Considering that Windows XP won't boot off of these things, I'm inclined to believe you. But that's not relevant to anyone who doesn't share your obsessions.
The tricky bit is the EVO uses a *little* Flash as SLC but mostly uses TLC. If you've got bursts of writes the SLC cache can handle them; if you sustain sequential writes for a long time, eventually it has to write to TLC which is slower than the MLC. Looking at those spec charts, the MLC drive is apparently fine without an SLC cache in practice; dunno, maybe it can get more MLC writes going in parallel since it's not a limited-size cache.
For most consumer or even workstation uses, I don't think you're gonna notice any difference. If for some weird reason I had to run a database on consumer drives, the PRO's endurance and sustained performance would count for something. But as someone who grew up with computers using HDDs, it's hard to go wrong with any halfway decent SSD today.
I am a high-end gamer 1st and a home productivity user second. I tested the Intel Optane 900P and the 960 PRO up against my Patriot Hellfire. I saw no appreciable difference between the 3 in my day to day use. My understanding is that even Windows 10 core is still designed around conventional hard drive use. But I could be wrong. If my Hellfire goes out I'd buy this new EVO to replace it probably.
You're definitely on to something there. I have an 960 evo. I noticed when copying large amount of small files, performance would turtle.
My understanding of SSDs is that they shouldn't be anywhere near as bad as harddrives when it came to such tasks, yet I saw performance remeniscent of harddrives.
Here's what I did: I had a small react project. The project has 47000 files, autogenered by NPM, while the whole folder is 320 MBs, so a massive amount of very small files. Copying that folder to another location on the drive is extremely slow, so I opened my task manager so I could monitor the resource use while it worked. First off: You'll see the CPU is barely allowed to work on the windows explorer process, instead something called Antimalware Service Executable hogs the CPU. Windows Explorer gets about 5-6% of the CPU time. That antimalware process starts hogging the moment I started copying.
In addition, Windows Explorer doesn't seem to be very smart about it, it still copies only one file at the time, something that makes sense for harddrives, but not SSDs.
To make sure I was sane, I packed that same folder using winrar, and then proceded to copy that file. Performance is then as advertized, instead of ~1MB per second, I saw those magical 1.5 GBs per second I was promised, though I had to make a bigger file for that to pop up.
In short, windows is extremely inefficent when copying large amounts of very small files. Main reason appears to be the antimalware measures they have going, another is inefficient design of the windows explorer app.
I'm surprised no one else commented, Antimalware Service Executable is Windows Defender scanning each file as it is queued before it is copied.
The older AV programs used to scan, say My Documents, once, then ignore until a certain amount of time had passed, maybe once a day. Windows Defender scans the folder with the real time scanner every single time you open the folder. Most AV do these days. I don't run a realtime scanner any more and have scheduled full scans few times a week.
Hi Billy, do you think it’s possible that readers would benefit more if benchmarks like these were mentioned with a clear caveat? For example the articles says:
“...both drives are now rated to hit 500k IOPS for random writes given sufficient queue depth...”
These numbers are mentioned as “improvements”. As we know while this is technically true, but is also practicality speaking false, since an extremely small percentage of users will ever benefit from queue depth 24 scenarios.
If you think most AT readers already understand this, I can’t argue with that. It’s plausible, and maybe most of them do know it, so let’s just stipulate that for the sake of argument. Then what’s the issue?
Still, It lends undue credibility to what improvements the product is actually offering, it’s misleading to the minority of readers who don’t yet know it’s a marketing tactic, and encourages manufacturers to emphasize them.
I’m aware that AT has explained this topic in other articles. That’s great and is consistent with the excellent standards you guys set. However, is it possible there’s an advantage to using some kind of phrasing similar to this whenever an article mentions very high QD numbers?
“...both drives are now rated to hit 500k IOPS at QD 24, although in most cases users will see no benefit related to this number (see our previous discussions on benchmarks and low queue depths).”
I understand how different performance metrics translate (roughly) into real world experiences, but I'm totally for this idea, as it would open up the article to more people without giving false impressions of value.
Nice, I'll wait for reviews on this one but if there's any decent improvement in real world testing, I'll get rid of my 960 Pro 1TB and get the 970 Pro. Shame about the 2TB Pro, but it makes sense at the same time. While I've long found 1TB to be the sweet spot for how I use my machine, I may consider the 2TB Evo this go round.
Disappointed at the lack of a 2TB pro. Hopefully samsung reconsiders. The 960 pro 2TB was drool-worthy, and 1TB just isnt enough to justify the 970 pro's pricetag.
Great possibly, 2TB 970 Pro will be available quite later.... But, I think 1TB is really enough, if you download a BD serie of about 300GB, and opening of it consumes another 300GB, operating system takes about 100~150GB, computer ram about 32GB, consumes 48GB roughly 800GB still 200GB free.
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ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
I have a compact flash card that boots Windows XP faster than these thingsBilly Tallis - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Considering that Windows XP won't boot off of these things, I'm inclined to believe you. But that's not relevant to anyone who doesn't share your obsessions.anactoraaron - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Only difference I see from the 960 EVO is improved SLC and a better warranty. Once you go beyond that cache there's no difference at all.iuli - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
i have read this article: http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/flash-data-cente...so, isnt the SLC from the EVO better than the MLC fromthe PRO?
vortmax2 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
The EVO has TLC, not SLC.twotwotwo - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
The tricky bit is the EVO uses a *little* Flash as SLC but mostly uses TLC. If you've got bursts of writes the SLC cache can handle them; if you sustain sequential writes for a long time, eventually it has to write to TLC which is slower than the MLC. Looking at those spec charts, the MLC drive is apparently fine without an SLC cache in practice; dunno, maybe it can get more MLC writes going in parallel since it's not a limited-size cache.For most consumer or even workstation uses, I don't think you're gonna notice any difference. If for some weird reason I had to run a database on consumer drives, the PRO's endurance and sustained performance would count for something. But as someone who grew up with computers using HDDs, it's hard to go wrong with any halfway decent SSD today.
Chaser - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
I am a high-end gamer 1st and a home productivity user second. I tested the Intel Optane 900P and the 960 PRO up against my Patriot Hellfire. I saw no appreciable difference between the 3 in my day to day use. My understanding is that even Windows 10 core is still designed around conventional hard drive use. But I could be wrong. If my Hellfire goes out I'd buy this new EVO to replace it probably.Gnomer87 - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link
You're definitely on to something there. I have an 960 evo. I noticed when copying large amount of small files, performance would turtle.My understanding of SSDs is that they shouldn't be anywhere near as bad as harddrives when it came to such tasks, yet I saw performance remeniscent of harddrives.
Here's what I did: I had a small react project. The project has 47000 files, autogenered by NPM, while the whole folder is 320 MBs, so a massive amount of very small files. Copying that folder to another location on the drive is extremely slow, so I opened my task manager so I could monitor the resource use while it worked. First off: You'll see the CPU is barely allowed to work on the windows explorer process, instead something called Antimalware Service Executable hogs the CPU. Windows Explorer gets about 5-6% of the CPU time. That antimalware process starts hogging the moment I started copying.
In addition, Windows Explorer doesn't seem to be very smart about it, it still copies only one file at the time, something that makes sense for harddrives, but not SSDs.
To make sure I was sane, I packed that same folder using winrar, and then proceded to copy that file. Performance is then as advertized, instead of ~1MB per second, I saw those magical 1.5 GBs per second I was promised, though I had to make a bigger file for that to pop up.
In short, windows is extremely inefficent when copying large amounts of very small files. Main reason appears to be the antimalware measures they have going, another is inefficient design of the windows explorer app.
mnelsoneorm - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - link
Use Robocopy instead of explorer :)0ldman79 - Monday, June 11, 2018 - link
I'm surprised no one else commented, Antimalware Service Executable is Windows Defender scanning each file as it is queued before it is copied.The older AV programs used to scan, say My Documents, once, then ignore until a certain amount of time had passed, maybe once a day. Windows Defender scans the folder with the real time scanner every single time you open the folder. Most AV do these days. I don't run a realtime scanner any more and have scheduled full scans few times a week.
WhitneyLand - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Hi Billy, do you think it’s possible that readers would benefit more if benchmarks like these were mentioned with a clear caveat? For example the articles says:“...both drives are now rated to hit 500k IOPS for random writes given sufficient queue depth...”
These numbers are mentioned as “improvements”. As we know while this is technically true, but is also practicality speaking false, since an extremely small percentage of users will ever benefit from queue depth 24 scenarios.
If you think most AT readers already understand this, I can’t argue with that. It’s plausible, and maybe most of them do know it, so let’s just stipulate that for the sake of argument. Then what’s the issue?
Still, It lends undue credibility to what improvements the product is actually offering, it’s misleading to the minority of readers who don’t yet know it’s a marketing tactic, and encourages manufacturers to emphasize them.
I’m aware that AT has explained this topic in other articles. That’s great and is consistent with the excellent standards you guys set. However, is it possible there’s an advantage to using some kind of phrasing similar to this whenever an article mentions very high QD numbers?
“...both drives are now rated to hit 500k IOPS at QD 24, although in most cases users will see no benefit related to this number (see our previous discussions on benchmarks and low queue depths).”
casperes1996 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
I understand how different performance metrics translate (roughly) into real world experiences, but I'm totally for this idea, as it would open up the article to more people without giving false impressions of value.Flying Aardvark - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Nice, I'll wait for reviews on this one but if there's any decent improvement in real world testing, I'll get rid of my 960 Pro 1TB and get the 970 Pro. Shame about the 2TB Pro, but it makes sense at the same time. While I've long found 1TB to be the sweet spot for how I use my machine, I may consider the 2TB Evo this go round.Samus - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Wow those prices. Something tells me the WD Black is still going to be the go to for economical NVMe performance.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link
Disappointed at the lack of a 2TB pro. Hopefully samsung reconsiders. The 960 pro 2TB was drool-worthy, and 1TB just isnt enough to justify the 970 pro's pricetag.karakarga - Saturday, April 28, 2018 - link
Great possibly, 2TB 970 Pro will be available quite later.... But, I think 1TB is really enough, if you download a BD serie of about 300GB, and opening of it consumes another 300GB, operating system takes about 100~150GB, computer ram about 32GB, consumes 48GB roughly 800GB still 200GB free.