It's 2016 and there is no reason for magnetic drives to be alive. Yes yes, I know about cost per gig and all the stats you feel like googling and quoting to me to prove how smart you are, but the real truth is this: it's way more profitable to sell us 50 year old technology cuz dums dums will keep on buying.
Bring on xpoint, it'll help push traditional flash down into the bargain bin... And for u sir, Ii will gladly mail you my original dos 6.22 install disks if you simply shut the f**k up.
It's a process of how quickly do you need to access certain types of data. OS, programs and games all benefit from being on an SSD (assuming supporting architecture does not have any obvious bottlenecks). I'm not sure browsing photos from a recent vacation really provides the necessary strain on your I/O that requires an SSD :D Magnetic drives will stick around for quite a while, especially for Home/SMB NAS devices where the amount of storage is greater then the perceived need for super fast access, which is throttled by GbE network (or WiFi) anyways
Modern operating system do lots of stuff in the background, an AV may scan your drives from time to time. This is stuff that kills IO on a HDD and that barely registers on a SSD. So there are reason for moving away from HDDs... But yes, the HDD will stick around for a while, simply because of pricing.
1TB is quite out of my pocket £218 (http://www.span.com/product/SanDisk-X400-SSD-SD8SN... but 512GB I would not mind. If you have Qnap tvs-1282 server or similar - they have m.2 for caching or tiered storage. I can use for it in there.
I changed TiB to TB. In reality the sizes are only nominal. The exact capacity of the X400 is 1,024,209,543,168 bytes while 1TiB would be 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and 1000GB drives like the 850 EVO are 1,000,204,886,016 bytes.
yay, that's some black magic with spare areas / crc prossibly... X vs Xi prefixes are treatcherous... while with kilo it does only 2,4%, with Tera it's already 9,95%...more than enough to hide OS and majority of installed software :-)
I'm tempted to buy two 512GB and RAID 0 them. Does anybody know if that would improve performance consistency compared to a single 1TB drive? I don't really care about raw bandwidth, but 4k IOPS for VMs. I'm having trouble finding benchmarks showing what RAID 0 does to latency outliers
As someone who has been running 2 SSDs in RAID0 for the last few years I would recommend against it. That is not to say that I have had any real issues with it, just that it is not really worth doing. 1) once you have a RAID your boot time takes much longer as you have to POST, RAID, and then POST again, then boot. This undoes any speed benefit for fast start times that SSDs bring you. 2) It adds points of failure. Having 2 drives means that things are (more or less) twice as likely to fail. SSDs are not as scary as they use to be, but it is still added risk for no real world benefit. 3) Very little real-world benefit. While in benchmarks you will see a bit of improvement, real world workloads are very bursty. And the big deal with RAID with mechanical drives is the ability to que up read requests in rapid succession to dramatically reduce seek time (or at least hide seek time). With SSDs there is practically no seek time to begin with, so that advantage is not needed. For read/write performance you will also see a minor increase, but typically the bottleneck will be at the CPU, GPU, or now even the bus itself.
Sure, if you are a huge power-user that is editing multiple concurrent 4K video streams then maybe you will need that extra little bit of performance... but for most people you would never notice the difference.
The reason I did it 4 years ago was simply a cost and space issue. I started with a 240GB SSD that cost ~$250 which was a good deal. Then when the price dropped to $200 I picked up another and put it in RAID 0 because I needed the extra space and could not afford a larger drive. Now with the price of a single 1TB drive so low, and with RAID having just as many potential issues as potential up-sides, I would just stick with a single drive and be done with it.
I did it with 2x 128GB 840s at one point and again last year for the same reasons, cost and space... 1TB EVO x2 (using a 256GB SM951 as OS drive) If I were to add more SSD space now I'd probably just end up with a 2TB EVO.
Probably won't need to RAID up drives to form a single large-enough volume again in the future, this X400 is already $225 on Amazon (basically hours after the article went up with the $244 price).
I don't even need the dual 1TB in RAID in an absolute sense, but it's more convenient to have a single large volume shared by games/recent photos than to balance two volumes.
I don't think the downsides are a big deal, but I wouldn't do it for performance reasons either, and I backup often.
Exactly, for me it's v300 for low end desktop, BX100 for laptops (hard to get over time) and Sandisk Extreme Pro or 850 Pro for high end. I avoid TLC, because of experience with Dell Samsung 841oem. Who knows if I can read data from it after year or two. TLC drives are great to reduce ssd prices.
Yeah everyone moaned about the V300's back in the day but they are perfect SSDs for putting in SATA II kit as they push 285+MBps all day long...plus they are the cheapest you can buy usually. Also I have bought dozens of them and not one has yet failed. They are a solid tough little SSD. I shall be sorry when they go.
I wonder if they have included any of the increased endurance technology from their Smart Storage (formerly part of Smart Modular) acquisition. The idea behind the technology was that most cells didn't need full current to program, and when programmed with less than full current, that the cell would allow more write/erase cycles.
I think if I were shopping for a TLC drive I'd stick with Sandisk too. I haven't had any issues with their Ultra II's, although many people have. I have, however, had two ADATA SP550's fail (a 120GB and 240GB) one during a power failure in a laptop (BSOD) which a secure erase recovered usability of the drive, and another within an hour of installation - cloning about 100GB of data to it killed it an no longer detects by BIOS.
I have 5 or so other SP550's in the field running fine though, but none of them have suffered the "abuse" of the above cases.
I have dozens of Mushkin drives out there, even ECO2's, all running incredibly well. I have a few ECO3 TLC drives in house about to go out, but I've been avoiding them because the ECO2 is still available.
On a side note, I still have 840EVO's coming in at least bi-weekly with basically unusable performance. Samsung is hell to deal with for RMA (a stark contrast to, say, OCZ that actually sends you an advanced replacement!) and nothing I can do revives performance in these drives. Secure erase, fill and trim, etc, nothing works. Even after a fresh OS install they read at half the speed they write. It's crazy, slower than a 2.5" hard disk.
Switching to Windows 10 would require re-testing a lot of drives, monopolizing the testbed for a month. It'll probably happen at some point this year, but I'll need to put together a second system for it (hopefully a Skylake system with working PCIe power management).
@anandtech : Seriously ? You are trying to compare apples to oranges to grapes. You are comparing 3D NAND products with 2D NAND, MLC with TLC type products. Sandisk X400 should be compared with OCZ Trion and Crucial BX series. As you can see X400 is better than Crucial MX in some cases ! Samsung, OCZ vector, crucial MX should not even be there in comparison. With that said, clearly X400 is the winner in TLC segment.
It would sure be nice if you could include a graph in some (all?) of your charts that normalizes for cost. Raw performance is nice, but performance/$ is also very useful.
What's the deal with referring to "Power" both as W·h, and as W (but commenting on efficiency)?
Efficiency would be energy consumed per byte read, for example. Effectiveness could be bytes read per second. Measuring power usage during operation tells you nothing of either efficiency or effectiveness, unless it's calculated as total energy.
"The Reactor is about $25 cheaper but only has a 3-year warranty and less than half the write endurance rating." Is this because of n-cache technique? MLC, TLC factors - Does it not make Mushkin a little better one?
Endurance Rating Mushkin Enhanced Reactor 1TB - 144TB SanDisk X400 1TB - 320TB Moreover SanDisk X400 is recommended for OEM unlike Mushkin which is targeted at consumer? Does it make a difference?
Thats just manufacturer rating. I'm sure unless Mushkin uses the crappiest MLC out there, that it will outlive sandisk x400 in terms of real world endurance.
I have a question: I know it states that it is 1024gb but is it a true 1024 or is it like something 960gb? I'm cloning a desktop with clonezilla and I need a 1tb ssd that is larger that 960GB to clone from disk to disk. <a href="https://wander.io">Wander</a>
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Chaitanya - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
1TB capacity in M.2 Form factor is tempting.nathanddrews - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I like the $/GB, but there aren't enough GBs.Namisecond - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link
Maybe you need to stop treating SSDs as bulk storage?dsumanik - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link
Maybe you should go back to floppies.It's 2016 and there is no reason for magnetic drives to be alive. Yes yes, I know about cost per gig and all the stats you feel like googling and quoting to me to prove how smart you are, but the real truth is this: it's way more profitable to sell us 50 year old technology cuz dums dums will keep on buying.
Bring on xpoint, it'll help push traditional flash down into the bargain bin... And for u sir, Ii will gladly mail you my original dos 6.22 install disks if you simply shut the f**k up.
santeana - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link
LMAO! I wish there was a like button!+1
blakeatwork - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link
It's a process of how quickly do you need to access certain types of data. OS, programs and games all benefit from being on an SSD (assuming supporting architecture does not have any obvious bottlenecks). I'm not sure browsing photos from a recent vacation really provides the necessary strain on your I/O that requires an SSD :DMagnetic drives will stick around for quite a while, especially for Home/SMB NAS devices where the amount of storage is greater then the perceived need for super fast access, which is throttled by GbE network (or WiFi) anyways
bug77 - Tuesday, May 10, 2016 - link
Modern operating system do lots of stuff in the background, an AV may scan your drives from time to time. This is stuff that kills IO on a HDD and that barely registers on a SSD. So there are reason for moving away from HDDs... But yes, the HDD will stick around for a while, simply because of pricing.jordanclock - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
Good thing we just dump all old technology as soon as we find a replacement!edward1987 - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
1TB is quite out of my pocket £218 (http://www.span.com/product/SanDisk-X400-SSD-SD8SN... but 512GB I would not mind. If you have Qnap tvs-1282 server or similar - they have m.2 for caching or tiered storage. I can use for it in there.HollyDOL - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
There is a mismatch in Specification table:1TiB (1024GB) should be 1TB(1000GB)
According to specs at https://www.sandisk.com/content/dam/sandisk-main/e...
putting 10^3n and 2^10n prefixes together is just incorrect anyway without correct recalculation...
Billy Tallis - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I changed TiB to TB. In reality the sizes are only nominal. The exact capacity of the X400 is 1,024,209,543,168 bytes while 1TiB would be 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and 1000GB drives like the 850 EVO are 1,000,204,886,016 bytes.HollyDOL - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
yay, that's some black magic with spare areas / crc prossibly...X vs Xi prefixes are treatcherous... while with kilo it does only 2,4%, with Tera it's already 9,95%...more than enough to hide OS and majority of installed software :-)
bug77 - Tuesday, May 10, 2016 - link
Then you should put that into the article, unless you're intentionally trying to be misleading ;)SaolDan - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Neat!!hechacker1 - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I'm tempted to buy two 512GB and RAID 0 them. Does anybody know if that would improve performance consistency compared to a single 1TB drive? I don't really care about raw bandwidth, but 4k IOPS for VMs. I'm having trouble finding benchmarks showing what RAID 0 does to latency outliersCaedenV - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
As someone who has been running 2 SSDs in RAID0 for the last few years I would recommend against it. That is not to say that I have had any real issues with it, just that it is not really worth doing.1) once you have a RAID your boot time takes much longer as you have to POST, RAID, and then POST again, then boot. This undoes any speed benefit for fast start times that SSDs bring you.
2) It adds points of failure. Having 2 drives means that things are (more or less) twice as likely to fail. SSDs are not as scary as they use to be, but it is still added risk for no real world benefit.
3) Very little real-world benefit. While in benchmarks you will see a bit of improvement, real world workloads are very bursty. And the big deal with RAID with mechanical drives is the ability to que up read requests in rapid succession to dramatically reduce seek time (or at least hide seek time). With SSDs there is practically no seek time to begin with, so that advantage is not needed. For read/write performance you will also see a minor increase, but typically the bottleneck will be at the CPU, GPU, or now even the bus itself.
Sure, if you are a huge power-user that is editing multiple concurrent 4K video streams then maybe you will need that extra little bit of performance... but for most people you would never notice the difference.
The reason I did it 4 years ago was simply a cost and space issue. I started with a 240GB SSD that cost ~$250 which was a good deal. Then when the price dropped to $200 I picked up another and put it in RAID 0 because I needed the extra space and could not afford a larger drive. Now with the price of a single 1TB drive so low, and with RAID having just as many potential issues as potential up-sides, I would just stick with a single drive and be done with it.
Impulses - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I did it with 2x 128GB 840s at one point and again last year for the same reasons, cost and space... 1TB EVO x2 (using a 256GB SM951 as OS drive) If I were to add more SSD space now I'd probably just end up with a 2TB EVO.Probably won't need to RAID up drives to form a single large-enough volume again in the future, this X400 is already $225 on Amazon (basically hours after the article went up with the $244 price).
I don't even need the dual 1TB in RAID in an absolute sense, but it's more convenient to have a single large volume shared by games/recent photos than to balance two volumes.
I don't think the downsides are a big deal, but I wouldn't do it for performance reasons either, and I backup often.
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Get 4 of them and stick them into a RAID10. :)Lolimaster - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
There's no point in doind raid0 with SSD's. You won't decrease latency/access times or improve random 4k reads (they will be worse most of the time).Sequential gains are meaningless (if it matter to you then you should stick to a PCI-e/m.2 NVME drive)
Pinn - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I have the Samsung NVME M.2 512gb in the only m.2 slot and am aching to get more storage. Should I just fill one of my PCIe slots (x99)?Margalus - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
It uses less power than some, and is priced lower. But it seems performance is severely lacking..jabber - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
This just shows what a fantastic budget SSD the BX100 was. Crucial were stupid to dump it.Mixal11 - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link
Exactly, for me it's v300 for low end desktop, BX100 for laptops (hard to get over time) and Sandisk Extreme Pro or 850 Pro for high end. I avoid TLC, because of experience with Dell Samsung 841oem. Who knows if I can read data from it after year or two. TLC drives are great to reduce ssd prices.jabber - Sunday, May 8, 2016 - link
Yeah everyone moaned about the V300's back in the day but they are perfect SSDs for putting in SATA II kit as they push 285+MBps all day long...plus they are the cheapest you can buy usually. Also I have bought dozens of them and not one has yet failed. They are a solid tough little SSD. I shall be sorry when they go.jhh - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I wonder if they have included any of the increased endurance technology from their Smart Storage (formerly part of Smart Modular) acquisition. The idea behind the technology was that most cells didn't need full current to program, and when programmed with less than full current, that the cell would allow more write/erase cycles.Michael Bay - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Goddamn it, one more terabyte.Just one.
Samus - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
I think if I were shopping for a TLC drive I'd stick with Sandisk too. I haven't had any issues with their Ultra II's, although many people have. I have, however, had two ADATA SP550's fail (a 120GB and 240GB) one during a power failure in a laptop (BSOD) which a secure erase recovered usability of the drive, and another within an hour of installation - cloning about 100GB of data to it killed it an no longer detects by BIOS.I have 5 or so other SP550's in the field running fine though, but none of them have suffered the "abuse" of the above cases.
I have dozens of Mushkin drives out there, even ECO2's, all running incredibly well. I have a few ECO3 TLC drives in house about to go out, but I've been avoiding them because the ECO2 is still available.
On a side note, I still have 840EVO's coming in at least bi-weekly with basically unusable performance. Samsung is hell to deal with for RMA (a stark contrast to, say, OCZ that actually sends you an advanced replacement!) and nothing I can do revives performance in these drives. Secure erase, fill and trim, etc, nothing works. Even after a fresh OS install they read at half the speed they write. It's crazy, slower than a 2.5" hard disk.
ladder_to_heaven - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Win 8.1 - STILL? -For the love of god WHY?
Billy Tallis - Friday, May 6, 2016 - link
Switching to Windows 10 would require re-testing a lot of drives, monopolizing the testbed for a month. It'll probably happen at some point this year, but I'll need to put together a second system for it (hopefully a Skylake system with working PCIe power management).jabber - Saturday, May 7, 2016 - link
Yeah no rush, after all 85% of 10's code is...8.1.Michael Bay - Saturday, May 7, 2016 - link
There`s 3.1 down there somewhere too.I`d like to have the source on your percentages though.
Madpacket - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link
Looks like the 1TB Mushkin Reactor (MKNSSDRE1TB) is still the best value drive to beat. Nice to see TLC drives other than Evo's getting better though.hojnikb - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
there is also reactor LT, if you want 512GB.justkar4u - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link
@anandtech : Seriously ? You are trying to compare apples to oranges to grapes. You are comparing 3D NAND products with 2D NAND, MLC with TLC type products. Sandisk X400 should be compared with OCZ Trion and Crucial BX series. As you can see X400 is better than Crucial MX in some cases ! Samsung, OCZ vector, crucial MX should not even be there in comparison. With that said, clearly X400 is the winner in TLC segment.nobozos - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
It would sure be nice if you could include a graph in some (all?) of your charts that normalizes for cost. Raw performance is nice, but performance/$ is also very useful.Andre74 - Friday, May 27, 2016 - link
What's the deal with referring to "Power" both as W·h, and as W (but commenting on efficiency)?Efficiency would be energy consumed per byte read, for example. Effectiveness could be bytes read per second. Measuring power usage during operation tells you nothing of either efficiency or effectiveness, unless it's calculated as total energy.
BimmerInd - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
"The Reactor is about $25 cheaper but only has a 3-year warranty and less than half the write endurance rating." Is this because of n-cache technique? MLC, TLC factors - Does it not make Mushkin a little better one?Endurance Rating
Mushkin Enhanced Reactor 1TB - 144TB
SanDisk X400 1TB - 320TB
Moreover SanDisk X400 is recommended for OEM unlike Mushkin which is targeted at consumer? Does it make a difference?
hojnikb - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
Thats just manufacturer rating. I'm sure unless Mushkin uses the crappiest MLC out there, that it will outlive sandisk x400 in terms of real world endurance.BimmerInd - Friday, June 24, 2016 - link
It says it uses Micron's NAND same as in Crucial's BX100. So which one should I choose?runasroot - Thursday, January 12, 2017 - link
I have a question: I know it states that it is 1024gb but is it a true 1024 or is it like something 960gb? I'm cloning a desktop with clonezilla and I need a 1tb ssd that is larger that 960GB to clone from disk to disk. <a href="https://wander.io">Wander</a>runasroot - Thursday, January 12, 2017 - link
Ugh, I can't edit my comment, come on.