a new-ish drive from WD and was designed for use in 2.5" form factor "mini-NAS" storage applications - but it still retains the shock resistance of the best of WD's 2.5" non-NAS drives. The Red is also shipped with a SATA6G interface plus WD's "IntelliPower" controller which adapts spindle speed based on current job request-mix (range: 5400-7200rpm). Unfortunately, the local Seagate distributor does not import any of the Seagate 2.5" 7200rpm drives with SATA6G controllers (I have a weakness for Seagate - they've done me proud for many years).

The drive switch is only due to be carried out this coming week as I've battled with Asus SA for a response to a query regarding warranty impact of a drive exchange. I've played with this WD Red on my desktop using it in a Zalman USB3.0 dual-bay SATA drive dock and found it to be a pretty fast wee drive, returning sequential write speeds via USB 3.0 from a SATA6G 3.5" Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB HDD, of around 130-140MB/sec, so am quite confident that it will equal or better this via a SATA6G port into the HM86 Express PCH.

I have a second Samsung 256GB 840PRO SSD which will be used to store a clone of the primary OS C: drive once the OS, settings & apps have been migrated to the first SSD. This cloning will be re-done whenever there's any significant change to the structure/content of the primary C: drive. (Another good reason for separating data away from system drive when looking at SSDs - this allows you to comfortably install a 256GB SSD rather than anything in 500GB to 1TB range, which, in turn, makes a second clone SSD a viable option).

This clone will only be used in the event of a crash or similar to enable a quick re-build of the primary SSD or, if primary SSD fails, to install the clone to replace the failed primary SSD (at which stage another SSD will be cloned).

That's the theory anyway...

 

I'm kind of glad they aren't at the present. Until there's either a proper process node shrink or when 3D stacking comes online. The Sandisk Extreme II derives most of its performance from the fact it uses low density, high speed NAND. If it were 1TB at the moment, it would have to use either TLC or 128 gbit dies, neither of which are acceptable from a performance perspective.

The Sandisk Extreme II is currently the price/performance king among the 64 gbit die SSDs (neglecting the capacity optimized SSDs).

 

I see, so there's a technological barrier.

It's a little frustrating if you have a laptop with only one drive bay. 480GB is just not enough to have both the OS and storage data on it.

 

RAID 0 has a pro and a con - where the balance sits will depend on your priorities:

Pro: each additional drive configured in RAID 0 adds another SATA port to the bandwidth calculation - 2 drives = double the bandwidth of 1
Con: when one drive fails, your entire RAID "volume" is lost - replace the faulty drive and restore (if it works) is your only escape route

The debate on mSATA SSD versus 2.5" SSD has been covered - more than adequately - by previous posts but the bandwidth "gain" from RAID 0 does not - IMHO - offset the challenges of RAID 0 in general and mSATA RAID 0 in particular.

The alternatives, given constraints in the number of 2.5" drive bays (1 for most 15.6" or smaller, and 2 on some 17.3"), lie in the use of a "combo" SSD/HDD drive. Currently there are two options in this category:

1) "Hybrid" SSD/HDD such as Seagate's "SSHD" range which, in addition to an HDD, include a nominal amount of flash RAM which functions as a "learning cache".
2) Dual SSD/HDD drives such as Western Digital's Black2 which houses a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD in a single housing, sharing a single SATA6G connector

Seagate's SSHD marries 8GB of MLC flash RAM cache with either a 500GB or 1TG 5400rpm SATA6GB HDD. The cache uses a learning algorithm to manage which filles are most often used and those move to the top of list for caching. Initially, these drives are abominably slow while the file usage data is accumulated (the cache in this stage has little or no benefit and the 5400rom HDD sets the performance level). Once the cache algorithm has "got it right", these drives do tend to deliver an overall average performance gain, but this is nowhere near what you would get from a full 2.5" SSD - but you DO get the extra capacity from the HDD.

The WD Black2 is a different story... At installation, you only get to see the HDD (1TB 5400rpm SATA3G), but after running the "SSD enabler application" the 120GB SATA3G SSD becomes accessible with the two SATA3G drives (HDD & SSD) sharing a single SATA6G port. The SSD suffers as it is limited by any concurrent HDD I/O. This is a solution for anyone with a single-bay laptop who wants to shoe-horn both an SSD and HDD into the one available bay. Its also not that cheap yet,,,

So, my recommendations:

If you have a 2-bay laptop running an H86 Express chipset with 2 x SATA6G ports, opt for a dedicated SSD and a separate HDD and, if performance is your main focus.

If you have a 1-bay laptop, go for a decent 500GB SSD (if your budget allows) otherwise go for a smaller SSD and keep your data on external USB drive(s).

My $0.02 worth...

Dave