Whatever happend to the Samsung PRO in those comparisons? If you call something a "top NVMe SSD" and then don't have the PROs in there to stack up against, it feels incomplete.
Where do you see that they call it the top NVMe SSD?
Comparing it to the 970PRO doesn't make a lot of sense since they are in vastly different price ranges and market segment. The 970 EVO is perfect because they are very close in price and market segment. They even admit in the conclusion that the "970 EVO may be the slightly better performer overall."
I think it's always useful, regardless of where you are in the meerkat, to compare to the top and the bottom of the range. This gives you an idea of what you're getting. Am I getting 70% of top end performance for 70% of the price or am I getting 95% of it for 70% of the price? Those are two very different value propositions and certainly things we see often in the PC meerkat. Sometimes the progression with price is linear(ish) and sometimes you can spend double the cash to get the very best but really all you're seeing is a few percent extra performance because it takes that much extra R&D / materials investment to get there.
Depends where you are I guess. The 500Gb WD Black is exactly the same price as the 512Gb Samsung 970 Pro where I live. Samsung's 970 EVO drives are $100/TB cheaper.
LOL, the 500GB WD Black is consistently close to half the price of the 980 Pro, and the 970 Pro is essentially the same performance as the EVO (hence them being similarly priced.)
I agree, the 980 Pro should be in the benchmarks, but certainly not the 970 Pro. Just use the EVO as a baseline and add 3% if you want to be picky about exact figures.
I forgot to add, or rather point out, the 970 EVO and 970 PRO share the same controller and are otherwise identical configurations with the exception of the PRO being MLC.
That said, Samsung actually rates them near-identically in performance and aside from the SLC caching algorithm, the EVO performs the same.
The only real reason to get the PRO is if you need the DWPD\endurance of MLC. That's literally the only advantage the PRO has.
Strangely enough I don't think anandtech has ever reviewed the 970 Pro which is likely why it isn't in the comparison. They have done the 960 pro and the 970 evo but not the 970 pro.
"Whatever happend to the Samsung PRO in those comparisons?"
Unfortunately Samsung never sampled the 970 PRO, so we don't have it on hand. And all indications are that they're just about done with it, having never released a 2TB version (like they did the 960 PRO).
I'm really not sure if we're going to see any new consumer MLC drives in 2019. The market has bifurcated into TLC and then more boutique solutions like Z-NAND and 3D XPoint.
The 512Gb drive is a ~$150 part, just buy it and test it? To many this remains the most prestigious tech site around for at least some things. SSDs have been one of those things. Not having the latest of Samsung's pro drive in your results kinda makes this whole thing not worth it, IMO.
If you need an excuse do a "MLC Redux" review where you look at what was probably the faster ever MLC drive and talk about how SSD tech has changed.
This is the level of a business expense though. Even if you did one a day for every day of the year it would be $53,400. OK, you could get a full-time journalist for that in some places, but that assumes they are kept and not sold on or used for anything else.
More troubling is that unwillingness to buy a product for review smacks of demanding bribes. "Give us a free sample or we won't review your product." Which implies that companies which shower the reviewer with gifts will get more favorable reviews.
Ideally, a review site should *never* accept free samples, and do all their product reviews with samples bought from the store. That's the only way to completely eliminate any undue influence the product manufacturer may have on the product review.
I would love to see at least some endurance testing in anandtechs reviews. I think it's something that's missing pretty much all SSD testing I see. Yes, speed is great, but endurance is something perspective owners will care more about in the long term.
NAND technology is changing over time, is it changing for the better? More layers, but often at the expense of P/E Cycles.
SSD Firmwares as well have gotten both a lot more reliable, but also a lot more complicated, with different companies doing different things to maximize performance and also endurance.
Without testing these things, we don't know if there are duds in terms of firmwares/drives that don't strike a good balance between performance/reliability.
Bare minimimum I would love to see ananadtech do the following: - Talk to manufacturers about the actual specifications of the NAND, what is the P/E Cycle rating for the NAND. Then list it in the specs for the drives so we can do our own research/homework if we want to. This spec is very often missed in the most marketing material. - Do a quick capture of the SMART data at the very start of the testing - Do a capture of the SMART data at the very end of your testing. - Check out the Block Erase Count specifically. The Average Block Erase count would give a good approximation of how much life you've used just within your benchmark suite. It's much more grainular than Percent Life Used. This SMART attribute can vary between different manufacturer/firmware/controllers, so you might need to contact the manufacturer for this info.
In the end, you'll have something like: Rated P/E count / Average Block Erase, and since your test suite is likely pretty similar between SSD's, it would be a useful metric.
Bonus points, you could also look at NAND writes (not to be confused with Host Writes), during your testing, as it's related to life expectancy and can be corrolated with Total Byte Written.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that some drives write a lot more to NAND than you are expecting, and thus have higher Average Block Erases during your testing.
At my company when I did this test, while we were evaluating a drive for our products, Tier 1 memory manufacturers and their drives, failed bitterly at this endurance test where most did fine. I attribute this to the firmware. Working with the firmware developement team, we determined that the fix would not be feasible in that generation of product, so we had to skip that product.
Specs aren't everything, we need to test it, endurance is an important aspect, and I'd love to see it represented in your reviews.
Whom do you consider to be "Tier 1 memory manufacturers" - Samsung or Intel? I can't imagine their products failing endurance tests. Or are you talking about those you would consider to be lower than Samsung - like AData, Team Group, etc. - as a Tier 2 or Tier 3?
Micron was the manufacturer I was referring to. Other brands we've used which didn't exhibit the same poor endurance, ADATA, Kingston, Swissbit, Crucial
Some of them probably even use Micron NAND. I bet the NAND is fine on the Micron model we were using, perhaps the hardware is good but the software (firmware) wasn't? Of course we haven't tested every brand/model as our requirements were very specific, so I am sure there are other Micron models that are totally fine (kind of why i'd love to see anandtech include some endurance results, to help weed out the outliers)
Well they were different models. The crucial was an old model that we were replacing with something new, since the old crucial drives were no longer available. It would be interesting to compare a crucial equivalent model though, I wonder if they share firmware.
Of course, these improvement will be welcomed, and I would like to see more in clear the steady state behaviour too.
Regarding the endurance, we should take into account that most of these reviews are about consumer products. An NVME SSD for enterprise market has totally different performance: e.g regular steady state performance, higher endurance, higher reliability and so on. Sometimes, it's possible to find lightly used enterprise NVME drives at bargain price or at the cost of consumer drive: when this happens I prefer these drives.
I think the role of a "consumer" is not perfectly defined these days. Are they the same as a "power user?" It would seem that more and more consumers are starting to do more and more serious workloads on their PCs. Obviously this is anecdotal, but with all the processing power at our disposal these days ("consumer" CPU's having 16 threads). People probably don't even know what the applications or services that they are running on their PC are doing.
For example, a lot of commonly used applications will be running with a database system as their backend, whether it be a more simple sqlite database, or something more serious, those can be very write heavy, and they're often configured by the application without the user even knowing it. I'll bet that a lot of users even have web services running on their PC's, without actually thinking about it, all these API's that allow you to connect to your mobile devices/streaming appliances.
I'll bet a lot of people reading anandtech reviews even have their PC's running as a fileserver, or have a dedicated machine for such duties.
A lot of this stuff is stuff is stuff would be considered "enterprise" computing of yester-years. Why does anandtech run transcoding, rendering and "destroyer" style tests in their "consumer" reviews? Because it's relevant to some portion of the purchasing community.
Considering how consumer parts have had endurance problems...
Examples: OCZ Vertex 2 (with 64-bit NAND), Samsung 840 128 (terrible steady state performance, too), Samsung 840 and 840 EVO series (read speed loss), etc.
Endurance isn't just a matter of whether or not the drive dies or it has a lot of cell death. It's also a matter of performance consistency over time.
I agree, I have bad memories of the early days of SSD's. I purchased a first generation intel SSD for $1000 (CND), the speeds were tested as being amazing compared to anything else on the market. But given the early learning curves with NAND controllers, and whatever the like, performance was terrible in the real world. I wasn't even able to upgrade the firmware since it was a first generation product, and only the subsequent versions supported the updates.
Things have gotten better, but from my experience, it's been a rough road. Some manufacturers are a lot better than others for firmware development, and believe it or not a bug in the firmware can tank performance, or even tank your reliability, since the firmware is what controls wear leveling, and other new fangled features to give the maximum performance.
There are MLC drives that work in SLC mode dynamically to aid in performance, and other drives that are MLC NAND running SLC mode which have a hybrid endurance between the two. Some older drives did driver level compression to reduce NAND writes, while theoretically great, can cause problems for reliability if there are any cases where the data doesn't get committed correctly, especially in poor power conditions. Firmware bugs are rarely talked about, but a firmware bug could cause garbage collection to occur too often, which will take your performance and reliability.
With current gen 3D NAND, it would take an incredible amount of writes to test endurance and the regional wholeseller RMA data averaged over hundreds of thousands of SSD's sold is much more representative than AT testing endurance on 1 drive they receive as a sample. It appears most SSD RMA's are NOT from using up the endurance cycles so that would make a 1 sample test by AT even less meaningful. If they happen to get a dud when 99% of that same model has a very good reliability history based on the broader market it would just make thousands of AT readers base their purchasing decision based on a sample size of 1.
P/E ratings are highly dependent on what kind of error correction the NAND is used with. Even under pressure, the NAND manufacturers won't be able to give us more than just ballpark figures that would be tough to fairly compare between manufacturers.
Last year (I think around when the first QLC drives showed up) I started recording SMART data before and after each phase of testing. I haven't written any code to parse and analyze that information yet, but it's on my to-do list.
I don't think the usual consumer SSD test suite does enough total drive writes to move the SMART indicators enough to form meaningful projections about write endurance and drive lifetime. To do that, I would have to set up another system to do long-term endurance testing on several drives at once. That's also on our wishlist, but it's a relatively low priority given the extra equipment and time requirements.
@gglaw, @Billy Tallis, you guys are right, it's hard to get firm reliability numbers based off a short, small sample test. But to be honest, its' better than nothing. And as I said, seeing one example of an outlier that performs badly on the bench for the test would validate it's usefulness.
gglaw, you are totally right, there is more to reliability than PE Cycles, I gave the examples of a drive that under our testing failed, with a life expectancy under a year, the same test scenario (which was a heavy real world workload for our product) on other similar rated drives did not fail the test. But I didn't mention that we had huge realiability issues with our previous drives (Kingston), where they were no where near the end of their endurance ratings, but were failing for other causes. Kingston attributed a lot of the failures to firmware bugs that weren't traceable in SMART data, and in some cases pure hardware failure.
Billy, yes in general you're right, it's hard to get meaningful projections for a short period of time, this is especially the case if you use percent life used as a metric (1-100). However, it's not too bad if you can get the PE Cycles, which typically are 3000 for MLC, and in some cases 2500 for 3D NAND, instead of waiting months for a single change in percent life change, we have seen drives go through 1 PE Cycle a day, which would give us around 8 years of product life (baring other failures), we were going through 5-6 PE Cycles a day on the Micron drive, which was a huge warning sign. That would be a great case for anandtech finding the poor endurance outliers.
So for what it's worth, the last time I talked to the PCI-SIG about PCIe 5, they were saying that they were expecting it to be used in conjunction with PCIe 4 rather than replacing it. The idea being that the PCIe x16 slot closest to the CPU would be a PCIe 5 slot, while everything else would be PCIe 4 due to the distances and signal integrity issues involved.
If that's still the plan, then I wouldn't expect to see PCIe 5 SSDs, at least not in the M.2 form factor.
Thx. But surely Directly Attached NAND from SSD is more important? It is way more latency sensitive than GPU.I am wondering if we could get sort of like 20x Slot with 16x bandwidth. So 4x for SSD, and 8x * 2 for GPU.
Most people are still using a single graphics card, I would be fine with 8x GPU PCI-E 5.0 and 4x for SSD.
Does that mean we might never see Thunderbolt 5 with PCI-E 5 signalling?
What is and isn't tested is sometimes very strange here. The Nvidia GTX 960, for example, was never tested.
"Editor's Note: Due to personal matters we won’t have a GeForce GTX 960 review published today. But in lieu of that we wanted to go over the basics of NVIDIA’s latest Maxwell card"
Today or ever.
"Anyhow, that’s a wrap from us for now. Be sure to check back in early next week for our complete look at GeForce GTX 960, including performance, overclocking, HEVC support, and more."
Still waiting... Those promises were posted in 2015.
"Has Anandtech staff ever explained why the promised review never materialized?"
Honestly, we're busy and despite our best efforts, sometimes bite off more than we can chew. Especially as we have imperfect vision about what products may show up on our doorsteps tomorrow.
Can't wait to read the SX8200 Pro review. I've bought a few, and I believe they are the best performing drives for the money right now. Excellent. I stopped buying Samsung after they started denying warranties in Canada (and they don't seem to want to fix that). Anyways the Samsung drives cost almost twice the SX8200 pro and perform exactly the same pretty much. Maybe the SX8200 Pro is even faster than the 970 EVO honestly.
A few from decent reviewers are already up for this and the HP EX950 which are small upgrades over the incredibly well-rounded drives they replaced. The SX8200 (non-pro) and EX920 go on so many massive sales it is hard to beat them until the newer drives start dropping in price. The average home user would never know whether they had a 970 Pro, SX8200, SX8200 Pro, or EX950 running so major price differences would make the decision for me. After my initial experiences with the SX8200/EX920, these have been all I've stocked for close to a year. Made me almost regret my 970 Pro. They regularly go on sale for ~$75 for 500GB, and $135 for 1TB versions so my SSD adventures have become rather boring with no close 2nd place I would even consider buying.
I'm likely going to get a SX8200 Pro just because I can't help myself with new versions of my favorite drives, but I'm already 99% positive I'll be in the same boat of not being able to tell any difference with the small upgrade. Then I'll have buyer's remorse again like the 970 Pro, knowing the 1TB version of the cheaper drive is barely more than the new 500GB one (SX8200 1TB $135, Pro 500GB $115).
We test SSDs on a desktop, and that means we need to jump through some hoops to get PCIe power management enabled. I've never encountered a desktop motherboard that even has PCIe ASPM enabled by default, and when you are lucky enough to get a BIOS option to turn it on, you can't trust that to take care of everything. Even with the OS set to override the motherboard's settings, not all drives are able to enter their deepest sleep state on our testbed.
I view this situation as being similar to DEVSLEEP for SATA drives. It's pretty likely that a laptop which was designed to use M.2 PCIe storage will have all the right firmware bits enabled to use the deepest power saving modes, but they're normally not used (or usable) on a desktop and I don't currently have equipment that can work around that.
Basically every NVMe SSD vendor has shipped something that turned out to have serious power management bugs, most often with APST and only on certain host systems. It's pretty clear that no vendors (SSD or motherboard) are thoroughly testing those features before shipping, and instead just make sure that it works with a small handful of Windows configurations. But even the Windows NVMe driver is a moving target and new builds have caused problems.
It would probably help if the UNH-IOL NVMe Integrator's List testing included APST, but their current test plan only checks whether the drive can handle manually setting power states. And even if they were more thorough, only a few vendors put consumer drives through that certification.
I wonder when we'll see the upper end of sizes in consumer drives jump to 4TB. Durability seems to be ready. Perhaps consumer need isn't quite there. But if controllers can handle it and layers exist for it to be built to that size in the M2 format, you'd think that's where they would go next since prices have come out of the stratosphere.
Is it just me, or do these comparisons make the HP 920 look quite good? Not in terms of top performance, but in performance/price. Has anybody here had any experiences with 920 drives?
Why not compare similar products together? Why is one drive a 2 TB drive? Since 2TB has more save locations it may naturally be faster due to drive space, cache size, energy usage, etc. Maybe Anandtech doesnt use samsung drives because Samsung will not donate the drives for free but other companies would give them free gear to test.
So, is it worth getting the new SN750 2019 version over the wd black 2018? (price difference is 5 euros where I live) And if so, why? I can't really find any difference between the two ssds, and I really can't decide which one to get. I want to put it in my laptop (helios 300).
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nevcairiel - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Whatever happend to the Samsung PRO in those comparisons? If you call something a "top NVMe SSD" and then don't have the PROs in there to stack up against, it feels incomplete.jordanclock - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Where do you see that they call it the top NVMe SSD?Comparing it to the 970PRO doesn't make a lot of sense since they are in vastly different price ranges and market segment. The 970 EVO is perfect because they are very close in price and market segment. They even admit in the conclusion that the "970 EVO may be the slightly better performer overall."
Drakkhen - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
He didn't call it the top NVMe SSD, he said a "top NVMe SSD".But, I agree that it isn't really relevant since this comparison is for a different price point/market.
DanNeely - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
I would like to see at at least on higher end drive that's not an Optane for comparison though.romrunning - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Agreedphilehidiot - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
I think it's always useful, regardless of where you are in the meerkat, to compare to the top and the bottom of the range. This gives you an idea of what you're getting. Am I getting 70% of top end performance for 70% of the price or am I getting 95% of it for 70% of the price? Those are two very different value propositions and certainly things we see often in the PC meerkat. Sometimes the progression with price is linear(ish) and sometimes you can spend double the cash to get the very best but really all you're seeing is a few percent extra performance because it takes that much extra R&D / materials investment to get there.29a - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
In the second paragraph on the last page."the new WD Black is still a very competitive high-end NVMe SSD"
They do make the claim that it is a high end SSE which I would equate to being "a top NVMe SSD" and should be compared to the Samsung Pro models.
althaz - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Depends where you are I guess. The 500Gb WD Black is exactly the same price as the 512Gb Samsung 970 Pro where I live. Samsung's 970 EVO drives are $100/TB cheaper.Samus - Monday, January 21, 2019 - link
LOL, the 500GB WD Black is consistently close to half the price of the 980 Pro, and the 970 Pro is essentially the same performance as the EVO (hence them being similarly priced.)I agree, the 980 Pro should be in the benchmarks, but certainly not the 970 Pro. Just use the EVO as a baseline and add 3% if you want to be picky about exact figures.
Samus - Monday, January 21, 2019 - link
I forgot to add, or rather point out, the 970 EVO and 970 PRO share the same controller and are otherwise identical configurations with the exception of the PRO being MLC.That said, Samsung actually rates them near-identically in performance and aside from the SLC caching algorithm, the EVO performs the same.
The only real reason to get the PRO is if you need the DWPD\endurance of MLC. That's literally the only advantage the PRO has.
namechamps - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Strangely enough I don't think anandtech has ever reviewed the 970 Pro which is likely why it isn't in the comparison. They have done the 960 pro and the 970 evo but not the 970 pro.Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Whatever happend to the Samsung PRO in those comparisons?"Unfortunately Samsung never sampled the 970 PRO, so we don't have it on hand. And all indications are that they're just about done with it, having never released a 2TB version (like they did the 960 PRO).
I'm really not sure if we're going to see any new consumer MLC drives in 2019. The market has bifurcated into TLC and then more boutique solutions like Z-NAND and 3D XPoint.
althaz - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
The 512Gb drive is a ~$150 part, just buy it and test it? To many this remains the most prestigious tech site around for at least some things. SSDs have been one of those things. Not having the latest of Samsung's pro drive in your results kinda makes this whole thing not worth it, IMO.If you need an excuse do a "MLC Redux" review where you look at what was probably the faster ever MLC drive and talk about how SSD tech has changed.
eldakka - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
" just buy it and test it?"I'm sure anandtech would be delighted to test it if you sample one to them, or donate $150 to them to purchase one with.
GreenReaper - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
This is the level of a business expense though. Even if you did one a day for every day of the year it would be $53,400. OK, you could get a full-time journalist for that in some places, but that assumes they are kept and not sold on or used for anything else.Solandri - Monday, January 21, 2019 - link
More troubling is that unwillingness to buy a product for review smacks of demanding bribes. "Give us a free sample or we won't review your product." Which implies that companies which shower the reviewer with gifts will get more favorable reviews.Ideally, a review site should *never* accept free samples, and do all their product reviews with samples bought from the store. That's the only way to completely eliminate any undue influence the product manufacturer may have on the product review.
Dark_wizzie - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
I don't think they actually reviewed the 970 Pro?StevoLincolnite - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Yeah. Comparisons have been a bit crap on Anandtech lately.The RTX 2080 review is lacking a good lineup of GPU's to compare with... Despite promises of "Adding more later". (Never happened sadly.)
joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
I would love to see at least some endurance testing in anandtechs reviews. I think it's something that's missing pretty much all SSD testing I see. Yes, speed is great, but endurance is something perspective owners will care more about in the long term.NAND technology is changing over time, is it changing for the better? More layers, but often at the expense of P/E Cycles.
SSD Firmwares as well have gotten both a lot more reliable, but also a lot more complicated, with different companies doing different things to maximize performance and also endurance.
Without testing these things, we don't know if there are duds in terms of firmwares/drives that don't strike a good balance between performance/reliability.
Bare minimimum I would love to see ananadtech do the following:
- Talk to manufacturers about the actual specifications of the NAND, what is the P/E Cycle rating for the NAND. Then list it in the specs for the drives so we can do our own research/homework if we want to. This spec is very often missed in the most marketing material.
- Do a quick capture of the SMART data at the very start of the testing
- Do a capture of the SMART data at the very end of your testing.
- Check out the Block Erase Count specifically. The Average Block Erase count would give a good approximation of how much life you've used just within your benchmark suite. It's much more grainular than Percent Life Used. This SMART attribute can vary between different manufacturer/firmware/controllers, so you might need to contact the manufacturer for this info.
In the end, you'll have something like: Rated P/E count / Average Block Erase, and since your test suite is likely pretty similar between SSD's, it would be a useful metric.
Bonus points, you could also look at NAND writes (not to be confused with Host Writes), during your testing, as it's related to life expectancy and can be corrolated with Total Byte Written.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that some drives write a lot more to NAND than you are expecting, and thus have higher Average Block Erases during your testing.
At my company when I did this test, while we were evaluating a drive for our products, Tier 1 memory manufacturers and their drives, failed bitterly at this endurance test where most did fine. I attribute this to the firmware. Working with the firmware developement team, we determined that the fix would not be feasible in that generation of product, so we had to skip that product.
Specs aren't everything, we need to test it, endurance is an important aspect, and I'd love to see it represented in your reviews.
romrunning - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Whom do you consider to be "Tier 1 memory manufacturers" - Samsung or Intel? I can't imagine their products failing endurance tests. Or are you talking about those you would consider to be lower than Samsung - like AData, Team Group, etc. - as a Tier 2 or Tier 3?joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Micron was the manufacturer I was referring to.Other brands we've used which didn't exhibit the same poor endurance, ADATA, Kingston, Swissbit, Crucial
Some of them probably even use Micron NAND. I bet the NAND is fine on the Micron model we were using, perhaps the hardware is good but the software (firmware) wasn't? Of course we haven't tested every brand/model as our requirements were very specific, so I am sure there are other Micron models that are totally fine (kind of why i'd love to see anandtech include some endurance results, to help weed out the outliers)
sdsdv10 - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Interesting you write that Micron has problems and Crucial doesn't, as Crucial is just a consumer brand name for Micron Technology Inc.joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Well they were different models. The crucial was an old model that we were replacing with something new, since the old crucial drives were no longer available. It would be interesting to compare a crucial equivalent model though, I wonder if they share firmware.sovking - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Of course, these improvement will be welcomed, and I would like to see more in clear the steady state behaviour too.Regarding the endurance, we should take into account that most of these reviews are about consumer products. An NVME SSD for enterprise market has totally different performance: e.g regular steady state performance, higher endurance, higher reliability and so on. Sometimes, it's possible to find lightly used enterprise NVME drives at bargain price or at the cost of consumer drive: when this happens I prefer these drives.
joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
I think the role of a "consumer" is not perfectly defined these days. Are they the same as a "power user?" It would seem that more and more consumers are starting to do more and more serious workloads on their PCs. Obviously this is anecdotal, but with all the processing power at our disposal these days ("consumer" CPU's having 16 threads). People probably don't even know what the applications or services that they are running on their PC are doing.For example, a lot of commonly used applications will be running with a database system as their backend, whether it be a more simple sqlite database, or something more serious, those can be very write heavy, and they're often configured by the application without the user even knowing it. I'll bet that a lot of users even have web services running on their PC's, without actually thinking about it, all these API's that allow you to connect to your mobile devices/streaming appliances.
I'll bet a lot of people reading anandtech reviews even have their PC's running as a fileserver, or have a dedicated machine for such duties.
A lot of this stuff is stuff is stuff would be considered "enterprise" computing of yester-years. Why does anandtech run transcoding, rendering and "destroyer" style tests in their "consumer" reviews? Because it's relevant to some portion of the purchasing community.
Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Considering how consumer parts have had endurance problems...Examples: OCZ Vertex 2 (with 64-bit NAND), Samsung 840 128 (terrible steady state performance, too), Samsung 840 and 840 EVO series (read speed loss), etc.
Endurance isn't just a matter of whether or not the drive dies or it has a lot of cell death. It's also a matter of performance consistency over time.
joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
I agree, I have bad memories of the early days of SSD's. I purchased a first generation intel SSD for $1000 (CND), the speeds were tested as being amazing compared to anything else on the market. But given the early learning curves with NAND controllers, and whatever the like, performance was terrible in the real world. I wasn't even able to upgrade the firmware since it was a first generation product, and only the subsequent versions supported the updates.Things have gotten better, but from my experience, it's been a rough road. Some manufacturers are a lot better than others for firmware development, and believe it or not a bug in the firmware can tank performance, or even tank your reliability, since the firmware is what controls wear leveling, and other new fangled features to give the maximum performance.
There are MLC drives that work in SLC mode dynamically to aid in performance, and other drives that are MLC NAND running SLC mode which have a hybrid endurance between the two. Some older drives did driver level compression to reduce NAND writes, while theoretically great, can cause problems for reliability if there are any cases where the data doesn't get committed correctly, especially in poor power conditions. Firmware bugs are rarely talked about, but a firmware bug could cause garbage collection to occur too often, which will take your performance and reliability.
gglaw - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
With current gen 3D NAND, it would take an incredible amount of writes to test endurance and the regional wholeseller RMA data averaged over hundreds of thousands of SSD's sold is much more representative than AT testing endurance on 1 drive they receive as a sample. It appears most SSD RMA's are NOT from using up the endurance cycles so that would make a 1 sample test by AT even less meaningful. If they happen to get a dud when 99% of that same model has a very good reliability history based on the broader market it would just make thousands of AT readers base their purchasing decision based on a sample size of 1.Billy Tallis - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
P/E ratings are highly dependent on what kind of error correction the NAND is used with. Even under pressure, the NAND manufacturers won't be able to give us more than just ballpark figures that would be tough to fairly compare between manufacturers.Last year (I think around when the first QLC drives showed up) I started recording SMART data before and after each phase of testing. I haven't written any code to parse and analyze that information yet, but it's on my to-do list.
I don't think the usual consumer SSD test suite does enough total drive writes to move the SMART indicators enough to form meaningful projections about write endurance and drive lifetime. To do that, I would have to set up another system to do long-term endurance testing on several drives at once. That's also on our wishlist, but it's a relatively low priority given the extra equipment and time requirements.
joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
@gglaw, @Billy Tallis, you guys are right, it's hard to get firm reliability numbers based off a short, small sample test. But to be honest, its' better than nothing. And as I said, seeing one example of an outlier that performs badly on the bench for the test would validate it's usefulness.gglaw, you are totally right, there is more to reliability than PE Cycles, I gave the examples of a drive that under our testing failed, with a life expectancy under a year, the same test scenario (which was a heavy real world workload for our product) on other similar rated drives did not fail the test. But I didn't mention that we had huge realiability issues with our previous drives (Kingston), where they were no where near the end of their endurance ratings, but were failing for other causes. Kingston attributed a lot of the failures to firmware bugs that weren't traceable in SMART data, and in some cases pure hardware failure.
Billy, yes in general you're right, it's hard to get meaningful projections for a short period of time, this is especially the case if you use percent life used as a metric (1-100). However, it's not too bad if you can get the PE Cycles, which typically are 3000 for MLC, and in some cases 2500 for 3D NAND, instead of waiting months for a single change in percent life change, we have seen drives go through 1 PE Cycle a day, which would give us around 8 years of product life (baring other failures), we were going through 5-6 PE Cycles a day on the Micron drive, which was a huge warning sign. That would be a great case for anandtech finding the poor endurance outliers.
iwod - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Patiently waiting for PCI-E 5.0 SSD, that is 16GB/s for 4x.Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
So for what it's worth, the last time I talked to the PCI-SIG about PCIe 5, they were saying that they were expecting it to be used in conjunction with PCIe 4 rather than replacing it. The idea being that the PCIe x16 slot closest to the CPU would be a PCIe 5 slot, while everything else would be PCIe 4 due to the distances and signal integrity issues involved.If that's still the plan, then I wouldn't expect to see PCIe 5 SSDs, at least not in the M.2 form factor.
iwod - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Thx. But surely Directly Attached NAND from SSD is more important? It is way more latency sensitive than GPU.I am wondering if we could get sort of like 20x Slot with 16x bandwidth. So 4x for SSD, and 8x * 2 for GPU.Most people are still using a single graphics card, I would be fine with 8x GPU PCI-E 5.0 and 4x for SSD.
Does that mean we might never see Thunderbolt 5 with PCI-E 5 signalling?
GreenReaper - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Basically this is how PCIe 4 is likely to work for many existing AMD motherboards.ScouserPcgamer - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
The Seagate Firecuda wipes the floor of read/write speeds, this is like a 1% improvement over the 2018 modelLogitechFan - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
And then comes 970 Pro and wipes the floor with all of them and spits on their graves.LogitechFan - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
970 Pro is not on the list?! WTF is this, an Intel commercial?!Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
What is and isn't tested is sometimes very strange here. The Nvidia GTX 960, for example, was never tested."Editor's Note: Due to personal matters we won’t have a GeForce GTX 960 review published today. But in lieu of that we wanted to go over the basics of NVIDIA’s latest Maxwell card"
Today or ever.
"Anyhow, that’s a wrap from us for now. Be sure to check back in early next week for our complete look at GeForce GTX 960, including performance, overclocking, HEVC support, and more."
Still waiting... Those promises were posted in 2015.
Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Conspiracy theorists" claimed the card wasn't tested because it was a turkey, making Nvidia look bad.Has Anandtech staff ever explained why the promised review never materialized?
Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Has Anandtech staff ever explained why the promised review never materialized?"Honestly, we're busy and despite our best efforts, sometimes bite off more than we can chew. Especially as we have imperfect vision about what products may show up on our doorsteps tomorrow.
Oxford Guy - Monday, January 21, 2019 - link
It's weird to review minor products and not review something major like the GTX 960.It may be explainable without conspiracy but it's still weird, in terms of priorities.
Alistair - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Can't wait to read the SX8200 Pro review. I've bought a few, and I believe they are the best performing drives for the money right now. Excellent. I stopped buying Samsung after they started denying warranties in Canada (and they don't seem to want to fix that). Anyways the Samsung drives cost almost twice the SX8200 pro and perform exactly the same pretty much. Maybe the SX8200 Pro is even faster than the 970 EVO honestly.gglaw - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
A few from decent reviewers are already up for this and the HP EX950 which are small upgrades over the incredibly well-rounded drives they replaced. The SX8200 (non-pro) and EX920 go on so many massive sales it is hard to beat them until the newer drives start dropping in price. The average home user would never know whether they had a 970 Pro, SX8200, SX8200 Pro, or EX950 running so major price differences would make the decision for me. After my initial experiences with the SX8200/EX920, these have been all I've stocked for close to a year. Made me almost regret my 970 Pro. They regularly go on sale for ~$75 for 500GB, and $135 for 1TB versions so my SSD adventures have become rather boring with no close 2nd place I would even consider buying.I'm likely going to get a SX8200 Pro just because I can't help myself with new versions of my favorite drives, but I'm already 99% positive I'll be in the same boat of not being able to tell any difference with the small upgrade. Then I'll have buyer's remorse again like the 970 Pro, knowing the 1TB version of the cheaper drive is barely more than the new 500GB one (SX8200 1TB $135, Pro 500GB $115).
ajp_anton - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
What's wrong with WD's idle power consumption, and am I right assuming that that makes it unsuitable for laptops (mobile ones, not gaming)?Billy Tallis - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
We test SSDs on a desktop, and that means we need to jump through some hoops to get PCIe power management enabled. I've never encountered a desktop motherboard that even has PCIe ASPM enabled by default, and when you are lucky enough to get a BIOS option to turn it on, you can't trust that to take care of everything. Even with the OS set to override the motherboard's settings, not all drives are able to enter their deepest sleep state on our testbed.I view this situation as being similar to DEVSLEEP for SATA drives. It's pretty likely that a laptop which was designed to use M.2 PCIe storage will have all the right firmware bits enabled to use the deepest power saving modes, but they're normally not used (or usable) on a desktop and I don't currently have equipment that can work around that.
hnlog - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
WD Black NVMe has problem on Linux with default parameter.Is it fixed on the new model?
https://community.wd.com/t/linux-support-for-wd-bl...
I think WD should test before shipping the former model.
Billy Tallis - Monday, January 21, 2019 - link
Basically every NVMe SSD vendor has shipped something that turned out to have serious power management bugs, most often with APST and only on certain host systems. It's pretty clear that no vendors (SSD or motherboard) are thoroughly testing those features before shipping, and instead just make sure that it works with a small handful of Windows configurations. But even the Windows NVMe driver is a moving target and new builds have caused problems.It would probably help if the UNH-IOL NVMe Integrator's List testing included APST, but their current test plan only checks whether the drive can handle manually setting power states. And even if they were more thorough, only a few vendors put consumer drives through that certification.
FXi - Sunday, January 20, 2019 - link
I wonder when we'll see the upper end of sizes in consumer drives jump to 4TB. Durability seems to be ready. Perhaps consumer need isn't quite there. But if controllers can handle it and layers exist for it to be built to that size in the M2 format, you'd think that's where they would go next since prices have come out of the stratosphere.eastcoast_pete - Sunday, January 20, 2019 - link
Is it just me, or do these comparisons make the HP 920 look quite good? Not in terms of top performance, but in performance/price. Has anybody here had any experiences with 920 drives?piasabird - Sunday, January 20, 2019 - link
Why not compare similar products together? Why is one drive a 2 TB drive? Since 2TB has more save locations it may naturally be faster due to drive space, cache size, energy usage, etc. Maybe Anandtech doesnt use samsung drives because Samsung will not donate the drives for free but other companies would give them free gear to test.mohitssj10 - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
Will the heatsink included model fit inside Acer Predator Helios 300 (2018 version having 8 gen i5 CPU) laptop?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
The heatsink version is intended only for desktops, and is very unlikely to fit in anything that could reasonably be called a laptop.Nasalmirror - Sunday, February 24, 2019 - link
So, is it worth getting the new SN750 2019 version over the wd black 2018? (price difference is 5 euros where I live) And if so, why? I can't really find any difference between the two ssds, and I really can't decide which one to get. I want to put it in my laptop (helios 300).Davidm771 - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link
Was wondering how the SN750 compares to the SN730 in terms of power efficiency? Against the SK Hynix P31 Gold even? Thanks