SSD Thread: (its good, ignore the anime)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > SSD Thread: (its good, ignore the anime)

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Klyith posted:

m.2 SATA drives are a dumb investment and a trap for the ill-informed enthusiast consumer

Except not, because -let's be clear here- even sata 3 is basically enough for the vast majority of home users

# ¿ Jul 6, 2018 11:33

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 21:16

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Lockback posted:

I've had 2 SATA cables die on me in the last 5 or 6 years and I haven't had any hard drive die on me since like 1999. I don't know what the deal is with SATA cables but they seem to want to die as a natural state.

They are definitely more poo poo than a simple cable has any right being.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2018 21:27

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Malcolm XML posted:

qlc is trash tho, best for a nas or something. 4TB @ 2-3x cost per gig is worth it to not have to deal with spinning rust

When I hear nas I think backups, and I'd rather have spinning rust in that role than any ssd, especially a super cost optimised one

# ¿ Nov 23, 2018 07:21

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

endlessmonotony posted:

That's not the kind of recovery I'm talking about. Backing up your OS state is more often than not worthless, because you're facing a reinstall when Microsoft fucks up again, and not having to care about important files on the boot drive is great.

Also, using Raid0 instead of backups gives you certainty about the state of your files in the case of a device failure, and if you're using Raid0 and not backups, you won't lose anything important when the device fails, so the end outcome is the same.

I don't know if you're trolling, but please stop telling people to use raid0 when you're clearly referring to raid1. It's actually a pretty dangerous error to make.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2018 14:52

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

LRADIKAL posted:

Heatsinks on ssds are placebo.

If only that were true. It's become quite crazy, extra nvme ssd cooling makes a measurable difference.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Samsung-950-Pro-M-2-Additional-Cooling-Testing-795/

# ¿ Dec 6, 2018 11:28

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

LRADIKAL posted:

In the same topic that people are advised that NVME is a waste of money because no one needs the speed and you can't tell the difference, we're talking about putting aftermarket heat sinks on ssds to improve their benchmark performance. Got it.

Wait wait wait, there's a huge difference between the (reasonable) opinion that NVMe drives are not that necessary in most home-user scenarios, and acknowledging the actual data that shows heatsinks and cooling can give more consistent performance on fast-rear end NVMe SSDs.

Those statements are not in any way mutually exclusive. The fact that you (probably) won't notice a performance difference doesn't mean the cooling effect is "placebo". If there's a measurable, repeatable difference that's outside of margin of error, that's surely beyond the definition of 'placebo'.

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Dec 7, 2018

# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 16:09

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Atomizer posted:

Oh no, I don't play all of those games regularly, but there's a combination of factors including: preemptively installing games to circumvent a mediocre Internet connection (25 Mb/s down, which roughly yields a little over 10 GB/hour,) the large sizes of modern games, and the relative affordability of high-capacity HDD storage. If I wanted to play *any* new title I didn't already have installed, it would likely mean starting the download and watching a movie, or two, or three... plus saturating the connection makes accessing the Internet almost impossible for everyone else in the house, so often I have to throttle downloads or restrict them to overnight. Having the HDD capacity to hold them for future use is convenient.

Granted, I could certainly live with, say, a 1 TB SSD and shuffle things around, but keep in mind all of these things are luxuries anyway. We don't need games, or movies, or PCs, or SSDs, etc.

I agree completely that there should be space for all the games - I do the same. No point buying stuff you're even less likely to play because you can't launch it quickly on a whim.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2019 08:58

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

BeastOfExmoor posted:

I was looking up my total writes for all my SSD's and the results were pretty comical:

4.5 year old Intel 530, used as a boot drive - 43TB written
5 year old Samsung 840 Pros used as workstation boot drives - 26TB written
1.3yr old Samsung 850 Evo used as a boot drive and also containing a huge dropbox - 18TB written

Pretty comical to see what my real world stats are and how long it would take to hit a modern SSD's endurance rating at those kind of rates. That said, I hadn't remembered how low (or perhaps more accurately, conservative?) endurance ratings were a few years ago. The Intel drive was only rated for 20GB a day for 5 years (36TB).

I thought I'd take a look at my boot drive...

6 year 8 month~ year old Samsung 830 256GB, 22042 power on hours (918 days, 2.5 years), 21.5TiB written.
I love these drat things; after the 840 came out I bought more 830s instead, they were clearly the better drive.
My HTPC has an 830 256GB that was previously the boot drive in my wife's PC, and my dad's machine has an 830 256GB that was previously my documents drive (now there's an 850 Pro 1TB performing that duty).
The drives I previously used as boot drives were the Intel 320 120GB (now in a triple RAID0 setup in my Vaio Z along with the built in 64GB SSDs), and the infamous OCZ Vertex2 120GB, which failed, and was replaced, the replacement is in an old Precision laptop.

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Apr 13, 2019

# ¿ Apr 13, 2019 13:38

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

zer0spunk posted:

I'm retiring a 2012 256 830 drive that's been my boot drive for 7.5+ years to external drive duty. I figured I'd stick with samsung barring any crazy issues with the 860s, but everything I've seen on them seems solid.

That 256 was 350 when I bought it in 2012, 4tb drives being in that same price range is a nice tangible sign of progress.

The 830 is, in my opinion, one of the all time great SSDs. It was a breath of fresh air over the small, slow and unreliable ssds that were common prior to it. I'll be keeping mine running for some time to come.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 10:53

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Well that was just stupid

Edit: oh, and thanks for the heads-up

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Nov 26, 2019

# ¿ Nov 26, 2019 16:47

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Xenomorph posted:

OK, so I can definitely notice the shortcomings with the new Samsung 860 QVO drives. No benchmark app or stress test required.

I've been setting up a 1TB QVO for someone, and when copying data I'm seeing speeds drop to as low as 40 MB/sec when reading & writing for sustained periods. This is less than half the speed I'd usually get when copying from magnetic hard drives.

Going by AnandTech's site (which noticed that "performance drops significantly"), apparently the 1TB QVO drive is rated at just 80 MB/sec when its cache is full (the 2TB/4TB QVO drives are rated at 160MB/sec, the old 250/500GB EVO drives were rated at 300 MB/sec, and the 1/2/4TB EVO drives were rated at 500MB/sec.)

With regular Desktop usage, I guess the drive seems fine, as IOPS / small file performance is great (when everything fits in cache). It's just after using SSDs all these years, I didn't expect to see such a speed regression like this.

Well, it's not a secret.. There's no way, in my opinion, that the small amount of money saved is ever worth going QLC for. I'm still of the opinion that TLC is undesirable, but OK for a games drive or less important system, for example. Although I know that TLC drives have come a long way.

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Dec 7, 2019

# ¿ Dec 7, 2019 16:11

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

priznat posted:

I hate m.2s so much with their tiny loving screws that disappear forever if you drop one.

Mobos that have the plastic push retention pins are cool though.

It pisses me off that they didn't use an existing, well known and used PC screw type for the job.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2019 01:46

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Saukkis posted:

Or rather they should have used the well known SO-DIMM clips.

See, that kind of intelligent thinking is why you weren't on the design team

# ¿ Dec 29, 2019 01:57

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

WhyteRyce posted:

Got back from Samsung Memory Day

I hope you fuckers are excited for QLC in phones

Well, if the eu rules regarding replaceable batteries kick in as expected, they need something else to die in the phone to get you to buy a new one

# ¿ Oct 21, 2023 18:07

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

priznat posted:

Honestly I would just ship my work laptop back who needs a lovely mid tier dell or whatever

my work hp zbook firefly 15 g8 has the shittiest screen I've seen in anything, ever, it has absolutely unreal image retention - you can leave a dialogue box on the screen for maybe just 30 seconds, lock the screen, or move a blank window there instead and you can make out the text in the window that was just there
that said, I'd still take it for free

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 25, 2023

# ¿ Oct 25, 2023 21:25

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

priznat posted:

I have a dell latitude and it�s pretty decent but if they said you can have it I think it would probably either just sit unused or I would give it to my kids. I have a hard separation between work and personal devices so I don�t have any use for it outside of work, really!

I�d rather have the cash equivalent

Yeah I never use my work machine for personal use, same with my work sim card. If cash was an option then yes please

# ¿ Oct 26, 2023 09:20

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Ophidia posted:

This is the usual "what should I buy post" - sorry in advance.

My WD SSD just died (I bought that only 1 year ago), so I don't want to buy crap yet again.
I want a 1 or 2 TB SSD and it has to be SATA because my m2 slot on my mainboard is taken already.

What would you recommend?

You know it's almost certainly in warranty, right?

# ¿ Feb 4, 2024 15:20

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 21:16

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Klyith posted:

As a drive for nothing but games, the less expensive QLC drives are a lot cheaper and will have few noticeable differences in use. Slow writes from QLC are not a big deal for games. Something like a Crucial P3 Plus might be 2/3rds the cost depending on where you are in Euros. It's a good and reliable drive, but is QLC.

This should have zero difference while playing games, and zero difference while downloading & installing an already-out game. It might have some slowdown when installing a just-released game that you pre-loaded. (Decrypting the pre-load means rewriting all the files.)

As for whether this is worth it, depends on the other "and stuff" you will use it for. Shumagorath just recently posted about a drive they didn't know was QLC, and was infuriated by slow speed on 100GB writes. If you write large amounts of data, QLC is worth avoiding. OTOH if the other stuff you will use the drive for is like media storage, it's fine.

I personally can't see any use for QLC drives, and I won't be recommending them. For bulk media storage hdd is king, and for anything that requires even some performance and reliability, TLC is the answer.

I've seen how TLC drives can die after a couple of years of relatively tame SQL transactions and logging (I've had to replace a raid 1 pair twice), and QLC is far worse, so I simply can't take them seriously.

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Feb 16, 2024

# ¿ Feb 16, 2024 07:30

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > SSD Thread: (its good, ignore the anime)