Do these drives employ standard SATA command to limit the accessible LBAs? Moreover, on a most empty driver, is the controller "smart enough" to treat all free space as spare space?
Yes, adjusting the DCO is a standard operation that can be done with free vendor-neutral tools like hdparm. I don't think the 5100 will adjust its flash management strategies without the DCO being imposed, but there is likely still some change in write performance as the drive and spare area fill up.
Nice to see, but I really miss the days of the m4 and the MX100 where Crucial had a high end drive that really hit Samsung hard on price. Nobody makes a high end drive today except for Samsung (and maybe Sandisk?).
The consensus is that there's not much point trying to make a high-end SATA SSD, especially since the best you could aspire to is merely matching the 850 Pro's performance. All the high-performance efforts are focused on PCIe SSDs.
Not entirely true. There is still a need to match 850 Pro performance while lowering its energy consumption plus adding power loss protection. The former is important to the portable devices moreso in light of the even higher power consumption of PCIe based SSDs. The later via the addition of small & cheap capacitors, which 850 PRO line lacks for marketing reasons.
I saw now that Samsung released 4TB 850 EVO SATA SSDs. £1300. Affordable prices for large volume drives are on the way in a year or two... I think it's amazing.
The only thing that's really amazing is that companies like Micron, Intel, Samsung and Toshiba, after many years, are STILL releasing "new" drives which have very low capacities, performance that remains crippled by the transfer interface and ridiculously high prices. Oh, and that after all this time we are still years away from reasonably priced large capacity SSDs.
What are you talking about? We've been relying on magnetic storage for an exceedingly long time now and this is a young consumer market from less than a decade ago in formation.
I paid $500 for a Vertex 2 120GB drive relatively early on and I can definitely say, the ability to buy a $500 1TB drive for with infinitely better lifetime, consistent throughput and that happens to eliminate all major consumer performance barriers as well as innovating the technology in more complex ways to present a massive endurance increase from where it was initially. Performance is also better on all metrics.
Do you have the knowledge to explain thoroughly, why this is ridiculous (without ignoring the fundamental industry changes or market trends or technological barriers or company costs involved in development and so forth)? In less than 10 years, I can pay the same for 10x the storage increase in SSDs and that's ignoring the significant improvements, changes, limitations and technological innovation that was required to facilitate this instead of just driving NAND nodes lower for lower costs at the expense of subsequently, far lower endurance and reliability.
He wants the $/GB ratio to go down and it is not going down very fast. While the sizes go up, so do the prices, and so the ratio stays around $0.30-.70/GB. What we need is $0.10-.20/GB for SSDs to be more accessible. That seems another 5 years away at this point.
It's ridiculous because the technology to vastly increase capacities has been around. It's just that the entire industry is deliberately dragging its ass in releasing it to milk that cow. Performance hasn't gone anywhere in years and price/GB and capacity have been stalled for a very long time and the refrain I keep hearing is that what we currently have is 'good enough'. Consumers should actually care about the technology advancing and prices coming down, not rationalizing and making excuses for an industry deliberately not producing better products at a better value as you seem to be doing. Which lends me to think you own stock in some of these companies or something. Any system can only be as fast as its slowest component. If all you ever want to do is check your Facebook and read your emails then why not just go back to using magnetic storage since it's good enough after all. My time however is actually valuable to me. If I have to transfer a 4GB file from and SSD to magnetic storage then all of a sudden our good enough SSDs aren't good enough anymore. And if I need to store more than 10TB of data I have NO other option than to RAID and take all the bad that comes with that. And I don't need to be a professional to want something better. At this rate you'll be waiting far more than 10 years to see the improvements you're talking about.
You're looking for Serial Attached SCSI, then. It's currently at 12Gbps and will be moving to 22.5Gbps starting in a year or two. SATA won't be getting a direct successor; SATA Express made PCIe the official way forward, but M.2 and U.2 are the connector standards that actually caught on.
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edzieba - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
Nice to see some more 2TB m.2 drives available, currently the 960 Pro is the only one I am aware of.Dave Null - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
And the 960 Pro isn't really available. At this rate, Micron might beat Samsung to market.CoD511 - Tuesday, December 6, 2016 - link
In Australia, I've got guaranteed stock of the 2TB 960 Pro on the 28th of December.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
These are SATA drives. 960 Pro is PCIe so it's a very different drive to begin with.close - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
So is the name ECO (like in the text) or EVO (like in the table)? Because EVO/PRO would really be a confusing pick considering Samsung's lineup.Billy Tallis - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
ECO, not EVO. They're clashing with SanDisk's naming rather than Samsung's.shodanshok - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
Do these drives employ standard SATA command to limit the accessible LBAs? Moreover, on a most empty driver, is the controller "smart enough" to treat all free space as spare space?Billy Tallis - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
Yes, adjusting the DCO is a standard operation that can be done with free vendor-neutral tools like hdparm. I don't think the 5100 will adjust its flash management strategies without the DCO being imposed, but there is likely still some change in write performance as the drive and spare area fill up.Drumsticks - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
Nice to see, but I really miss the days of the m4 and the MX100 where Crucial had a high end drive that really hit Samsung hard on price. Nobody makes a high end drive today except for Samsung (and maybe Sandisk?).Billy Tallis - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
The consensus is that there's not much point trying to make a high-end SATA SSD, especially since the best you could aspire to is merely matching the 850 Pro's performance. All the high-performance efforts are focused on PCIe SSDs.Nexing - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
Not entirely true. There is still a need to match 850 Pro performance while lowering its energy consumption plus adding power loss protection. The former is important to the portable devices moreso in light of the even higher power consumption of PCIe based SSDs. The later via the addition of small & cheap capacitors, which 850 PRO line lacks for marketing reasons.HomeworldFound - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
I saw now that Samsung released 4TB 850 EVO SATA SSDs. £1300. Affordable prices for large volume drives are on the way in a year or two... I think it's amazing.Magichands8 - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
The only thing that's really amazing is that companies like Micron, Intel, Samsung and Toshiba, after many years, are STILL releasing "new" drives which have very low capacities, performance that remains crippled by the transfer interface and ridiculously high prices. Oh, and that after all this time we are still years away from reasonably priced large capacity SSDs.CoD511 - Tuesday, December 6, 2016 - link
What are you talking about? We've been relying on magnetic storage for an exceedingly long time now and this is a young consumer market from less than a decade ago in formation.I paid $500 for a Vertex 2 120GB drive relatively early on and I can definitely say, the ability to buy a $500 1TB drive for with infinitely better lifetime, consistent throughput and that happens to eliminate all major consumer performance barriers as well as innovating the technology in more complex ways to present a massive endurance increase from where it was initially. Performance is also better on all metrics.
Do you have the knowledge to explain thoroughly, why this is ridiculous (without ignoring the fundamental industry changes or market trends or technological barriers or company costs involved in development and so forth)? In less than 10 years, I can pay the same for 10x the storage increase in SSDs and that's ignoring the significant improvements, changes, limitations and technological innovation that was required to facilitate this instead of just driving NAND nodes lower for lower costs at the expense of subsequently, far lower endurance and reliability.
doggface - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
He wants the $/GB ratio to go down and it is not going down very fast. While the sizes go up, so do the prices, and so the ratio stays around $0.30-.70/GB. What we need is $0.10-.20/GB for SSDs to be more accessible. That seems another 5 years away at this point.Magichands8 - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
It's ridiculous because the technology to vastly increase capacities has been around. It's just that the entire industry is deliberately dragging its ass in releasing it to milk that cow. Performance hasn't gone anywhere in years and price/GB and capacity have been stalled for a very long time and the refrain I keep hearing is that what we currently have is 'good enough'. Consumers should actually care about the technology advancing and prices coming down, not rationalizing and making excuses for an industry deliberately not producing better products at a better value as you seem to be doing. Which lends me to think you own stock in some of these companies or something. Any system can only be as fast as its slowest component. If all you ever want to do is check your Facebook and read your emails then why not just go back to using magnetic storage since it's good enough after all. My time however is actually valuable to me. If I have to transfer a 4GB file from and SSD to magnetic storage then all of a sudden our good enough SSDs aren't good enough anymore. And if I need to store more than 10TB of data I have NO other option than to RAID and take all the bad that comes with that. And I don't need to be a professional to want something better. At this rate you'll be waiting far more than 10 years to see the improvements you're talking about.jabber - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
So when do we get SATA IV? I just want the same backwards capable connector with more throughput.Billy Tallis - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
You're looking for Serial Attached SCSI, then. It's currently at 12Gbps and will be moving to 22.5Gbps starting in a year or two. SATA won't be getting a direct successor; SATA Express made PCIe the official way forward, but M.2 and U.2 are the connector standards that actually caught on.jabber - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Yeah trouble is all those newer standards are a mess.M.2 can be SATA/NVME/Single Sided, Double Sided, B key? Whatever.
I just want one socket and one standard with no gotchas to look out for. Just like we've had with SATA for the past 10+ years.