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Binary Badger posted:So I decided to saunter by my local MicroCenter, and lo and behold... Eh, <$150 isn't an unheard of price for 1 TB NVMe.
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Mar 10, 2019 09:51
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The guy who started the HardForums thread that was quoted earlier is insisting up to this current moment that this SSD is a diamond in the rough. He is saying that the $144 you pay for this gets you the performance equivalent of a $350 Samsung 970 Pro 1 TB thanks to the enhanced firmware on the Phison E12 controller; also that there is room for even more improvement as the Phison firmware can be further updated using hopefully-soon-to-be-available OEM software.
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Mar 10, 2019 17:25
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It's not bad at all, and the price is indeed good, but you don't need a 970 Pro or similar for gaming or whatever (unless you have a very specific need for this type of high-end NVMe SSD) and you certainly don't need to spend $350 on an SSD. The Adata SX8200 960 GB is ~$140 on Rakuten with the AD25 discount code, and that's a solid mid-range SSD that's regularly on sale around that price. The Inland is a good deal at $144, but above that the average consumer shouldn't be eyeballing it or for example the 970 Pro when mainstream options like Adata are available.
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Mar 10, 2019 22:50
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Even though I'm the guy who linked it, I tried to find an actual website for Inland and the closest I came was a sketchy retail site that wasn't even selling Inland SSDs. Also, most of the other E12 drives are carrying five year warranties.
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Mar 10, 2019 22:56
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Even though I'm the guy who linked it, I tried to find an actual website for Inland and the closest I came was a sketchy retail site that wasn't even selling Inland SSDs. Inland is Micro Center's house brand.
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Mar 10, 2019 23:09
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My understanding is that it's simply a Microcenter house brand; they just slap it on OEM products and resell them. I wouldn't expect to find a specific Web site for Inland; indeed plenty of their products are on Microcenter's own site.
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Mar 10, 2019 23:11
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So, I've been using a comical array of four old random laptop drives in my server for temporary bulk storage (in a 2x2 RAID0 configuration) which works, but I've seen the system choke a bit when under a lot of I/O stress. I'm planning on replacing these at least partially with QVO SSDs given they're so drat cheap. I understand that they have a lower performance and potentially reliability, but this is basically a big `/tmp` drive - seedboxing, transcoding temporary storage, ArchiveWarrior storage and other misc uses where if the array dies, no harm done and I don't need to back up any of it at all as I can just start afresh easily. - Given this sort of mix of random-read/random-write load (seedbox) and sequential (transcoding) would the QVOs be an adequate choice? Assuming I'm not writing more than a few 10s of GB a day, I'd expect a lifespan of around 5 years at least. - I'm tempted to buy 2x1TB rather than 1x2TB, so that I get more IOPS out of them and more chance that I can still reuse one drive if the other fails. I'm looking to beat out the performance of four striped 4800RPM laptop drives, so I'd assume half a potato would fit the bill here.
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Mar 11, 2019 08:24
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ECM, it sounds like you've given a lot of consideration to your use case and I'm not seeing any glaring issues. QVO / QLC / 4-bit MLC dives are fine for the load use case you've estimated. Splitting your workload between two 1TB drives may not buy you very much performance increase; unless you're pushing a load of tens of thousands of iops and/or more that 400 MB/s. If I were you, I'd just go with whichever is the cheaper option between 1x 2TB vs 2x 1TB.
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Mar 11, 2019 16:22
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Yeah I wouldn't put SSDs in a RAID, especially lower-end consumer SSDs. You'd get more IOPS from a single SATA SSD than from all four of those HDDs combined. For your use case, which is basically as a big cache, I'd get the cheapest available option, and currently you can find decent SSDs at <$100/TB. Since you are planning to write heavily to the drive, I'd suggest against going with the cheapest, crappiest DRAMless QLC option, and instead grab something like the Adata SU800, which has decent 3D TLC and DRAM; it's frequently, and currently, as low as $186 for the 2 TB on Rakuten (i.e. Adata's own storefront there) with the AD34 discount code. The 1 TB may also be on sale.
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Mar 11, 2019 23:01
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Help me out here: I'm torn between buying a Sandisk SSD Plus for a mom-PC or springing a few bucks extra for a drive with some DRAM cache like the MX500. What's the goon-approved thing to do?
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Mar 11, 2019 23:34
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Lambert posted:Help me out here: I'm torn between buying a Sandisk SSD Plus for a mom-PC or springing a few bucks extra for a drive with some DRAM cache like the MX500. What's the goon-approved thing to do? If you're talking about the Sandisk Plus line I'm thinking of, the last time I checked it had DRAM at the 500+ GB capacities and none at the lower capacities. That being said, if "mom PC" means what it would to me, a DRAMless SSD should be totally fine. I'm assuming light usage, limited writes. In that case capacity will be more important than DRAM; a 128 GB SU800 for ~$30 would be less desirable than a 480 GB SU650 for $50. (Adata frequently has sales on their SSDs on their Rakuten storefront. There's one going on right now, at least for the higher capacities.) Even if she doesn't need all the capacity, it will last that much longer due to wear-leveling and all the excess NAND flash. An MX500 would be overkill in any case, although they're not even that expensive anymore. I'd suggest a ~240-256 GB (or double that) SU650, BX300, Team L5 3D Lite, or even a SU800, whichever's the best price. (All of those but the SU650 have DRAM, even.)
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Mar 12, 2019 00:12
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Lambert posted:Help me out here: I'm torn between buying a Sandisk SSD Plus for a mom-PC or springing a few bucks extra for a drive with some DRAM cache like the MX500. What's the goon-approved thing to do? Even on a mom-PC I wouldn't use a DRAM-less drive for the OS. Atomizer posted:Adata SU800
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Mar 12, 2019 00:14
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Klyith posted:Even on a mom-PC I wouldn't use a DRAM-less drive for the OS. She's not going to notice the difference. You're not going to notice the difference either. Klyith posted:*thread takes a drink* Adata's current SSDs are fine. This is not 2013.
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Mar 12, 2019 11:31
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Atomizer posted:Adata's current SSDs are fine. This is not 2013. Yeah, SSDs have gotten to the point where you really, *really* have to try to buy a bad one. This typically happens when you spend $20-30 for a 120GB bargain-basement DRAM-less SSD that'll *still* outperform any HDD (save for the perilously small capacity). Manufacturing processes and subcomponent pricing have hit a spot where even what used to be considered the "worst" is now just the "it's ~$20 less than an MX500, so if that's important, your setup won't explode if you use this" level.
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Mar 12, 2019 12:00
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Atomizer posted:Adata's current SSDs are fine. This is not 2013. Nah dude I was just joking that how often you say "Adata SU800" could be a drinking game. And I don't disagree with that btw -- as a cheapskate myself I am totally ok with the Adata's small set of downsides compared to the discount they're being offered at. I don't happen to own one myself though. so I can't personally vouch for them as well as you can. BIG HEADLINE posted:Yeah, SSDs have gotten to the point where you really, *really* have to try to buy a bad one. Yeah, which is not surprising when you think about how simple they are from a manufacturing standpoint. It's a PCB and some chips, does anyone worry about the reliability of a sound card? If not for OCZ we'd have a very different perception of SSDs. All the big lemons besides OCZ have been firmware bugs. Cheap PSUs are getting pretty great too. Enough people finally got "but a good PSU" hammered into them that the brands started competing on quality, and now you can get a $40 PSU that's reliable and specced correctly.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:50
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Thanks for the great recommendations! Didn't realize the Sandisk Plus 480GB had DRAM cache, but seems to be a pretty bad drive regardless (probably more than fine for a mom-PC, though). It is much cheaper than the other options, but I still feel bad about buying that one. The SU650 and WD Blue are within 10 of the MX500, the SU800 is within 5. I think I'll just get the MX500 with a price-difference that small, even though it's likely overkill. The eDrive functionality should come in handy, even though not all that necessary.
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Mar 13, 2019 11:07
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Lambert posted:Thanks for the great recommendations! The MX500 also has basic power outage protection built-in (most SSDs don't), so if said Mom PC doesn't have a UPS protecting it, that's another checkmark in its "pro" column.
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Mar 13, 2019 11:55
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I know it's a really small thing and I totally did not "need" this, but I think it's really cool that I can plug a 1TB drive directly into my mobo, cover it with a...heat sink shield built into the mobo...? And it just runs without wires of any kind and doesn't clutter up the case.
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Mar 13, 2019 15:27
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What's the consensus opinion on the Intel 660P QLC NVMe drives? Not really considering one, but I'm just trying to figure out where the fit in. Better or worse than a SATA3 SSD? Okay or not ideal as a boot drive?
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Mar 13, 2019 16:02
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Read the last 5 pages.
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Mar 13, 2019 16:14
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Naffer posted:I just ordered an IDE SSD (Transcend PSD330) to replace an aging 40 GB 3.5" hard drive in a 533 MHz VIA Cyrix3-powered embedded PC that runs an old piece of scientific equipment. The embedded PC runs Windows XP SP1. It's a goofy SSD - draws about 1.2W and is completely powered off the IDE connector. Naffer posted:Update 1: Naffer posted:Update 2: I purchased a 44-pin IDE to 40-pin IDE adapter for my goofy SSD project. It turned out that my USB to IDE enclosure doesn't have room for the molex connector on the ide adapter, so I hacked together a truly horrific temporary solution involving using packing tape to "secure" stripped power wires to the appropriate traces on the adapter board. It worked for the 10 minutes it took to image the SSD. Now the old windows XP SP1 PC is back and better than new. I was initially perplexed to find that the IDE controller was limited to UDMA mode 2 (ATA-33!) with the SSD but when I swapped back in the old hard drive I noticed that the same was true before. Something about the hardware or software configuration of this old PC is limiting bandwidth on the IDE port to 33 MB/s, which is really pathetic for even my IDE SSD. Honestly the PC doesn't move a lot of data and I'd never noticed before though, so I'm not going to mess with it. The bad - The instrument is still down. It turns out that the outage that fried the ATX power supply also fried another power supply in the instrument that I'm also in the process of sourcing. At least this is the end of updates for the SSD thread. Summary: I successfully imaged a 15 year old 40 GB hard drive containing the only copy of software to run a scientific instrument. The drive was swapped with an IDE SSD which should hopefully last the remaining life of the instrument, (which will depend on replacing another power supply) Bonus photograph of the embarrassing solution to the Molex power fiasco described above.
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Mar 13, 2019 16:42
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BeastOfExmoor posted:What's the consensus opinion on the Intel 660P QLC NVMe drives? Not really considering one, but I'm just trying to figure out where the fit in. Better or worse than a SATA3 SSD? Okay or not ideal as a boot drive? Thread consensus doesn't seem to like it very much, but I think the thread consensus is just frightened of change. The question is, are you a normal games&apps desktop user who wants a 2TB NVMe drive? If so, it's a good choice. 2TB is where it has a great price advantage over everything else, and where you can short-partition it by 100gb and not feel like you've lost much. The thing about this drive is that it really doesn't want to be full. If you're looking at 1TB it's kinda questionable, and I'm not even sure why they sell it in 500. It's fine as a boot drive. This thing was pretty much designed to be a fast consumer drive that hides all the bad parts of QLC behind the fact that desktop users actively use a small percentage of the bits on a drive. The extra writes from stuff like page files go to the SLC zone, it's fine. If you want a big drive and you need it now, it's a fine choice. If you don't *need* it now, I'd wait for future iterations of QLC to come around.
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Mar 13, 2019 19:15
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Naffer posted:Update 3 - Final update: That's pretty good aside from all the power supply troubles. Don't forget to keep a couple of extra copies of the image around in case the SSD craps out in the future.
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Mar 13, 2019 19:23
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[edit] yes keep images around
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Mar 13, 2019 21:49
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Naffer posted:Update 3 - Final update: This right here is some good-rear end stuff.
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Mar 13, 2019 21:59
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Klyith posted:Thread consensus doesn't seem to like it very much, but I think the thread consensus is just frightened of change. How full is too full? I bought the 2tb one over the weekend and have been using it to replace a 1tb MX500
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Mar 13, 2019 22:41
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Endymion FRS MK1 posted:How full is too full? I bought the 2tb one over the weekend and have been using it to replace a 1tb MX500 used basically only as a gaming PC Edit: My first quote is not edit, yay Endymion FRS MK1 fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 13, 2019 22:42
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Probably as it fills up it could OMG lose performance.
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Mar 13, 2019 23:38
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redeyes posted:Probably as it fills up it could OMG lose performance. How noticable, I assume not very?
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Mar 14, 2019 00:01
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For a consumer workload? Doubtful.
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Mar 14, 2019 00:09
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Endymion FRS MK1 posted:How noticable, I assume not very? Fill it up and report back.
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Mar 14, 2019 00:23
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Endymion FRS MK1 posted:How noticable, I assume not very?
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Mar 14, 2019 00:35
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Naffer posted:Bonus photograph of the embarrassing solution to the Molex power fiasco described above. FYI as a rule you should avoid sticking packing tape to circuit boards like that. Its an excellent generator of static electricity when being unrolled from a spool, handled, or pulled off a surface. (As with many other things there are ESD-safe tapes which try to minimize this sort of problem.)
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Mar 14, 2019 00:57
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Lambert posted:Thanks for the great recommendations! Basically the "Plus" is a BoM drive, meaning it has a variable BoM and individual components can vary, including things like the controller and NAND flash; basically everything that's not explicitly advertised is subject to change, which is why specs are vague for this product, but they apparently put DRAM in the half-terabyte-and-above models. I can't be 100% sure which version of the product you're buying, but this is the review article I was referencing the last time I referred to it. The "Ultra" is the higher-end SSD line (and is identical to the WD Blue) but I wouldn't hesitate to use the "Plus" especially for a basic system (i.e. Momputer, guest PC, old PC, revived laptop, etc.) and especially if I was reasonably sure that it'd have DRAM and at a competitive price. The fact that SSD prices are all pretty similar complicates things, but I don't think you can make a bad choice here. Just get one at a good price for an appropriate capacity. BeastOfExmoor posted:What's the consensus opinion on the Intel 660P QLC NVMe drives? Not really considering one, but I'm just trying to figure out where the fit in. Better or worse than a SATA3 SSD? Okay or not ideal as a boot drive? Klyith wrote what I generally share about the 660p. It's basically good enough for anyone who needs a large amount of NVMe storage, and you're largely not going to be able to tell what SSD you're using in practice anyway. The 2 TB version is the only one I recommend because of pricing; that much NVMe capacity for ~$200 is hella good and nothing else compares; the WD Blue was >$300 the last time I checked and is SATA (which is fine, but your interface will dictate which of these products is viable.) The lower-capacity versions aren't as price-competitive and shouldn't really exist; I can regularly get a much better TLC SX8200 for ~$75 and ~$150 or even less for the 480 & 960 GB versions, respectively, with ~monthly discount codes on Rakuten, so the comparable 660p SSDs would have to be <$60 and <$120 to make sense. I'd say the 2 TB is fine as a boot drive (but ideal as bulk storage in a multi-drive setup) but then again as above basically any SSD is fine for the OS. Also as above you're not likely to notice whether or not you're using SATA or NVMe unless you're benchmarking; you'll be happy with either so I wouldn't worry about that. Technically the 660p isn't as performant as a proper, higher-end NVMe SSD (and for example the aforementioned SX8200, which I guess is mid-high-end,) and is usually between SATA and NVMe; Intel has done a good job masking the downsides of QLC. In the worst-case scenarios (i.e. heavy use, especially when the drive is nearly full,) the raw NAND speed is worse than a fast HDD, around 100-150 MB/s from what I've been able to gather, but the average consumer isn't likely to experience this. Endymion FRS MK1 posted:How full is too full? I bought the 2tb one over the weekend and have been using it to replace a 1tb MX500  Just use it as normal and don't worry about it, but that chart shows the static and dynamic pseudoSLC behavior. At >75% capacity the drives have 6-24 GB of static cache, after all the dynamic cache has been folded into QLC storage. The controller does apparently hold some of your data in the cache for faster reads so not all of the pseudoSLC is immediately available to accept writes. So basically if you started to write to the 660p from a sufficiently fast medium (i.e. another NVMe SSD,) you could exhaust the cache more quickly based on how full your drive is and run into the native QLC speed. That's not to say I'd recommend against the 660p; as above I specifically recommend the 2 TB version if you need capacity in the m.2 form-factor. I've started to add these drives to appropriate systems, and I have one ready to add to my Hades Canyon NUC (which as you might know has 2x m.2 slots and no other internal storage, and thus is an ideal candidate for such a drive.) That system has the OS on an SX8200, by the way, and the only reason I'm pulling out the m.2 SU800 that's already in there is due to the capacity (512 GB to be replaced with 2 TB;) otherwise, as I've said repeatedly, the SU800 has been an excellent budget SATA SSD.
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Mar 14, 2019 01:08
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Atomizer posted:Basically the "Plus" is a BoM drive, meaning it has a variable BoM and individual components can vary, including things like the controller and NAND flash; basically everything that's not explicitly advertised is subject to change, which is why specs are vague for this product, but they apparently put DRAM in the half-terabyte-and-above models. I can't be 100% sure which version of the product you're buying, but this is the review article I was referencing the last time I referred to it. The "Ultra" is the higher-end SSD line (and is identical to the WD Blue) but I wouldn't hesitate to use the "Plus" especially for a basic system (i.e. Momputer, guest PC, old PC, revived laptop, etc.) and especially if I was reasonably sure that it'd have DRAM and at a competitive price. The fact that SSD prices are all pretty similar complicates things, but I don't think you can make a bad choice here. Just get one at a good price for an appropriate capacity. That's pretty helpful, thanks!
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Mar 14, 2019 01:11
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BobHoward posted:FYI as a rule you should avoid sticking packing tape to circuit boards like that. Its an excellent generator of static electricity when being unrolled from a spool, handled, or pulled off a surface. (As with many other things there are ESD-safe tapes which try to minimize this sort of problem.) That's helpful to know. I really ought to have a role of Kapton (polyimide) tape around for these sorts of things. The XP image is only 6 GB so I've got a couple copies now. It's remarkable how much smaller an XP install was than a modern W10 install.
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Mar 14, 2019 01:21
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High end systems in the beginning of 2002 only had about 60-80 GB hard drives. Compared to say, a 256 GB SSD things haven't actually changed proportionally.
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Mar 14, 2019 01:58
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Sooo. For 200 bux, you can get roughly 280GB of SLC memory if you 'short stroke' the partition you use? That's not bad at all. Maybe somewhere between 400-500GB?
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Mar 14, 2019 02:00
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redeyes posted:Sooo. For 200 bux, you can get roughly 280GB of SLC memory if you 'short stroke' the partition you use? That's not bad at all. Maybe somewhere between 400-500GB? Pseudo-SLC isn't as good as true SLC, and a 500 gig 970 Pro that out-performs an empty 660p isn't much above $200.
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Mar 14, 2019 06:56
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WD is ditching the blue/black separation between their SATA and NVMe lines. Also, the new blue NVMe drives top out at 500GB. MSRP is similar to what the sale prices for the mid-range HP and ADATA drives, so unless street prices are much lower than MSRP I have no idea who would buy these. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14086/new-wd-blue-sn500-ssd-switches-to-nvme
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Mar 14, 2019 18:30
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