That's some crappy endurance right there. 240TB on the 960GB drive means 250 p/e cycles. Probably a good drive to put your games on, since you usually write those once and rarely update them afterwards.
not really, games are updated rather frequently. As an example, a quick glance at my downloads on steam today shows 7 games were updated since 3am this morning (it's 5:47pm CST right now)
I've been eyeing the Sandisk Ultra II for my steam library. The 960 GB version has been as cheap as $199 on amazon and routinely drops to $249.99.
Updates might add new assets to the game as well, however, that's OK, not as bad as continuously rewriting big files in their entirety. At any rate, those updates are still fairly small relative to the entire games, and not a concern in terms of SSD endurance.
Game updates are completely negligible relative to the endurance of even TLC NAND. The solder points on the SSD will fail before steam exhausts the NAND endurance.
You do realize that the entire game wasn't updated right? If a 30 GB had to re-download itself every single time it patched itself, that would be absurd. I reckon those 7 games used less than 1 GB tops.
Specsheet endurance numbers are almost always about market segmenting/warranty limitations, and not anywhere near the actual hardware limits. The manufacturers don't want to cannibalize their highly profitable enterprise lines with cheap consumer drives; so they set the warrantied wear limits low enough that enterprise users won't touch them because if something went wrong they'd be out of support. To minimize warranty claims from normal consumers they also set the limits well below typical physical limits; this way even a customer who got a low edge of the bell curve drive and was doing a pathological workload that resulted in abnormally high write amplification will still hit the specsheet endurance number before actually using up the available spare area on the drive and being able to claim a replacement.
It would have 250 p/e if we lived in a perfect world, where write amplification was 1. But it isn't, so endurance of the actual flash is most certainly higher. I'm guessing around 400-500 p/e
The actual flash is probably rated at 1,000 cycles. They are being very conservative here, by probably dividing by two and then assuming avg write amp of 2.
In all reality the flash will probably last for far more p/e cycles than 1,000. All of the long endurance tests of SSD's that I have seen have gone WAY beyond their spec'd life.
With more of the marketshare of computers being taken by laptops (and other battery powered portable formfactors) I don't see how planar TLC SSDs can really find a lot of marketshare due to their generally poor idle and perf/W characteristics.
Yes, I'm intentionally sidestepping discussions about endurance.
I posted about half of my thought process. I strongly believe in SSDs for the masses, I just don't think this is the set of compromises that will get us there.
I know so many people who use a laptop as their primary work machine, often times away from the wall. These people are also often on the go, and to me having a spinning disk drive for this usage scenario just seems silly. They're sitting around for minutes waiting for Windows to boot wasting productive time and chewing up battery. Also, since these users are highly mobile, I'm constantly terrified that one wrong jostle of the chassis could lead to disk failure and catastrophic dataloss. Sure, a backup can be a godsend to avoid losing you projects, but the amount of downtime you'd have restoring your work environment is costly in terms of lost productivity and frustration.
The current crop of budget planar TLC SSDs, while better than a spinning disk for most of the caveats above, still have too many tradeoffs compared to the marginal price premium of an MLC or larger process-node 3D TLC.
Performance is lower, power consumption is higher, and although long term (non-endurance related) reliability is still largely unknown due to the short time these drives have been on the market, I can't help but wonder if these "cut every possible corner to minimize BOM" drives will really stand the test of time.
$70 for a 240GB Trion 150? I'd pay the extra $15 to get a 250GB 850 Evo every time. Don't have $15? Skip going out to for a meal once a week for the next two weeks. Don't have $85? Maybe you shouldn't be spending your money on computer parts.
I disagree - the SSD industry does have to move towards lower prices (at almost any cost) to increase SSD adoption. Price/GB is the biggest barrier for SSDs, and even a BX200 will beat a 5400 RPM HDD for random accesses.
With regards to write durability, remember that HDDs are notoriously unreliable.
It's just because Samsung did so well. This is just the natural progression of NAND without the early and aggressive development of Samsung's 3D NAND and excludes the fact that Samsung is a vertical manufacturer which has aggressive pricing on their 3D NAND products.
What folks here tend to forget is that the drives can get even cheaper and poorer performing and they will still be great SSDs. Why? Well there is still a megaton of older SATA II kit out there that will gladly take a SSD giving it 280MBps with low latency all day long.
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bug77 - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
That's some crappy endurance right there. 240TB on the 960GB drive means 250 p/e cycles.Probably a good drive to put your games on, since you usually write those once and rarely update them afterwards.
eek2121 - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
not really, games are updated rather frequently. As an example, a quick glance at my downloads on steam today shows 7 games were updated since 3am this morning (it's 5:47pm CST right now)I've been eyeing the Sandisk Ultra II for my steam library. The 960 GB version has been as cheap as $199 on amazon and routinely drops to $249.99.
eek2121 - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
It's also worth noting that the 1 TB 850 evo is on sale right now for $289.99. If only I had the money: http://amzn.to/1K1vKzfddriver - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
Games update the executable, which is tiny - usually less than 50mb compared to the game assetsDigitalFreak - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
You're a bit out of date. Steam just got done downloading a couple of GB of updates for my games.edzieba - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Even if Steam downloaded 10GB of game updates per day, that's still 24,000 days (65 years) before hitting the write endurance limit.ddriver - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Updates might add new assets to the game as well, however, that's OK, not as bad as continuously rewriting big files in their entirety. At any rate, those updates are still fairly small relative to the entire games, and not a concern in terms of SSD endurance.eek2121 - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
You don't game much do you?saratoga4 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Game updates are completely negligible relative to the endurance of even TLC NAND. The solder points on the SSD will fail before steam exhausts the NAND endurance.Golgatha - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Caught two of those 960 Ultra II drives for sub-$200 each between Black Friday and New Year's Day to put my games on. Good stuff!jkhoward - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
You do realize that the entire game wasn't updated right? If a 30 GB had to re-download itself every single time it patched itself, that would be absurd. I reckon those 7 games used less than 1 GB tops.ERJ - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
According to http://www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850... the write endurance of the 1TB 850 Evo is 150TB so 240TB doesn't seem too bad.bug77 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Yet I'm having a hard time believing this planar TLC can do better than V-NAND.WinterCharm - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Anandtech is pretty trustworthy. What's so hard to believe?DanNeely - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Specsheet endurance numbers are almost always about market segmenting/warranty limitations, and not anywhere near the actual hardware limits. The manufacturers don't want to cannibalize their highly profitable enterprise lines with cheap consumer drives; so they set the warrantied wear limits low enough that enterprise users won't touch them because if something went wrong they'd be out of support. To minimize warranty claims from normal consumers they also set the limits well below typical physical limits; this way even a customer who got a low edge of the bell curve drive and was doing a pathological workload that resulted in abnormally high write amplification will still hit the specsheet endurance number before actually using up the available spare area on the drive and being able to claim a replacement.hojnikb - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
thats not how you get p/e.It would have 250 p/e if we lived in a perfect world, where write amplification was 1. But it isn't, so endurance of the actual flash is most certainly higher. I'm guessing around 400-500 p/e
extide - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
The actual flash is probably rated at 1,000 cycles. They are being very conservative here, by probably dividing by two and then assuming avg write amp of 2.In all reality the flash will probably last for far more p/e cycles than 1,000. All of the long endurance tests of SSD's that I have seen have gone WAY beyond their spec'd life.
MrCommunistGen - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
With more of the marketshare of computers being taken by laptops (and other battery powered portable formfactors) I don't see how planar TLC SSDs can really find a lot of marketshare due to their generally poor idle and perf/W characteristics.Yes, I'm intentionally sidestepping discussions about endurance.
MrCommunistGen - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
I posted about half of my thought process. I strongly believe in SSDs for the masses, I just don't think this is the set of compromises that will get us there.I know so many people who use a laptop as their primary work machine, often times away from the wall. These people are also often on the go, and to me having a spinning disk drive for this usage scenario just seems silly. They're sitting around for minutes waiting for Windows to boot wasting productive time and chewing up battery. Also, since these users are highly mobile, I'm constantly terrified that one wrong jostle of the chassis could lead to disk failure and catastrophic dataloss. Sure, a backup can be a godsend to avoid losing you projects, but the amount of downtime you'd have restoring your work environment is costly in terms of lost productivity and frustration.
The current crop of budget planar TLC SSDs, while better than a spinning disk for most of the caveats above, still have too many tradeoffs compared to the marginal price premium of an MLC or larger process-node 3D TLC.
Performance is lower, power consumption is higher, and although long term (non-endurance related) reliability is still largely unknown due to the short time these drives have been on the market, I can't help but wonder if these "cut every possible corner to minimize BOM" drives will really stand the test of time.
$70 for a 240GB Trion 150? I'd pay the extra $15 to get a 250GB 850 Evo every time. Don't have $15? Skip going out to for a meal once a week for the next two weeks. Don't have $85? Maybe you shouldn't be spending your money on computer parts.
chlamchowder - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
I disagree - the SSD industry does have to move towards lower prices (at almost any cost) to increase SSD adoption. Price/GB is the biggest barrier for SSDs, and even a BX200 will beat a 5400 RPM HDD for random accesses.With regards to write durability, remember that HDDs are notoriously unreliable.
zodiacfml - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
It's just because Samsung did so well. This is just the natural progression of NAND without the early and aggressive development of Samsung's 3D NAND and excludes the fact that Samsung is a vertical manufacturer which has aggressive pricing on their 3D NAND products.Shadowmaster625 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Cost is $45, not including the cost of a reinstall after the drive fails in 90 days. No thanks.LordConrad - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I'll never buy an SSD that uses planar TLC NAND that was produced at 20nm or less. Too many potential problems.jabber - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
What folks here tend to forget is that the drives can get even cheaper and poorer performing and they will still be great SSDs. Why? Well there is still a megaton of older SATA II kit out there that will gladly take a SSD giving it 280MBps with low latency all day long.lagittaja - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
Oh dear lord, stop it already! The earth needs to be cleansed of planar TLC NAND. Burn it with fire!