I fondly remember when new developments in SSD products resulted in lower prices AND better performance. Now it seems that every new product is geared only for lower prices, and the performance is getting worse! Not to mention that the prices have gone up substantially in the past year, I don't think we are at the best value time for SSD's.
Can you provide evidence of performance getting worse? I haven't seen groundbreaking performance strides in anything but high-end/upper-mid (Samsung 960 series), but I haven't seen a performance regression.
i actually found this today, i was looking for a new budget 1tb SSD.
my current is a crucial m500 from 2013 i bagged for about £450, now the cheapest 1tb ss'd are about £300 but overall performance is about 30% of the m500..... in 4 years they have dropped 30% of the cost at the expense of 60% of the speed...
I looked on amazon.co.uk and the Samsung 850 Evo is 300 for 1TB. I also paged around in Anandtech reviews, and it has better performance than the M500, sometimes significantly so. The MX300 is 250 for 1TB, and it also scores very well on reviews, although I didn't do a very thorough comparison to the M500, it seems a little lower in performance compared to the 850Evo, which should still put it slightly ahead of the M500
That embecil Comey wanted to grab and be in the headlines, and he was manipulating evidence, etc ,and non-evidence, etc.to accomplish that. That's just one thing. He has no integrity. He showed himself to be just another Washington stooge. Hoover was also another Washington stooge and a degenerate, but was fired by the president that committed the crime that he fired Hoover for. If some entity could lob a couple of nukes onto Washington DC when whatever worthless miscreant president at the time is addressing both houses of congress, it would be a blessing!
The big difference is the Crucial M500 is MLC NAND and the Samsung 850 EVO and similar cheaper ones are TLC NAND. TLC is inherently slower than MLC; always. It's 2 bits per cell vs 3 bits per cell. It's an important distinction when comparing SLC, MLC, TLC and soon QLC. Maybe you didn't know?
If only the very site you were on had some sort of database of benchmarks you could check to see that, in fact, the 850 EVO is massively faster than the M500. Oh hey, look what I found! http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/805?vs=1398
The 600p isn't even targeted at the same market segment. That's like saying that every single SSD released since the Intel P4800X is a performance regression because it can't come close to those random IOPS. I'm talking about a performance regression within the same price segment.
The Intel 600P is TLC NAND and the Intel 750 is MLC NAND.... maybe you don't know the difference? TLC is inherently slower than MLC; 3 bits per cell vs 2 bits per cell.
Well, all new technologies cost the most at first, and much less later. Performance is the opposite. The worst at first, and much better later.
Next year, the price of Optane will be half of what it is now, but for a 512GB board, rather than the 375GB board it is now. Still expensive, sure. But you just have to learn to be patient.
On the bright side, Optane should be a lot cheaper to produce in the long run. While it's terrible as an accelerator, it's fantastic as a standalone drive. Prices will come down over time.
Is the average consumer one that even reads about these things? The average consumer just goes to Best Buy and a salesman tells them what to get. Anyone who reads AnandTech and/or actually read the reviews about Optane aren't average consumers anyway.
Its like Video Recorders or DVD players. The first ones weighed 30 kilos and were built like they were made during the Industrial Revolution. By the time they stopped making them they weighed 3 kilos, had 70% fewer parts and were mostly plastic.
Yep! Prices are getting higher in many cases even if they aren't dropping AND performance is either mediocre or just getting worse. Like I've said before, somewhere there are people buying such products. I don't know who they are or what's wrong withe them but I guess manufacturers are going to continue the trend for as long these people have money to lose. Even though it's dismaying to see I won't have much trouble waiting them out though. There's just very little value in most current offerings.
I'm one of those people buying such things. In my case, I was using mechanical hard disks until the middle of last year and I'm slowly (due to unusually high NAND prices) purchasing low performance SSDs for my home computers. Cheap, relatively slow SSDs still let me enjoy faster and more responsive storage. Since I'm not a power user or someone that's interested in waving around my consumer electronics like they're an extension of my reproductive organs, I have no want or need for the fastest and most expensive tier of solid state storage.
While you wonder what's wrong with us for our purchases, we wonder what's wrong with you for being worried about what we buy when you can simply mind your business and buy a higher end product meant to meet your needs or desires.
I just hope the shortage is going to end, and we can go back to cheaper SSDs. I'm also unsure of the usefulness of this drive, but I can see it being used in systems a notch above budget systems.
I just want a 2TB SSD that costs $200 US and performs better than a hard drive (no spin up delays, lower latency, no moving parts).
I could deal with 150MB/s transfer rates and even 2ms latencies for that. Still worlds better than the hard drives I use for storage now considering I have to spin them down as they are only accessed every few hours a couple times a day (but then stream data at 40MB/s+ for a couple hours).
Let's see. JMicron SSD drives stalled (I had one). Two different USB drive enclosures, featuring JMicron chipsets, caused random data corruption for me and my colleague. The DVD / Blueray drives on my desktop randomly fail to show after boot. The chip they're hanging off of? JMicron. Will I consciously buy anything from this company or their offshoots? Nope. Their chips are ubiquitous and hard to avoid, but what trash they are.
I have an ADATA SP600NS34 with JMicron JMF670H and it's a solid drive with 100% life remaining after 3TB written. No slowdowns or drive timeouts either.
I'm trying to hold off buying in any SSD drives at the moment. Prices have got silly compared to what I was paying a year ago for essentially a better product.
I would have, if I had any on hand to test. Nobody's offered one up for review in quite a while, and I've asked a few vendors for a Phison S11 drive but they're not interested.
My problem with dram-less ssd is the durability of the drive. How does the life-expectancy of this drive compare to other SSD drives. The DRAM in current SSD drives groups data accesses together, reducing the data array access. This increases performance and array durability. Array durability is proportional to the number of array accesses. I don't think this is a good idea and I would like to see if someone can prove to me that this will have a decent life span (5 years???)
SSDs that have external DRAM usually don't use it as a write cache for user data; it's just for caching the mapping metadata. A DRAMless controller like MK8115 can do pretty much the same amount of write combining and wear leveling that a mainstream controller can. There may be a slight increase in write amplification from the controller having to flush metadata updates to the flash more often, but mainstream drives don't want to buffer those writes too much either, for the same safety reasons they don't put user data in the DRAM.
Remember that write operations are the only ones that significantly affect drive lifetime. DRAMless controllers need to do more flash reads, but read disturb errors are still too rare for that to matter to drive reliability.
Yea no thanks if this is what DRAM-less drives are like I think I will stick to SSD's that can maintain their performance a lot better. I don't care if these drives are a bit cheaper if you end up swearing at your computer because the SSD is lagging then for peace of mind just spend the extra cash on a real SSD.
I just sold a gaming system to a customer that had a SSD installed as the windows drive. Yep it booted fast and was pretty peppy but if you tried to work the system it seemed like the SSD would bog right down to a crawl so I would assume it was a DRAM-Less SSD. When I sold the customer on the system I was going off of my own SSD usage on my gaming laptop & gaming desktop options which would never bog down like that. I guess the good news was the customer did come back a few days later and said the system was great and so fast that he never had to wait for stuff to load like he did before on his older setup so he was a happy camper I guess.
Shady? It was a pre built with 3 year warranty the finer detailed spec's were not revealed as in brands like SSD or system memory. He also wanted a gaming system but did not want to pay a lot of money. I would normally build the system myself as a custom so you know what every part is inside and you get to choose the build quality but since he wanted a gaming system on the cheap he got a pre built system. He is happy with it and it actually is a nice system for the money and he got a 3 year warranty from the OEM. So nothing shady going on here...lol
I am not sure if the price of such DRAM less SSDs is worth buying over a normal budget SSD. In every instance, it is performing very poorly against a budget SSD with DRAM.
As much as people complain about the low performance....when benchmarking the drive, why compare it against high end consumer SSD's? Compare it against HHD's and SSHDs's where it would actually make sense. This style of drive is not intended to compete against an EVO 850, maybe an MX300 but that would even be pushing it. It will be interesting to see where this is kind of budget SSD ends up on the $/GB scale when it actual reaches production.
People are actually getting scammed with the prebuild OEM systems with SSD because THAT's when they will include shi*tty dram-less SSD's (in bulk $5-10 off of each system to sell them at the same price is a lot for OEM's).
Similar to TLC SSD's, dram-less SSD's consistency goes to sh*t when you empty the SLC cache, if you don't implement it, even worse, you basically get writes slower than a 5400rpm HDD with the system pegging.
I would only touch 850 EVO's, Crucial MX300 for TLC, Kingston HyperX Savage or 850 pro for MLC.
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jardows2 - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I fondly remember when new developments in SSD products resulted in lower prices AND better performance. Now it seems that every new product is geared only for lower prices, and the performance is getting worse! Not to mention that the prices have gone up substantially in the past year, I don't think we are at the best value time for SSD's.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Can you provide evidence of performance getting worse? I haven't seen groundbreaking performance strides in anything but high-end/upper-mid (Samsung 960 series), but I haven't seen a performance regression.Sonic01 - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
i actually found this today, i was looking for a new budget 1tb SSD.my current is a crucial m500 from 2013 i bagged for about £450, now the cheapest 1tb ss'd are about £300 but overall performance is about 30% of the m500..... in 4 years they have dropped 30% of the cost at the expense of 60% of the speed...
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I looked on amazon.co.uk and the Samsung 850 Evo is 300 for 1TB. I also paged around in Anandtech reviews, and it has better performance than the M500, sometimes significantly so. The MX300 is 250 for 1TB, and it also scores very well on reviews, although I didn't do a very thorough comparison to the M500, it seems a little lower in performance compared to the 850Evo, which should still put it slightly ahead of the M500AlphaBlaster - Sunday, May 14, 2017 - link
That embecil Comey wanted to grab and be in the headlines, and he was manipulating evidence, etc ,and non-evidence, etc.to accomplish that. That's just one thing. He has no integrity. He showed himself to be just another Washington stooge. Hoover was also another Washington stooge and a degenerate, but was fired by the president that committed the crime that he fired Hoover for. If some entity could lob a couple of nukes onto Washington DC when whatever worthless miscreant president at the time is addressing both houses of congress, it would be a blessing!CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
The big difference is the Crucial M500 is MLC NAND and the Samsung 850 EVO and similar cheaper ones are TLC NAND. TLC is inherently slower than MLC; always. It's 2 bits per cell vs 3 bits per cell. It's an important distinction when comparing SLC, MLC, TLC and soon QLC. Maybe you didn't know?extide - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
Yeah, but the 850 is also using #d TLC, not planar TLC, and 3D TLC is a lot faster than planar TLC. Maybe you didn't know?extide - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
#d is supposed to be 3D, of courselowlymarine - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
If only the very site you were on had some sort of database of benchmarks you could check to see that, in fact, the 850 EVO is massively faster than the M500. Oh hey, look what I found! http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/805?vs=1398MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 11, 2017 - link
The 850 Evo is faster though, so I'm not sure what you're trying to sayromrunning - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Here's an example of performance regression - the Intel 600p versus any other Intel PCIe SSD (like the Intel 750 or P3700). Clear performance drop.Don't confuse it with price differences or target buyer - you only asked for an example of performance regression.
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
The 600p isn't even targeted at the same market segment. That's like saying that every single SSD released since the Intel P4800X is a performance regression because it can't come close to those random IOPS. I'm talking about a performance regression within the same price segment.CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
The Intel 600P is TLC NAND and the Intel 750 is MLC NAND.... maybe you don't know the difference? TLC is inherently slower than MLC; 3 bits per cell vs 2 bits per cell.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 11, 2017 - link
A. I know the difference. B. MLC vs TLC isn't even the point. C. My point still stands because the 600p is not targeted at the high end.satai - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
There are some cheap models and there some awesome models (Intel 750 and Intel Enterprise models, Samsung 960s, Optanes...). Pick yourself.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
The Intel Optane enterprise drive certainly is awesome, but I find it's price a bit hard to sell an average consumer on.melgross - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Well, all new technologies cost the most at first, and much less later. Performance is the opposite. The worst at first, and much better later.Next year, the price of Optane will be half of what it is now, but for a 512GB board, rather than the 375GB board it is now. Still expensive, sure. But you just have to learn to be patient.
WinterCharm - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
On the bright side, Optane should be a lot cheaper to produce in the long run. While it's terrible as an accelerator, it's fantastic as a standalone drive. Prices will come down over time.CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
Is the average consumer one that even reads about these things? The average consumer just goes to Best Buy and a salesman tells them what to get. Anyone who reads AnandTech and/or actually read the reviews about Optane aren't average consumers anyway.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 11, 2017 - link
True, but I doubt most of us still have the money for a $1,500 375GB SSDjabber - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Its like Video Recorders or DVD players. The first ones weighed 30 kilos and were built like they were made during the Industrial Revolution. By the time they stopped making them they weighed 3 kilos, had 70% fewer parts and were mostly plastic.Magichands8 - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Yep! Prices are getting higher in many cases even if they aren't dropping AND performance is either mediocre or just getting worse. Like I've said before, somewhere there are people buying such products. I don't know who they are or what's wrong withe them but I guess manufacturers are going to continue the trend for as long these people have money to lose. Even though it's dismaying to see I won't have much trouble waiting them out though. There's just very little value in most current offerings.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I'm not sure of an instance where performance has dropped in the same price band over the past couple of years. Please feel free to enlighten meBrokenCrayons - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I'm one of those people buying such things. In my case, I was using mechanical hard disks until the middle of last year and I'm slowly (due to unusually high NAND prices) purchasing low performance SSDs for my home computers. Cheap, relatively slow SSDs still let me enjoy faster and more responsive storage. Since I'm not a power user or someone that's interested in waving around my consumer electronics like they're an extension of my reproductive organs, I have no want or need for the fastest and most expensive tier of solid state storage.While you wonder what's wrong with us for our purchases, we wonder what's wrong with you for being worried about what we buy when you can simply mind your business and buy a higher end product meant to meet your needs or desires.
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I definitely respect your choices, as even a low-end SSD can best a HDD for metrics a typical home user would care about.melgross - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Right now, there are memory shortages. NAND shortages are expected to last until the end of the year. Then prices will begin dropping again.beginner99 - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
Yeah if this continues it will take less than a year and they will actually manage to perform worse than HDDs.JimmiG - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
I agree, unless you absolutely need more SSD storage right now, I'd recommend holding off until next year.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I just hope the shortage is going to end, and we can go back to cheaper SSDs. I'm also unsure of the usefulness of this drive, but I can see it being used in systems a notch above budget systems.looncraz - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I just want a 2TB SSD that costs $200 US and performs better than a hard drive (no spin up delays, lower latency, no moving parts).I could deal with 150MB/s transfer rates and even 2ms latencies for that. Still worlds better than the hard drives I use for storage now considering I have to spin them down as they are only accessed every few hours a couple times a day (but then stream data at 40MB/s+ for a couple hours).
I would buy three without hesitation.
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
That might be a long way awayvladx - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
You're gonna have to wait till mid-2019 for that.CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
You'll get that most likely when QLC drives come out. But consider they'll be for bulk storage rather than general use.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, May 11, 2017 - link
YepHomeworldFound - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
There's definitely some kind of manipulation occurring in the memory industry, it's happening with both DRAM and NAND.FH123 - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Let's see. JMicron SSD drives stalled (I had one). Two different USB drive enclosures, featuring JMicron chipsets, caused random data corruption for me and my colleague. The DVD / Blueray drives on my desktop randomly fail to show after boot. The chip they're hanging off of? JMicron. Will I consciously buy anything from this company or their offshoots? Nope. Their chips are ubiquitous and hard to avoid, but what trash they are.romrunning - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Don't forget the infamous JMicron "stutter" problem!vladx - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I have an ADATA SP600NS34 with JMicron JMF670H and it's a solid drive with 100% life remaining after 3TB written. No slowdowns or drive timeouts either.jabber - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I'm trying to hold off buying in any SSD drives at the moment. Prices have got silly compared to what I was paying a year ago for essentially a better product.romrunning - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
So true on the pricing woes - I'm hoping there is more MLC capacity coming on soon.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
samevladx - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
It will take until Q2 2018 for prices to start going down again.milli - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
You should have included other DRAM-less drives.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I would have, if I had any on hand to test. Nobody's offered one up for review in quite a while, and I've asked a few vendors for a Phison S11 drive but they're not interested.vladx - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
It's pretty obvious why, at least Maxiotek has some guts.bortiz - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
My problem with dram-less ssd is the durability of the drive. How does the life-expectancy of this drive compare to other SSD drives. The DRAM in current SSD drives groups data accesses together, reducing the data array access. This increases performance and array durability. Array durability is proportional to the number of array accesses. I don't think this is a good idea and I would like to see if someone can prove to me that this will have a decent life span (5 years???)vladx - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Whether a SSD IS DRAM-less or not doesn't influence life expectancy.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
SSDs that have external DRAM usually don't use it as a write cache for user data; it's just for caching the mapping metadata. A DRAMless controller like MK8115 can do pretty much the same amount of write combining and wear leveling that a mainstream controller can. There may be a slight increase in write amplification from the controller having to flush metadata updates to the flash more often, but mainstream drives don't want to buffer those writes too much either, for the same safety reasons they don't put user data in the DRAM.Remember that write operations are the only ones that significantly affect drive lifetime. DRAMless controllers need to do more flash reads, but read disturb errors are still too rare for that to matter to drive reliability.
CrazyElf - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
It is difficult for it to make the cut with a low 4k random read and write test like this SSD has.I think that the DRAM cache is well worth it.
I think it is best to hold off on SSDs for now.
rocky12345 - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Yea no thanks if this is what DRAM-less drives are like I think I will stick to SSD's that can maintain their performance a lot better. I don't care if these drives are a bit cheaper if you end up swearing at your computer because the SSD is lagging then for peace of mind just spend the extra cash on a real SSD.I just sold a gaming system to a customer that had a SSD installed as the windows drive. Yep it booted fast and was pretty peppy but if you tried to work the system it seemed like the SSD would bog right down to a crawl so I would assume it was a DRAM-Less SSD. When I sold the customer on the system I was going off of my own SSD usage on my gaming laptop & gaming desktop options which would never bog down like that. I guess the good news was the customer did come back a few days later and said the system was great and so fast that he never had to wait for stuff to load like he did before on his older setup so he was a happy camper I guess.
CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
So you sold someone something without researching the hardware in it yourself? Kinda shady but likely he still enjoyed it.rocky12345 - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
Shady? It was a pre built with 3 year warranty the finer detailed spec's were not revealed as in brands like SSD or system memory. He also wanted a gaming system but did not want to pay a lot of money. I would normally build the system myself as a custom so you know what every part is inside and you get to choose the build quality but since he wanted a gaming system on the cheap he got a pre built system. He is happy with it and it actually is a nice system for the money and he got a 3 year warranty from the OEM. So nothing shady going on here...lolwatzupken - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
I am not sure if the price of such DRAM less SSDs is worth buying over a normal budget SSD. In every instance, it is performing very poorly against a budget SSD with DRAM.Lolimaster - Sunday, May 14, 2017 - link
If you're not an OEM than will sells tons of system to uninformed customers, get a good TLC or MLC if possible.jabber - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
Bring back the good old BX100!nervegrind3r - Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - link
inZGamer - Saturday, May 13, 2017 - link
As much as people complain about the low performance....when benchmarking the drive, why compare it against high end consumer SSD's? Compare it against HHD's and SSHDs's where it would actually make sense. This style of drive is not intended to compete against an EVO 850, maybe an MX300 but that would even be pushing it. It will be interesting to see where this is kind of budget SSD ends up on the $/GB scale when it actual reaches production.Lolimaster - Sunday, May 14, 2017 - link
People are actually getting scammed with the prebuild OEM systems with SSD because THAT's when they will include shi*tty dram-less SSD's (in bulk $5-10 off of each system to sell them at the same price is a lot for OEM's).Similar to TLC SSD's, dram-less SSD's consistency goes to sh*t when you empty the SLC cache, if you don't implement it, even worse, you basically get writes slower than a 5400rpm HDD with the system pegging.
I would only touch 850 EVO's, Crucial MX300 for TLC, Kingston HyperX Savage or 850 pro for MLC.
genzai - Tuesday, May 16, 2017 - link
Seems like one good use for Optane would be to replace the DRAM (over a DDR interface) on drives like these.