Agree, it is an almost disposable storage device. On the other hand an average office/web user will not reach this level of writes for years, but somebody using NVMe drives in RAID for content creation will need to have like an ammo box of these drives nearby to keep swapping drives.
Maybe, maybe this type of drive, at this price point, isn't aimed at 'content creators'. Anyone earning a living off content creating is going to be using rather more expensive tools. Looks perfectly fine for the average user.
In the recent Anandtech review of the QLC 8TB nvme drive, I was really quite impressed the way the 8TB drive leveraged its vast storage space to overcome many of the QLC limitations. It was able to use up to 2TB as high speed SLC-level cache. Many people will rarely move more than 1 or 2 TB in a single operation.
Looking forward to 8TB QLC+ drives dropping to mortal prices.
You're asking the wrong question. What happens when you have a full drive (like most regular users end up doing because data tends to cruft up in there), and now you juggle all your operations in the little space you have free? Sure, wear leveling you might say but again, in an SSD with sub-mediocre performance AND endurance that will not go well because that's a lot of data you move around to do wear leveling. Keep in mind that wear leveling isn't about getting lower total wear but rather getting uniform wear and spread out concentration of write cycles (it actually increases wear by write amplification). Eventually the drive, depending on how its WL algorithms work, will start moving the long stationary data around to the blocks that were used more, in order to write the more dynamic data to those "pristine" blocks. *All* of that data has to be constantly shuffled for the WL to work as expected. That's how WL and garbage collection work and it's great when you have a lot of free space and basically treat it as a small drive with 7TB to spare to make up for shitty QLC.
You can't get something from nothing, having a lot of space makes the issue "less obvious" to the user, not "non-existent", and only if it's free. The issue is still there. The free space kept free is the price you pay for having a working drive. Like a CPU with 32 cores but you can never use more than 12 because they will out.
Even content creators do not have to worry as much, plus the serious ones still use Mechanical Hard drives, but usually the NAS quality ones like the IronWolf/Pro drives due to storage space per cost still being greatly cheaper. The SSD will be mainly used for the OS and applications to launch from, with a few using an SSD as a scrub drive, or RAID several mechanical drives together and use an SSD as a cache drive between them moving data much faster, while having also having the benefits of large storage.
I have seen normal people burn through 150TBW in about 2m. One of them used folding@home to help with the pandemic (IDK if that program was the cause). I forget what the other was doing.
Therefore, I also support the demand for higher endurance flash.
That sure as hell is not normal. My drive is 5 years old and only has 62 TBW. And its the only drive in my PC, so everything is done on it, 12 to 16 hours a day.
Or the firmware is at fault. Bugs in SSD firmwares happen and can cause very bad write efficiencies. I saw the same thing at work. Same workload given to 5 different brand/model drives, one drive ran through 1% of it's life expectancy every day, others were fine.
I have an 850 EVO that was the C drive in my old computer, now in as the D drive in my new one - I looked it up, I've had it closer to 6 years than 5, bought early 2015. As the D drive in this computer, it is my download drive, torrent temp storage, and basically all around junk collector drive - and it only has 16.2 TBW. I typically download to this drive, then copy things to my server, but really the most changing stuff besides the OS are on this drive. I don't do video production sort of tasks.
Yes but the point it how much data people write to their SSD, not the technology used. For the intended audience of these slower drives with lower endurance, the point being made here is that the endurance isn't really an issue. For people with use cases where these drives don't really make sense due to plenty of factors other than endurance, it might be an issue, but the people writing that much to the drive aren;t the people this drive is targeted at. Same goes with nearly every review ever posted here. It might be a basic budget product which is more than adequate for Mom and Pop to send emails and view pics of the grandkids, but ALWAYS some extreme user will pipe up with how useless the product is. Well - it's not for you, why should you care? Ma and Pa web browser and emailers don't need 64 core Threadrippers and 128GB RAM and the highest end video card on the market. If you do - then fine, get what suits your needs and ignore the products targeted at users who don't need it. All I'm saying. The key factor here is that this is an older drive and over its lifetime, it hasn't seen anywhere close to even this new drive's rated endurance, and I'm not a casual user. If this drive was around back then, I wouldn't have come close to hitting the limits of it, even though it's rated for far less writes than my 850 due to the technology used.
I have a PC with a NVMe SSD. This hosts both several frequently played games and my operating system. Anything that gets downloaded goes to that drive first.
It's a samsung 950 pro. 5 years old, and its just hit 10TBW after hosting god knows how many OS installations. Somehow I find it HIGHLY unlikely you know "normal people" who go through 150TB in 2 months.
Been using the same 512 GB SSD for 5+ years now. 12 to 16 hours a day. I have 62TBW now. Thats using it as a system/download/games/recording(not that often) drive. Given that I didnt install that many different games (since Im a more casual gamer now), 200 TBW seems low. Needs at least 400 TBW, which even my low 512 GB SSD offers, because its MLC. Its true that if youre a content creator you need much more than that.
Those numbers suggest this drive would last a user like you at least 15 years, and maybe 18. I have doubts that it would even be worth putting into whatever system you're running by then - and that's before we get into the nitty-gritty of what a drive is rated for vs. what it will actually do.
So this drive would last you nearly two decades then. And just because you hit the TBW limit doesnt mean the drive stops working. Techreport proved that years ago, and controllers have gotten a lot better since then.
The important thing to note as drives get larger is how important they can be for storing stuff like a Steam library. Game downloads are a read-heavy operation, and cheaper SSD storage with less endurance makes for a perfect storage medium.
Yes, the drive is absolutely fine for its intended use case and completely inappropriate when used in ways which were not intended (and where its performance would be miserable anyway). 🥱
In terms of my usage, for example, it's less "almost disposable" and more "extremely unlikely to wear out before it becomes useless in what will be my current system 10-15 years from now".
You are talking about 2 similarly but differently marketed drives, the Samsung 860 EVO is a step up or step down from QLC drives depending on how you look at it. The actual 200TBW or 600TBW is based slightly on warranty, data written to drive, along with a few other metrics, but in majority of cases an SSDs life will last several years to decades before it gives out. Well past the purchase date and in some cases past your lifetime.
There are other factors that will increase the WAF (Write Amplification Factor).
It's totally not uncommon to have a WAF of 2x, but if there are bugs, or firmwares too focused on speed or particular usage scenarios, the WAF can be much much higher.
Basically, it needs to be tested.
SMART data may provide this for you, look at your Average Nand writes. If you're at 10, then you're 1/100th through your 1000 P/E cycles. You can calculate out how many GB/TB's you've used by using the life expecancy the manufactuers advertise (200TB?), divided by that ratio, to find actual NAND writes (if the SMART CTL isn't giving it to you)
Had a crack at this earlier. Attributes were a bit obscure, but after some research, took value 241, LBAs written, and multiplied by 512 to work out bytes. From there, got about 2.28 TB or so, which squares with the ~2.4 TB value in Hwinfo. It's an 860 Evo 500 GB, just over a year old. I hardly play games or anything any more, so that's why the writes are so low. Also, round about May, put in a mechanical drive that was just collecting dust. It works well for storing films. Before that, space was a battle on the SSD.
My mistake! Made a blunder here. LBAs written (241) are the host/OS writes. Well, I can't seem to find SMART value 249 (NAND writes). Cunning work by Samsung, not exposing that value.
Is where "Wear Leveling Count" the one to use with the P/E cycles? Mine is at 5. Calculating 5 / 2,000 (for TLC, roughly) doesn't seem to yield a sensible value, against the drive's TBW and the OS writes. I'm stumped.
Another AT article helped here. Seems to be that 1 P/E cycle equals the capacity of the drive in NAND writes, roughly; and the raw Wear Levelling Count equates to used P/E cycles.
Roughly: Raw WLC x drive capacity == NAND writes
For me, I get: 5 x 500 == 2,500 GB
I'm scratching my head though because that yields a write amplification that seems erroneously small, only 1.09x (2,500 nand / 2,300 host).
'only 200 TBW'...based on my 10 TB per year as a 4 hours per day 'ordinary desktop user/surfer', the drive would be ending it's life in writes at merely 20 years for me... Best to shop elsewhere! :)
I just looked at the SMART data for my solid state devices, and I'm averaging 0.03 TB per day. over 660 (total power on) days on my oldest SSD. According to Aida64, the drive still has about 95% remaining lifetime. It's a Samsung Sata 850 EVO 500GB.
I like to think I'm not an average user, because this machine is running boinc always, and I use these SSDs for running virtual machines whose lifetime is typically less than 90 days each and, I'm also hosting a media server on this machine for in-home streaming.
I used to worry about longevity too, thinking myself to be a heavy user, but the numbers have not borne this suspicion out.
My current OS boot drive, with bitlocker ON is a sabrent 1TB nvme device, currently averaging 0.022 TB written per day over it's 160 day lifetime, and 99% lifetime remaining. If endurance is the only thing that kills these drives, I have many years of worry-free operation left in all these budget, consumer drives packed into my system.
Not exactly true. QLC drives are still a step up from mechanical drives in certain case scenarios, and depending on the pairing of the controller, can even come close or on par with some of their counterparts.
Rather have choice with competition rather then your narrow sight of vision as not every drive is built the same.
Price is always where the QLC drives have failed for me. As the article notes it is usually pretty easy to find an 8 channel with dram drive for minimal price premium over one of the QLC drives. Not to mention the other low cost variants with 4 channels and/or dramless that are almost always available at similar price points and while they might have some compromises also compared the better drives they are usually smaller compromises and easier to accept. I just don't see the QLC drive providing the value if there are TLC alternatives available.
This is the only one of the anti-QLC tropes I see routinely rolling around this comment section that I 100% unequivocally agree with.
A quick scan through a certain UK retailer shows the cheapest 1TB drive is the Intel 665p at £89, with the cheapest (relatively crappy) TLC drive at £96 and a WD Blue at £103. Worse still, at the 2TB level the positions flip and the WD Blue is *cheaper*.
At the 1TB level, even though I know objectively that the 665p would be fine for my purposes I'd still be tempted to pay the £14 extra for the Blue. If the difference were £25 or more, I wouldn't.
It's as if margarine were suddenly the same price as butter, or quite close, and the makers, exterting their marketing force, succeeded (almost succeeded) in blurring the distinction between the two.
It would be nice if somebody did a giant endurance experiment, finding out exactly where these QLC drives stand, like the one Techreport tackled in 2015, writing an horrific number of TBs till the drives "breathed their last." There will be surprises.
Not the best comparison, though – since butter was still widely available for reasonable prices.
QLC, by contrast, is intended to ruin the economy of scale of TLC. We could find farmers with butter churns pretty easily. Not so easy to find small-scale TLC foundries for the peasantry.
I 100% agree with @kpb321 I am also surprised that SK Hynix Gold P31 didn't make the last page budget consumer NVMe SSDs. MP400 1TB costs $114 on amazon, while one of the fastest budget drives in the review, P31 1TB, is currently at $120.60 - Which one you'd buy? I am "puzzled" by QLC drive makers' greed to raise the price per TB on bigger drives. They aren't the first to fill that niche - I expect the opposite - higher drives to be more expensive but priced the same or cheaper per TB.
I love how everyone's up in arms at 'Endurance'. Let me give you some insight on just how much 'endurance' you really need. I build a 'high speed storage' server, 16x 840 Evo 1TB, LSI MegaRaid 9750 16i back in 2014. We've been pounding the piss out of this server for *6* years. Not a single drive has reallocated sectors. I believe we've crossed a few petabytes on some of the drives, even after having to flash firmware updates and re-zero the drives due to the decay issue on the 840 Evo's. I'm sure these new drives will be just fine for the average user.
Let's not forget that most people aren't coming *remotely* close to what you're doing. I bet even most power users would struggle to *consistently* write more than 10-20GB per day average to these drives. Hitting the endurance ratings at these rates would take decades. The SSDs will have been long discarded by that point.
Even for the exceptional power user writing 100+GB a day, they would need to consistently do that every day for nearly 6 years to hit the endurance cap on the 1TB model. A user like this will also likely replace these drives within that time frame.
I have little to no worry about endurance for the vast majority of users even with QLC, and even that problem will go away with 2TB+ QLC.
That said, your use is unusual, and the 840s were particularly good drives especially with 1TB. The same usage patterns with 256gb TLC or 512GB QLC might well have seen them wear out. Thankfully we’re past that stage now. However you still had to flash firmware and re-zero the drives, and most people with SSDs nowadays won’t know how to do that.
The 840 Evo is probably the worst drive Samsung has ever shipped. The first gen 2D TLC memory in the drives caused a ton of performance issues thanks to losing the charge in the flash cells leaking out rather quickly. Samsung had to push out a bunch of firmware bandaids for the issue and switched to 3D TLC for the 850 Evo. Even then, I don't think many people managed to wear them out.
The 840 (not Pro, not Evo) would definitely take that title - it's like the Evo but without any caching or a firmware fix for the read degradation. Even with that said, I still have a couple of the absolute worst-case drives - the 840 120GB - hanging around in service as boot drives for seldom-used systems, which is a role they perform relatively well even in spite of their unique form of bit-rot. Maybe it's because Windows 10 basically rewrites the whole damn OS every 6 months? 😂
If your case is worth anything, then the logical conclusion for SSD manufacturers should be to increase warranty and TBW massively. Huh. I wonder why they dont.
This latest gen QLC with 8 channels looks too good so that it would disappear...
In sizes from 2TB and up, it iss probably a good choice for anyone looking for a cheap drive. And thanks to SLC caching 4k random writes are crazy fast.
One can always increase SLC cache amount by leaving 50-100G unpartitioned to make sure there is good amount of SOC cache even when filling the drive with one more Steam download.
That's a good point. Locking off 50GB a 2TB drive's capacity isn't a huge penalty to pay for the reward of having a guaranteed ~12.5GB of SLC cache available at all times, even with a "full" drive.
If you are getting a 1TB PCIe 3.0 SSD it'd be ridiculous not to get the P31, I replaced my WD SN750 that was chronically overheating and throttling in my system (65C-70C!) and the Hynix barely cracks 50C AND its faster. $110 shipped on Amazon.
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DZor - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Today's drives have less and less endurance.This Corsair 1TB model just 200TBW
For example Samsung 860 EVO is 600TBW!!!! Three times longer!!!
rozquilla - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Agree, it is an almost disposable storage device. On the other hand an average office/web user will not reach this level of writes for years, but somebody using NVMe drives in RAID for content creation will need to have like an ammo box of these drives nearby to keep swapping drives.Tomatotech - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Maybe, maybe this type of drive, at this price point, isn't aimed at 'content creators'. Anyone earning a living off content creating is going to be using rather more expensive tools. Looks perfectly fine for the average user.In the recent Anandtech review of the QLC 8TB nvme drive, I was really quite impressed the way the 8TB drive leveraged its vast storage space to overcome many of the QLC limitations. It was able to use up to 2TB as high speed SLC-level cache. Many people will rarely move more than 1 or 2 TB in a single operation.
Looking forward to 8TB QLC+ drives dropping to mortal prices.
danbob999 - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
The thing is, is that drive is 7 TB full, you don't get that same 2 TB cache. There is likely at most 256 GB left.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
And how many users are going to move 256GB at once?at_clucks - Wednesday, December 16, 2020 - link
You're asking the wrong question. What happens when you have a full drive (like most regular users end up doing because data tends to cruft up in there), and now you juggle all your operations in the little space you have free? Sure, wear leveling you might say but again, in an SSD with sub-mediocre performance AND endurance that will not go well because that's a lot of data you move around to do wear leveling. Keep in mind that wear leveling isn't about getting lower total wear but rather getting uniform wear and spread out concentration of write cycles (it actually increases wear by write amplification). Eventually the drive, depending on how its WL algorithms work, will start moving the long stationary data around to the blocks that were used more, in order to write the more dynamic data to those "pristine" blocks. *All* of that data has to be constantly shuffled for the WL to work as expected. That's how WL and garbage collection work and it's great when you have a lot of free space and basically treat it as a small drive with 7TB to spare to make up for shitty QLC.You can't get something from nothing, having a lot of space makes the issue "less obvious" to the user, not "non-existent", and only if it's free. The issue is still there. The free space kept free is the price you pay for having a working drive. Like a CPU with 32 cores but you can never use more than 12 because they will out.
Maverick009 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Even content creators do not have to worry as much, plus the serious ones still use Mechanical Hard drives, but usually the NAS quality ones like the IronWolf/Pro drives due to storage space per cost still being greatly cheaper. The SSD will be mainly used for the OS and applications to launch from, with a few using an SSD as a scrub drive, or RAID several mechanical drives together and use an SSD as a cache drive between them moving data much faster, while having also having the benefits of large storage.Beaver M. - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
No. You need a fast SSD when editing. A HDD is only useful for archiving anymore.niva - Wednesday, December 16, 2020 - link
Seriously, did you even read his comment?Beaver M. - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
What? Youre acting as if what he claimed is any proof.ballsystemlord - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
I have seen normal people burn through 150TBW in about 2m. One of them used folding@home to help with the pandemic (IDK if that program was the cause). I forget what the other was doing.Therefore, I also support the demand for higher endurance flash.
Ithaqua - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
150TB in 2 minutes? That is some massive write speeds.Unashamed_unoriginal_username_x86 - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
1250GB/s or 157 PCIe 6.0 lanes' bandwidthSamus - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
I just hopped in my DeLorean to check and this is the norm in 2029!ballsystemlord - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
2 months, silly. ;)Gigaplex - Wednesday, December 16, 2020 - link
Lower case m as a unit of time signifies minutes, not months, silly.Beaver M. - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
That sure as hell is not normal.My drive is 5 years old and only has 62 TBW. And its the only drive in my PC, so everything is done on it, 12 to 16 hours a day.
Spunjji - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Seconding this; whatever they were doing was not "normal".joesiv - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Or the firmware is at fault. Bugs in SSD firmwares happen and can cause very bad write efficiencies. I saw the same thing at work. Same workload given to 5 different brand/model drives, one drive ran through 1% of it's life expectancy every day, others were fine.rrinker - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
I have an 850 EVO that was the C drive in my old computer, now in as the D drive in my new one - I looked it up, I've had it closer to 6 years than 5, bought early 2015. As the D drive in this computer, it is my download drive, torrent temp storage, and basically all around junk collector drive - and it only has 16.2 TBW. I typically download to this drive, then copy things to my server, but really the most changing stuff besides the OS are on this drive. I don't do video production sort of tasks.Oxford Guy - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
850 EVO is 3D TLC built with a fairly large node.rrinker - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
Yes but the point it how much data people write to their SSD, not the technology used. For the intended audience of these slower drives with lower endurance, the point being made here is that the endurance isn't really an issue. For people with use cases where these drives don't really make sense due to plenty of factors other than endurance, it might be an issue, but the people writing that much to the drive aren;t the people this drive is targeted at.Same goes with nearly every review ever posted here. It might be a basic budget product which is more than adequate for Mom and Pop to send emails and view pics of the grandkids, but ALWAYS some extreme user will pipe up with how useless the product is. Well - it's not for you, why should you care? Ma and Pa web browser and emailers don't need 64 core Threadrippers and 128GB RAM and the highest end video card on the market. If you do - then fine, get what suits your needs and ignore the products targeted at users who don't need it. All I'm saying. The key factor here is that this is an older drive and over its lifetime, it hasn't seen anywhere close to even this new drive's rated endurance, and I'm not a casual user. If this drive was around back then, I wouldn't have come close to hitting the limits of it, even though it's rated for far less writes than my 850 due to the technology used.
SodaAnt - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
Folding@Home was not the cause, it uses next to no disk.Mobile-Dom - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
"normal people""Folding@home"
hmm
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
"normal people"I have a PC with a NVMe SSD. This hosts both several frequently played games and my operating system. Anything that gets downloaded goes to that drive first.
It's a samsung 950 pro. 5 years old, and its just hit 10TBW after hosting god knows how many OS installations. Somehow I find it HIGHLY unlikely you know "normal people" who go through 150TB in 2 months.
Beaver M. - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
Been using the same 512 GB SSD for 5+ years now. 12 to 16 hours a day.I have 62TBW now. Thats using it as a system/download/games/recording(not that often) drive.
Given that I didnt install that many different games (since Im a more casual gamer now), 200 TBW seems low. Needs at least 400 TBW, which even my low 512 GB SSD offers, because its MLC.
Its true that if youre a content creator you need much more than that.
Spunjji - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Those numbers suggest this drive would last a user like you at least 15 years, and maybe 18. I have doubts that it would even be worth putting into whatever system you're running by then - and that's before we get into the nitty-gritty of what a drive is rated for vs. what it will actually do.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
So this drive would last you nearly two decades then. And just because you hit the TBW limit doesnt mean the drive stops working. Techreport proved that years ago, and controllers have gotten a lot better since then.https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endura...
Beaver M. - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
It gets a lot slower and there will be NAND fatigue.mukiex - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
The important thing to note as drives get larger is how important they can be for storing stuff like a Steam library. Game downloads are a read-heavy operation, and cheaper SSD storage with less endurance makes for a perfect storage medium.Spunjji - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Yes, the drive is absolutely fine for its intended use case and completely inappropriate when used in ways which were not intended (and where its performance would be miserable anyway). 🥱In terms of my usage, for example, it's less "almost disposable" and more "extremely unlikely to wear out before it becomes useless in what will be my current system 10-15 years from now".
zdz - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Don't need to look at Samsung. Corsair MP500 1 TB (previous generation model) had 1700 TBW. Eight times more. Today's drive are becoming creap.zdz - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
I meant mp510, sorry.Makaveli - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
Yup the Corsair MP600 1TB which is based on the E16 controller is rated for 1800TBW.Maverick009 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
You are talking about 2 similarly but differently marketed drives, the Samsung 860 EVO is a step up or step down from QLC drives depending on how you look at it. The actual 200TBW or 600TBW is based slightly on warranty, data written to drive, along with a few other metrics, but in majority of cases an SSDs life will last several years to decades before it gives out. Well past the purchase date and in some cases past your lifetime.GeoffreyA - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
Using Kristian's 850 Evo calculations as a guide, I got the following values, assuming a 1,000 p/e cycle for QLC on a 1 TB drive:20 GB/day (with 1.5x write amp) == 93.52 years
50 GB/day (1.5x w.a.) == 37.4 y
100 GB/day (3x w.a.) == 9.35 y
Hopefully, I didn't muck it all up :)
Spunjji - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Nice! Looks like it would be perfectly suitable for the lower-end users that QLC drives are aimed at.But hey, number go down, so all the NAND ranters have a sad.
GeoffreyA - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
I'm sure the Fact Rewriting Squad can work wonders with those values ;)joesiv - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Good idea using P/E cycles.Just remember, OS writes != NAND writes.
There are other factors that will increase the WAF (Write Amplification Factor).
It's totally not uncommon to have a WAF of 2x, but if there are bugs, or firmwares too focused on speed or particular usage scenarios, the WAF can be much much higher.
Basically, it needs to be tested.
SMART data may provide this for you, look at your Average Nand writes.
If you're at 10, then you're 1/100th through your 1000 P/E cycles. You can calculate out how many GB/TB's you've used by using the life expecancy the manufactuers advertise (200TB?), divided by that ratio, to find actual NAND writes (if the SMART CTL isn't giving it to you)
Good luck!
GeoffreyA - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
Had a crack at this earlier. Attributes were a bit obscure, but after some research, took value 241, LBAs written, and multiplied by 512 to work out bytes. From there, got about 2.28 TB or so, which squares with the ~2.4 TB value in Hwinfo. It's an 860 Evo 500 GB, just over a year old. I hardly play games or anything any more, so that's why the writes are so low. Also, round about May, put in a mechanical drive that was just collecting dust. It works well for storing films. Before that, space was a battle on the SSD.GeoffreyA - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
My mistake! Made a blunder here. LBAs written (241) are the host/OS writes. Well, I can't seem to find SMART value 249 (NAND writes). Cunning work by Samsung, not exposing that value.Is where "Wear Leveling Count" the one to use with the P/E cycles? Mine is at 5. Calculating 5 / 2,000 (for TLC, roughly) doesn't seem to yield a sensible value, against the drive's TBW and the OS writes. I'm stumped.
GeoffreyA - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
Another AT article helped here. Seems to be that 1 P/E cycle equals the capacity of the drive in NAND writes, roughly; and the raw Wear Levelling Count equates to used P/E cycles.Roughly: Raw WLC x drive capacity == NAND writes
For me, I get: 5 x 500 == 2,500 GB
I'm scratching my head though because that yields a write amplification that seems erroneously small, only 1.09x (2,500 nand / 2,300 host).
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8239/update-on-sams...
MDD1963 - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
'only 200 TBW'...based on my 10 TB per year as a 4 hours per day 'ordinary desktop user/surfer', the drive would be ending it's life in writes at merely 20 years for me... Best to shop elsewhere! :)nucc1 - Wednesday, December 16, 2020 - link
I just looked at the SMART data for my solid state devices, and I'm averaging 0.03 TB per day. over 660 (total power on) days on my oldest SSD. According to Aida64, the drive still has about 95% remaining lifetime. It's a Samsung Sata 850 EVO 500GB.I like to think I'm not an average user, because this machine is running boinc always, and I use these SSDs for running virtual machines whose lifetime is typically less than 90 days each and, I'm also hosting a media server on this machine for in-home streaming.
I used to worry about longevity too, thinking myself to be a heavy user, but the numbers have not borne this suspicion out.
My current OS boot drive, with bitlocker ON is a sabrent 1TB nvme device, currently averaging 0.022 TB written per day over it's 160 day lifetime, and 99% lifetime remaining. If endurance is the only thing that kills these drives, I have many years of worry-free operation left in all these budget, consumer drives packed into my system.
shabby - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Go home corsair, you're drunk...You guys should stop accepting these overpriced qlc junk drives for review.
boozed - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Why, so we'll never know how they perform?shabby - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
We don't need to know how they perform, just their price, we know they all perform like shit.Maverick009 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Not exactly true. QLC drives are still a step up from mechanical drives in certain case scenarios, and depending on the pairing of the controller, can even come close or on par with some of their counterparts.Rather have choice with competition rather then your narrow sight of vision as not every drive is built the same.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, December 16, 2020 - link
And then when a QLC drive comes out that's actually good, we'd never know...kpb321 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Price is always where the QLC drives have failed for me. As the article notes it is usually pretty easy to find an 8 channel with dram drive for minimal price premium over one of the QLC drives. Not to mention the other low cost variants with 4 channels and/or dramless that are almost always available at similar price points and while they might have some compromises also compared the better drives they are usually smaller compromises and easier to accept. I just don't see the QLC drive providing the value if there are TLC alternatives available.Spunjji - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
This is the only one of the anti-QLC tropes I see routinely rolling around this comment section that I 100% unequivocally agree with.A quick scan through a certain UK retailer shows the cheapest 1TB drive is the Intel 665p at £89, with the cheapest (relatively crappy) TLC drive at £96 and a WD Blue at £103. Worse still, at the 2TB level the positions flip and the WD Blue is *cheaper*.
At the 1TB level, even though I know objectively that the 665p would be fine for my purposes I'd still be tempted to pay the £14 extra for the Blue. If the difference were £25 or more, I wouldn't.
GeoffreyA - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
It's as if margarine were suddenly the same price as butter, or quite close, and the makers, exterting their marketing force, succeeded (almost succeeded) in blurring the distinction between the two.It would be nice if somebody did a giant endurance experiment, finding out exactly where these QLC drives stand, like the one Techreport tackled in 2015, writing an horrific number of TBs till the drives "breathed their last." There will be surprises.
Oxford Guy - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
They will succeed. Getting everyone to go to a small form factor was very helpful, along with, apparently, not producing TLC in 1024Gbit dies.Margarine was superior to butter back in the day, remember? Superior partially hydrogenated technology. Because they said so.
Oxford Guy - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Not the best comparison, though – since butter was still widely available for reasonable prices.QLC, by contrast, is intended to ruin the economy of scale of TLC. We could find farmers with butter churns pretty easily. Not so easy to find small-scale TLC foundries for the peasantry.
GeoffreyA - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
"Margarine was superior to butter back in the day, remember? Superior partially hydrogenated technology. Because they said so."Nice one.
Oxford Guy - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
QLC doesn't need "tropes" any more than it needs cheerleading.Reality is that 16 voltage states is more problematic than 8 and fewer.
boredsysadmin - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
I 100% agree with @kpb321I am also surprised that SK Hynix Gold P31 didn't make the last page budget consumer NVMe SSDs. MP400 1TB costs $114 on amazon, while one of the fastest budget drives in the review, P31 1TB, is currently at $120.60 - Which one you'd buy? I am "puzzled" by QLC drive makers' greed to raise the price per TB on bigger drives. They aren't the first to fill that niche - I expect the opposite - higher drives to be more expensive but priced the same or cheaper per TB.
Drkrieger01 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
I love how everyone's up in arms at 'Endurance'. Let me give you some insight on just how much 'endurance' you really need. I build a 'high speed storage' server, 16x 840 Evo 1TB, LSI MegaRaid 9750 16i back in 2014. We've been pounding the piss out of this server for *6* years. Not a single drive has reallocated sectors. I believe we've crossed a few petabytes on some of the drives, even after having to flash firmware updates and re-zero the drives due to the decay issue on the 840 Evo's.I'm sure these new drives will be just fine for the average user.
inighthawki - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Let's not forget that most people aren't coming *remotely* close to what you're doing. I bet even most power users would struggle to *consistently* write more than 10-20GB per day average to these drives. Hitting the endurance ratings at these rates would take decades. The SSDs will have been long discarded by that point.Even for the exceptional power user writing 100+GB a day, they would need to consistently do that every day for nearly 6 years to hit the endurance cap on the 1TB model. A user like this will also likely replace these drives within that time frame.
Tomatotech - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
I have little to no worry about endurance for the vast majority of users even with QLC, and even that problem will go away with 2TB+ QLC.That said, your use is unusual, and the 840s were particularly good drives especially with 1TB. The same usage patterns with 256gb TLC or 512GB QLC might well have seen them wear out. Thankfully we’re past that stage now. However you still had to flash firmware and re-zero the drives, and most people with SSDs nowadays won’t know how to do that.
madmilk - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
The 840 Evo is probably the worst drive Samsung has ever shipped. The first gen 2D TLC memory in the drives caused a ton of performance issues thanks to losing the charge in the flash cells leaking out rather quickly. Samsung had to push out a bunch of firmware bandaids for the issue and switched to 3D TLC for the 850 Evo. Even then, I don't think many people managed to wear them out.Beaver M. - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
My 840 is stored at low temperatures 5 months a year without any power source. Still works like new.Spunjji - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
The 840 (not Pro, not Evo) would definitely take that title - it's like the Evo but without any caching or a firmware fix for the read degradation. Even with that said, I still have a couple of the absolute worst-case drives - the 840 120GB - hanging around in service as boot drives for seldom-used systems, which is a role they perform relatively well even in spite of their unique form of bit-rot. Maybe it's because Windows 10 basically rewrites the whole damn OS every 6 months? 😂Oxford Guy - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
"which is a role they perform relatively well even in"Not according to HardOCP which found they had worse steady state performance than laptop hard drives.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, December 16, 2020 - link
It was still better than the 840 non-EvoBeaver M. - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
If your case is worth anything, then the logical conclusion for SSD manufacturers should be to increase warranty and TBW massively.Huh. I wonder why they dont.
joesiv - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Care to share your SMART data for one of the drives? I'm curious.lmcd - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
While this drive is an interesting reference point, that extra $20 (or less) for a SK Hynix P31 is easily worth it.Zzzoom - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
DWPD calculations on page 1 are wrong.zepi - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
This latest gen QLC with 8 channels looks too good so that it would disappear...In sizes from 2TB and up, it iss probably a good choice for anyone looking for a cheap drive. And thanks to SLC caching 4k random writes are crazy fast.
One can always increase SLC cache amount by leaving 50-100G unpartitioned to make sure there is good amount of SOC cache even when filling the drive with one more Steam download.
Spunjji - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
That's a good point. Locking off 50GB a 2TB drive's capacity isn't a huge penalty to pay for the reward of having a guaranteed ~12.5GB of SLC cache available at all times, even with a "full" drive.kavanoz - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
When will Anandtech review Western Digital Black SN850?Samus - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
If you are getting a 1TB PCIe 3.0 SSD it'd be ridiculous not to get the P31, I replaced my WD SN750 that was chronically overheating and throttling in my system (65C-70C!) and the Hynix barely cracks 50C AND its faster. $110 shipped on Amazon.Oxford Guy - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Remember... if the drive doesn't fail spectacularly then it just has to be good quality.Speaking of "tropes"...
Paying more than one should for inferior technology is not a problem at all. As long as the drive doesn't kick the bucket then it's all good.
Snowleopard3000 - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Does anyone know where to get 15x15x2mm Soft Silicone Thermal Conductive Pads for the M.2 drives, I am specifically looking for 2mm thick ones.