Trying to fathom what "retail-ready" means...;) All of my Samsung NVMe drives--yes, even those with "pro" and "evo" in the names--were purchased at retail. Why is this drive anymore "retail-ready" than a 980 Pro, for instance, also sold at retail. Perhaps you meant to say, Samsung's "value drive," or "low-cost NVMe segment," etc, as it is no more "retail-ready" than any of Samsung's other drives--which are all sold at retail.
Along with "entry-level"... Anandtech really should have benchmarked this drive on a dual-core 6th gen laptop or 8th-gen 1L desktop minipc, because that's the kind of devices this is going to land in. And using the host memory for the cache and the extra driver bloat is going to hurt those weak machines. I am certain that a SATA M.2 with DRAM would end up outperforming this for most of the actual retail customers. Where this is a fabulous deal is in HEDT machines that want a lot of cheap SSD storage to act as front cache for a RAID, because they have RAM and cores to spare, so the loss of a relatively piddling amount of RAM to the host cache and driver bloat when they have 16-32x the RAM, isn't such a big deal.
I think you're vastly overestimating what's involved in making HMB work. It's a straightforward feature for the host OS to support and does not "bloat" the NVMe driver. Allocating a 64MB buffer out of the host RAM is a drop in the bucket, or: two frames of 4k image data. The SSD will only touch the HMB a few times per IO, plus maybe a bit more often when doing heavy background operations. The total PCIe bandwidth used by HMB is vastly smaller than the bandwidth used for transferring user data to and from the SSD. That means HMB is using an even more negligible fraction of the CPU's DRAM bandwidth. The CPU execution time used by HMB is exactly zero. The resource requirements of HMB are so low that UFS has copied the feature to accelerate smartphone storage.
The HMB helps track the LBA which is why most SATA drives suffer so much when there is no DRAM, it takes much longer to search for the block. With HMB PCIE SSDs will suffer much much less being DRAMless than an SATA SSD.
Indeed, some may remember the PM981 OEM drive that came out like 6mo before the 970 EVO, which you could get if you were willing to forgo the retail package.
I think what was implied by "retail-ready," was the idea that OEM builders like Dell, Acer, etc. might use the price-competitiveness of this model with the Samsung name-recognition to package, say, the 500 GB model into their builds. This would go a long way for performance and marketing bragging for sales when compared to lesser performing drives like an other (insert lesser-known name here) 250 GB DRAM-less NVMe.
Samsung has a lot of OEM only drives that most of us has not seen directly. As they have reviewed a few OEM only Samsung SSDs, i think this is why it was written that way.
Doesn't look like to me they are targeting the OEM crowd, lazy design as it is a two-sided M.2 stick, by removing the dram should have been easy to get everything on one side.
This is solely for the retail market where consumers by and large prefer Samsung , most will pick the cheapest samsung drive and at this price it will be hard to justify a brand that isn't associated with performance.
The whole thing appears to be designed for cost, and I am guessing a two-sided design was the most cost efficient layout(Don't have to double stack NAND dies?). Did you take any picture of the device with the sticker removed, would be interested to see how they chose to populate this. Also impressive the QD1 uplift with HMB enabled.
Samsung likes to have a catch for trying to spend less, like the dryer I bought. It played an extremely long very irritating song every time the load was finished. Only on the more expensive models could it be turned off. Of course none of the online reviews warned people about this and there was nothing in the big box store about it. Caveat emptor!
What did turn up online later, though, were the endless tales of woe from owners whose machines broke an expensive part — the same thing that happened with mine. The dryer only lasted three years or so. Some part on it melts and it's too difficult to replace and too expensive to have serviced.
Samsung tried really hard to make an SSD drive with worse value for money than Intel, and I'd argue they still managed to fail.
I guess it's fast enough that the typical consumer wouldn't notice the difference, will last longer than Intel's QLC, and the user would still get a fuzzy feeling inside because they bought a Genuine Samsung 980®™
Intel is really not the best company to compare with. Intel is obsessed with QLC nonsense even more than Samsung is, it seems. And, Intel is rubbing its mitts together about foisting PLC onto the public, as if its new 9000 series FX CPUs aren't enough of a disaster.
I have had good results with the Inland TLC drives, both in SATA and in NVME format. However, Gigabyte designed one of the motherboards I have so idiotically that the Performance Plus drive can't be used. The NVME slot is too close to the CPU socket (hits my EK block) and the expansion slot (hits that, too). One would think an ATX board with one NVME slot could be done intelligently, especially with what was once the top chipset.
Due watch with Inland, though, because the product naming is not nearly as clear as it should be. There are "Premium" and "Professional" drives, for instance — as if there is some kind of clarity there.
I've replied to one of your previous posts about this NVMe issue, but as it seems to be your favorite campfire story so I'll try digging a bit deeper this time.
NVMe M.2 drives fit fine on that motherboard. It's a close fit, but nobody else has had the same difficulties. If the drive doesn't fit, it means it isn't installed correctly or has an oversized heatsink on it. Since the Inland drives don't ship with a heatsink, that means it's not lined up properly in the slot.
That EK uses a weird, oversized mounting bracket isn't Gigabyte's fault. It's not Inland's (Microcenter's) fault. It's an EK problem.
Do you still have the drive? Do you own a dremel? You probably need to shave a chunk out of that waterblock bracket to allow clearance.
Failing that, grab a $13 NVMe M.2 to PCI Express x4 AIC adapter off of Amazon, or the vendor of your choosing. You can mount the drive in the last slot (PCI Express 3.0 x4) with no performance penalty, it'll be far from your cursed EK bracket, and you'll save hours by not having to bring it up in every article. ;)
You seem intent on blaming everything but Gigabyte but the fact is that the drive also hits the slot. It doesn’t just hit the EK bracket. It hits the slot as well!
Nothing of the sort, I'm just mystified as to how a standard NVMe M.2 seemingly won't fit on that board, since it's not at all difficult to find pictures of an NVMe M.2 mounted in that exact slot.
I do owe you an apology, though, with regard to the heatsink statement! If you've got the Inland Performance Plus (Gen4 - on a Z390?) NVMe M.2, they do indeed have a heatsink, similar to that on the Corsair MP600.
That said, it doesn't seem to extend past the edge of the PCB more than a millimeter or so. My assumption is that even without the heatsink, the bracket would still be contacting the PCB from the way you've described it - it might clear the x1 slot side in this kind of stark naked configuration, but the other edge would still be blocked, which wouldn't do you much good.
No argument that the board's got the M.2 slot in a very funky place, but it's absolutely fair to point a finger at the EK bracket, too.
I think I referenced a similar image before, but here's a regular NVMe M.2 happily existing in the troublesome slot via some stock imagery:
I'd still look into the cheap slot adapter route - it's not an elegant solution, but it'll work just as well and won't keep you up at night cursing Gigabyte into the early hours. ;)
Oof, those latencies! For basically the same price, I'd take the "way overpriced" 670p over this any day of the week! Peak transfer rates are worthless, SSDs live or die by their random read latencies for perceived performance.
But on all the marketable metrics it is a win, Right Brand, highest sequential numbers. Any conversation more nuanced doesn't matter to the majority. They have a hit on there hands and with how economical the design is the margins should be good enough, solid win for Samsung.
The performance send very good with an empty drive but it really drops off when the drive is full of days. In the ATSB Heavy benchmark the performance for from 936 MBps to 496 MBps. I wonder how much free space we have to keep in the drive so the performance will stay closer to 936 MBps
@Billy All those names are related to space. Polaris and Photon are obvious. Phoenix was a Mars robot. Elpis was the Greek spirit of hope, but is also an asteroid. Maru = Kobayashi Maru? Pablo = Pablo Gabriel de León? Maybe someone at Samsung is good with obscure facts :-)
An OK-ish drive especially if it comes down slightly to a better price. Middle of the pack on everything, which is excellent for an entry level drive.
The one thing I really don't like is the name. The Samsung 980 Pro is one of the best NVME drives ever made. This is ... not. The internet is full of praise for the Samsung 980, often without specifying the 'Pro' because there's been only one model. How many people are going to see that praise, whether it says 'Pro' or not, and assume it's referring to this drive?
This feels like a sneaky misleading cash-grab by Samsung Marketing for the sake of allowing PC adverts to plaster 'Contains Samsung 980 SSD!' on them.
To be honest the entry-level 980 doesn't deserve this, it's a decent drive that doesn't need cheating to promote it. If it was labelled 'Samsung SSD 975' that would be perfectly fine.
Samsung is a particularly slimy company. First, there were the fantasy power claims for the 830 drives, claims people took at face value to promote them in forums. (Samsung, I also recall, was caught paying people to astroturf in forums.) Anandtech's power tests showed that the 830 drives used a lot more power.
Then, when the planar 840 drives were exposed as being a faulty design, the company refused to replace the drives. Instead, it issued a kludgy work-around — causing the drive to re-write data as many times as necessary to continue to work around the problem (voltage drift from planar TLC I assume). The steady state performance of the 128 GB 840 was so bad HardOCP said it had worse performance than a laptop hard disk, at least in some areas.
Then, we have the company's decision to use (unfortunately legal, probably) fraud, labeling TLC and QLC drives 'MLC' — as an intentional bait and switch since the industry standard for naming has been MLC for 2 layer flash for many years — many years before Samsung started cheating with the naming. Calling QLC drives MLC is so egregious it shouldn't be legal.
Now, we have what you pointed out. Samsung loves to trick people with naming lately. Making up power consumption figures is old school, apparently.
It's anecdotal, but someone in my family bought a 1 TB 860 QLC and it has never been reliable. It even causes the entire machine to slow and have booting problems. The Inland NVME TLC drive I had him replace the Samsung with doesn't have those issues nor does the Inland TLC SATA drive that has been in the machine from the start. He did an RMA and the replacement (which probably was the original drive) had the same problem.
I know this is anecdotal but I can't help but mention the third Samsung SSD in as many months sitting on my bench that failed right out of its 5-year warranty, in this case an 850 EVO. Randomly drops off the bus. These drives have serious longevity concerns and it seems to be a firmware\controller issue, as every drive uses the MEX controller (the 840's and the 850 EVO 1TB) and while I realize that controller hasn't been used in recent products, it's astonishing coincidence they are failing out of warranty obviously doesn't result in repeat customers for Samsung.
Meanwhile every Crucial drive I've seen in the last decade from the C300, M4, M500\550, MX and BX series have reliability beyond Crucial's metrics and I'm talking at least 200 installed drives throughout our company.
I agree the newer drives seem reliable, yet the 840 Pro and 850's seemed reliable for the longest time too while recently reports across the web have shown them beginning to fail in the last few years, and Samsung has the most annoying, anti-customer tech support in the industry. Their storage support is outsourced to a 3rd party (storage tech solutions) and with ridiculous warranty qualifications (good luck finding that proof of purchase from 4 years ago) and weeks-long turnarounds. Meanwhile Intel, Toshiba\OCZ and presumably Crucial (we've never had to RMA a Crucial SSD, and most are Micron OEM drives anyway) have fairly normal RMA process from what I've heard. My experience RMA'ing a Intel SSD730 was met with a replacement of a larger capacity 545s and my experience RMA'ing a OCZ ARC100 was met with a free ADVANCED replacement of a same capacity Trion 150. The one Samsung SSD I replaced a few years ago (3 months before the warranty was set to expire) was an 840 EVO and they replaced it with AN 840 EVO. We all know the 840 EVO is one of the worst, if not the worst, SSD Samsung has ever made, you'd think they want to cycle them out of existence yet they seemingly have a stockpile of them somewhere to offload to customers and have them fail again from their write amplification issues.
I realize my experience is mostly anecdotal but there are plenty of references to customers with Samsung failures, and like Apple, it's hard to actually find negative reviews due to blind loyalty, and the fact the majority of Samsung's SSD business is (was) in OEM's so customers likely didn't even know the failures were Samsung-related in the systems that failed. Probably explains why Toshiba and Hynix, along with the OEM regulars Intel and Micron have erroded their OEM wins and you see fewer and fewer Samsung SSD's in modern PC's. Admittedly this can be attributed to Samsung's premium pricing over every other competitor in an industry plagued with tiny margins.
Interesting reports. I've installed rather a lot of Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs (various models, purchased used for cheap) for various charities and non-profits and never had any fail yet. Had an inherited Kingston 480GB SATA 2.5" fail - they sent me a replacement. A 1TB Crucial P1 NVMe m.2 (purchased new) started giving problems in one of my Macbook Airs - freezing and crashes - had to move it to my PC desktop where it's worked fine ever since.
My main m.2 are a pair of ADATA XPG SX8200 1TB nvme, also purchased used, which have given magnificent service in everything I've put them in - PCs and Apple Airs and MacBooks Pro.
Quite ironically to my above statements, I've never seen an PM\SM851 OEM Samsung SSD fail. Not sure what's up with that. They're common OEM drives for HP, Dell and Lenovo circa 2013-2016 and I've seen a lot of those still in service, and selling dirt cheap on eBay. It's no secret the OEM drives have nerfed firmware that lacks some throughput but that has always had me wonder if the M-series controllers are killing themselves at higher clock rates...there is a bit of precident to this as the Intel 730's based on the DC-class drives and controllers were higher clocked and seemed to fail a bit, too.
I'm running the same SSD in my desktop AND laptop now. Replaced the WD Black in my desktop which kept throttling near 70C in what I'd consider an adequately cooled case. The Hynix P31 rarely even reaches 60F.
Great drive. I wish they came in larger capacity :(
Based on a quick search of online man pages, at least FreeBSD has HMB support. A man page for Illumos dated 2018 makes no mention of HMB, and I don't think they have much reason to implement that feature since enterprise SSDs wouldn't use HMB. But it's also not too complicated to support.
I don't understand why anybody would buy one of these when you can get an SK Hynix Gold P31 for the same price on Amazon. I got an Adata SX8200 Pro 1TB for $100 from best buy the other day, which has DRAM cache. Granted it is the SM2262G with Samsung 64L TLC, but I'll still take that over a DRAM-less drive any day of the week.
Honestly I agree with you, the Hynix P31 is a top tier SSD and it costs $135 instead of $130 for this. A reasonable person should pay $5 extra. I also think the Phison E12 would be a nice alternative for ~$110, if only the manufacturers of all the E12 products would stop changing the flash memory and the controller every few months. I don't have faith in Adata, and I have only a little bit more confidence in Silicon Power
Right now “new” PCI 3.0 units are probably NOS. They’re all fast enough. This summer PCI 3 x 4 NVMe manufacturing will be competing to empty out old parts. Should be a great time for 2TB models for 149 USD.
I really doubt Phison has stopped making new E12 controllers yet. They're still far too popular. Even E16 is still thriving as the cheaper gen4 option than E18 for use with QLC, and there are even some E16s going into gen3-only drives. Silicon Motion obviously can't stop manufacturing for the SM2262(EN) family until well after their new 8-channel controllers are shipping in volume; but they haven't hit the market yet.
So I'd say it'll probably be at least another two years before a significant fraction of gen3 drives on the retail market are new-old-stock. These products aren't going away yet, and won't go away overnight.
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WaltC - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Trying to fathom what "retail-ready" means...;) All of my Samsung NVMe drives--yes, even those with "pro" and "evo" in the names--were purchased at retail. Why is this drive anymore "retail-ready" than a 980 Pro, for instance, also sold at retail. Perhaps you meant to say, Samsung's "value drive," or "low-cost NVMe segment," etc, as it is no more "retail-ready" than any of Samsung's other drives--which are all sold at retail.WaltC - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
I did see the "entry-level" qualifier, however. But I'm not aware that Samsung has ever manufactured an SSD that was not "retail-ready."linuxgeex - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Along with "entry-level"... Anandtech really should have benchmarked this drive on a dual-core 6th gen laptop or 8th-gen 1L desktop minipc, because that's the kind of devices this is going to land in. And using the host memory for the cache and the extra driver bloat is going to hurt those weak machines. I am certain that a SATA M.2 with DRAM would end up outperforming this for most of the actual retail customers. Where this is a fabulous deal is in HEDT machines that want a lot of cheap SSD storage to act as front cache for a RAID, because they have RAM and cores to spare, so the loss of a relatively piddling amount of RAM to the host cache and driver bloat when they have 16-32x the RAM, isn't such a big deal.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
I think you're vastly overestimating what's involved in making HMB work. It's a straightforward feature for the host OS to support and does not "bloat" the NVMe driver. Allocating a 64MB buffer out of the host RAM is a drop in the bucket, or: two frames of 4k image data. The SSD will only touch the HMB a few times per IO, plus maybe a bit more often when doing heavy background operations. The total PCIe bandwidth used by HMB is vastly smaller than the bandwidth used for transferring user data to and from the SSD. That means HMB is using an even more negligible fraction of the CPU's DRAM bandwidth. The CPU execution time used by HMB is exactly zero. The resource requirements of HMB are so low that UFS has copied the feature to accelerate smartphone storage.Byte - Monday, August 30, 2021 - link
The HMB helps track the LBA which is why most SATA drives suffer so much when there is no DRAM, it takes much longer to search for the block. With HMB PCIE SSDs will suffer much much less being DRAMless than an SATA SSD.SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
The article refers to it as retail-ready entry-level. As opposed to OEM entry-level, which Samsung has produced in the past.alfalfacat - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Indeed, some may remember the PM981 OEM drive that came out like 6mo before the 970 EVO, which you could get if you were willing to forgo the retail package.https://www.anandtech.com/show/12670/the-samsung-9...
antonkochubey - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Also forgo firmware updates and 5 year warranty.serendip - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Samsung now has a bunch of OEM drives like the PM991, PM991a and PM9A1.https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/ssd/client-s...
linuxgeex - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
exactly - retail-channel-ready.ptthere - Thursday, June 17, 2021 - link
I think what was implied by "retail-ready," was the idea that OEM builders like Dell, Acer, etc. might use the price-competitiveness of this model with the Samsung name-recognition to package, say, the 500 GB model into their builds. This would go a long way for performance and marketing bragging for sales when compared to lesser performing drives like an other (insert lesser-known name here) 250 GB DRAM-less NVMe.Byte - Monday, August 30, 2021 - link
Samsung has a lot of OEM only drives that most of us has not seen directly. As they have reviewed a few OEM only Samsung SSDs, i think this is why it was written that way.cyrusfox - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Doesn't look like to me they are targeting the OEM crowd, lazy design as it is a two-sided M.2 stick, by removing the dram should have been easy to get everything on one side.This is solely for the retail market where consumers by and large prefer Samsung , most will pick the cheapest samsung drive and at this price it will be hard to justify a brand that isn't associated with performance.
The whole thing appears to be designed for cost, and I am guessing a two-sided design was the most cost efficient layout(Don't have to double stack NAND dies?). Did you take any picture of the device with the sticker removed, would be interested to see how they chose to populate this. Also impressive the QD1 uplift with HMB enabled.
Wereweeb - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
It's a single-sided drive. The image shows the PCB with and without the label, not the different sides.cyrusfox - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Dang you are right, my bad, Guess we may see this in OEM laptops then.If only anandtech comments allowed edits, my ignorance will live on forever...
Kurosaki - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Entry level sizes for over the top prices. Yayy.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Samsung likes to have a catch for trying to spend less, like the dryer I bought. It played an extremely long very irritating song every time the load was finished. Only on the more expensive models could it be turned off. Of course none of the online reviews warned people about this and there was nothing in the big box store about it. Caveat emptor!What did turn up online later, though, were the endless tales of woe from owners whose machines broke an expensive part — the same thing that happened with mine. The dryer only lasted three years or so. Some part on it melts and it's too difficult to replace and too expensive to have serviced.
Last Samsung appliance for me.
UltraTech79 - Monday, March 29, 2021 - link
Dude just unplug the internal cable that connects the internal speaker. No warranties have to be lost hereWereweeb - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Samsung tried really hard to make an SSD drive with worse value for money than Intel, and I'd argue they still managed to fail.I guess it's fast enough that the typical consumer wouldn't notice the difference, will last longer than Intel's QLC, and the user would still get a fuzzy feeling inside because they bought a Genuine Samsung 980®™
powerarmour - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
A castrated TLC drive is still better than those Intel QLC horror shows.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Intel is really not the best company to compare with. Intel is obsessed with QLC nonsense even more than Samsung is, it seems. And, Intel is rubbing its mitts together about foisting PLC onto the public, as if its new 9000 series FX CPUs aren't enough of a disaster.I have had good results with the Inland TLC drives, both in SATA and in NVME format. However, Gigabyte designed one of the motherboards I have so idiotically that the Performance Plus drive can't be used. The NVME slot is too close to the CPU socket (hits my EK block) and the expansion slot (hits that, too). One would think an ATX board with one NVME slot could be done intelligently, especially with what was once the top chipset.
Due watch with Inland, though, because the product naming is not nearly as clear as it should be. There are "Premium" and "Professional" drives, for instance — as if there is some kind of clarity there.
Slash3 - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
I've replied to one of your previous posts about this NVMe issue, but as it seems to be your favorite campfire story so I'll try digging a bit deeper this time.NVMe M.2 drives fit fine on that motherboard. It's a close fit, but nobody else has had the same difficulties. If the drive doesn't fit, it means it isn't installed correctly or has an oversized heatsink on it. Since the Inland drives don't ship with a heatsink, that means it's not lined up properly in the slot.
That EK uses a weird, oversized mounting bracket isn't Gigabyte's fault. It's not Inland's (Microcenter's) fault. It's an EK problem.
Do you still have the drive? Do you own a dremel? You probably need to shave a chunk out of that waterblock bracket to allow clearance.
Failing that, grab a $13 NVMe M.2 to PCI Express x4 AIC adapter off of Amazon, or the vendor of your choosing. You can mount the drive in the last slot (PCI Express 3.0 x4) with no performance penalty, it'll be far from your cursed EK bracket, and you'll save hours by not having to bring it up in every article. ;)
https://www.amazon.com/M-2-NVMe-PCIe-3-0-x4/dp/B07...
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Incorrect.1. The drive’s PCB hits the waterblock bracket.
2. The drive does have a heatsink and it is an Inland.
3. It’s impossible to install an NVME drive incorrectly as long as one know how to push the edge connector all the way in.
4. ‘Oversized’ says who? ATX is a big board. One slot on the board. Gigabyte couldn’t manage to put it in an intelligent place.
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
You seem intent on blaming everything but Gigabyte but the fact is that the drive also hits the slot. It doesn’t just hit the EK bracket. It hits the slot as well!Gigabyte is at fault.
Slash3 - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Nothing of the sort, I'm just mystified as to how a standard NVMe M.2 seemingly won't fit on that board, since it's not at all difficult to find pictures of an NVMe M.2 mounted in that exact slot.I do owe you an apology, though, with regard to the heatsink statement! If you've got the Inland Performance Plus (Gen4 - on a Z390?) NVMe M.2, they do indeed have a heatsink, similar to that on the Corsair MP600.
This model?
https://90a1c75758623581b3f8-5c119c3de181c9857fcb2...
That said, it doesn't seem to extend past the edge of the PCB more than a millimeter or so. My assumption is that even without the heatsink, the bracket would still be contacting the PCB from the way you've described it - it might clear the x1 slot side in this kind of stark naked configuration, but the other edge would still be blocked, which wouldn't do you much good.
No argument that the board's got the M.2 slot in a very funky place, but it's absolutely fair to point a finger at the EK bracket, too.
I think I referenced a similar image before, but here's a regular NVMe M.2 happily existing in the troublesome slot via some stock imagery:
https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/jakarta...
https://image.shutterstock.com/z/stock-photo-jakar...
https://image.shutterstock.com/z/stock-photo-jakar...
Cozy, but it works!
I'd still look into the cheap slot adapter route - it's not an elegant solution, but it'll work just as well and won't keep you up at night cursing Gigabyte into the early hours. ;)
Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
The EK bracket is just one part of the problem. The PCB also hits the slot.So, even with no EK bracket the board is unacceptably poorly designed.
edzieba - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Oof, those latencies! For basically the same price, I'd take the "way overpriced" 670p over this any day of the week! Peak transfer rates are worthless, SSDs live or die by their random read latencies for perceived performance.cyrusfox - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
But on all the marketable metrics it is a win, Right Brand, highest sequential numbers. Any conversation more nuanced doesn't matter to the majority. They have a hit on there hands and with how economical the design is the margins should be good enough, solid win for Samsung.GREAT Expectations - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Literally in the first paragraph: "product stacl"XacTactX - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
The performance send very good with an empty drive but it really drops off when the drive is full of days. In the ATSB Heavy benchmark the performance for from 936 MBps to 496 MBps. I wonder how much free space we have to keep in the drive so the performance will stay closer to 936 MBpsXacTactX - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Next time I have to proof read. The performance is very good but it drops off when the drive is full of dataDigitalFreak - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
@Billy All those names are related to space. Polaris and Photon are obvious. Phoenix was a Mars robot. Elpis was the Greek spirit of hope, but is also an asteroid. Maru = Kobayashi Maru? Pablo = Pablo Gabriel de León?Maybe someone at Samsung is good with obscure facts :-)
Tomatotech - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
An OK-ish drive especially if it comes down slightly to a better price. Middle of the pack on everything, which is excellent for an entry level drive.The one thing I really don't like is the name. The Samsung 980 Pro is one of the best NVME drives ever made. This is ... not. The internet is full of praise for the Samsung 980, often without specifying the 'Pro' because there's been only one model. How many people are going to see that praise, whether it says 'Pro' or not, and assume it's referring to this drive?
This feels like a sneaky misleading cash-grab by Samsung Marketing for the sake of allowing PC adverts to plaster 'Contains Samsung 980 SSD!' on them.
To be honest the entry-level 980 doesn't deserve this, it's a decent drive that doesn't need cheating to promote it. If it was labelled 'Samsung SSD 975' that would be perfectly fine.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Samsung is a particularly slimy company. First, there were the fantasy power claims for the 830 drives, claims people took at face value to promote them in forums. (Samsung, I also recall, was caught paying people to astroturf in forums.) Anandtech's power tests showed that the 830 drives used a lot more power.Then, when the planar 840 drives were exposed as being a faulty design, the company refused to replace the drives. Instead, it issued a kludgy work-around — causing the drive to re-write data as many times as necessary to continue to work around the problem (voltage drift from planar TLC I assume). The steady state performance of the 128 GB 840 was so bad HardOCP said it had worse performance than a laptop hard disk, at least in some areas.
Then, we have the company's decision to use (unfortunately legal, probably) fraud, labeling TLC and QLC drives 'MLC' — as an intentional bait and switch since the industry standard for naming has been MLC for 2 layer flash for many years — many years before Samsung started cheating with the naming. Calling QLC drives MLC is so egregious it shouldn't be legal.
Now, we have what you pointed out. Samsung loves to trick people with naming lately. Making up power consumption figures is old school, apparently.
It's anecdotal, but someone in my family bought a 1 TB 860 QLC and it has never been reliable. It even causes the entire machine to slow and have booting problems. The Inland NVME TLC drive I had him replace the Samsung with doesn't have those issues nor does the Inland TLC SATA drive that has been in the machine from the start. He did an RMA and the replacement (which probably was the original drive) had the same problem.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Also, it's unacceptable to sell expensive televisions with undefeatable ads. That other companies do it also is no excuse.UltraTech79 - Monday, March 29, 2021 - link
Dude this naming scheme has been around for a decade. If someone is too stupid to see PRO thats on them, not Samsung.Samus - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
I know this is anecdotal but I can't help but mention the third Samsung SSD in as many months sitting on my bench that failed right out of its 5-year warranty, in this case an 850 EVO. Randomly drops off the bus. These drives have serious longevity concerns and it seems to be a firmware\controller issue, as every drive uses the MEX controller (the 840's and the 850 EVO 1TB) and while I realize that controller hasn't been used in recent products, it's astonishing coincidence they are failing out of warranty obviously doesn't result in repeat customers for Samsung.Meanwhile every Crucial drive I've seen in the last decade from the C300, M4, M500\550, MX and BX series have reliability beyond Crucial's metrics and I'm talking at least 200 installed drives throughout our company.
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Both of my 860 EVOs (500GB & 4TB) have been solid. I agree that their pre-860 series drives were not that great.Samus - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
I agree the newer drives seem reliable, yet the 840 Pro and 850's seemed reliable for the longest time too while recently reports across the web have shown them beginning to fail in the last few years, and Samsung has the most annoying, anti-customer tech support in the industry. Their storage support is outsourced to a 3rd party (storage tech solutions) and with ridiculous warranty qualifications (good luck finding that proof of purchase from 4 years ago) and weeks-long turnarounds. Meanwhile Intel, Toshiba\OCZ and presumably Crucial (we've never had to RMA a Crucial SSD, and most are Micron OEM drives anyway) have fairly normal RMA process from what I've heard. My experience RMA'ing a Intel SSD730 was met with a replacement of a larger capacity 545s and my experience RMA'ing a OCZ ARC100 was met with a free ADVANCED replacement of a same capacity Trion 150. The one Samsung SSD I replaced a few years ago (3 months before the warranty was set to expire) was an 840 EVO and they replaced it with AN 840 EVO. We all know the 840 EVO is one of the worst, if not the worst, SSD Samsung has ever made, you'd think they want to cycle them out of existence yet they seemingly have a stockpile of them somewhere to offload to customers and have them fail again from their write amplification issues.I realize my experience is mostly anecdotal but there are plenty of references to customers with Samsung failures, and like Apple, it's hard to actually find negative reviews due to blind loyalty, and the fact the majority of Samsung's SSD business is (was) in OEM's so customers likely didn't even know the failures were Samsung-related in the systems that failed. Probably explains why Toshiba and Hynix, along with the OEM regulars Intel and Micron have erroded their OEM wins and you see fewer and fewer Samsung SSD's in modern PC's. Admittedly this can be attributed to Samsung's premium pricing over every other competitor in an industry plagued with tiny margins.
Tomatotech - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Interesting reports. I've installed rather a lot of Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs (various models, purchased used for cheap) for various charities and non-profits and never had any fail yet. Had an inherited Kingston 480GB SATA 2.5" fail - they sent me a replacement. A 1TB Crucial P1 NVMe m.2 (purchased new) started giving problems in one of my Macbook Airs - freezing and crashes - had to move it to my PC desktop where it's worked fine ever since.My main m.2 are a pair of ADATA XPG SX8200 1TB nvme, also purchased used, which have given magnificent service in everything I've put them in - PCs and Apple Airs and MacBooks Pro.
Samus - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Quite ironically to my above statements, I've never seen an PM\SM851 OEM Samsung SSD fail. Not sure what's up with that. They're common OEM drives for HP, Dell and Lenovo circa 2013-2016 and I've seen a lot of those still in service, and selling dirt cheap on eBay. It's no secret the OEM drives have nerfed firmware that lacks some throughput but that has always had me wonder if the M-series controllers are killing themselves at higher clock rates...there is a bit of precident to this as the Intel 730's based on the DC-class drives and controllers were higher clocked and seemed to fail a bit, too.damianrobertjones - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
That's a worry, as nearly EVERY machine with an SSD, in work, is Samsung based. Mostly m.2. due to using intel Nucs.Not one has failed so far.
Kamen Rider Blade - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Thanks to this article, I discovered the:SK Hynix Gold P31 1TB
A very solid & balanced 1 TB SSD =D
Samus - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
I'm running the same SSD in my desktop AND laptop now. Replaced the WD Black in my desktop which kept throttling near 70C in what I'd consider an adequately cooled case. The Hynix P31 rarely even reaches 60F.Great drive. I wish they came in larger capacity :(
fazalmajid - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
So if HMB requires host OS support, how compatible is it with Linux or less common alternative OSes like the BSDs or Solaris/Illumos?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Based on a quick search of online man pages, at least FreeBSD has HMB support. A man page for Illumos dated 2018 makes no mention of HMB, and I don't think they have much reason to implement that feature since enterprise SSDs wouldn't use HMB. But it's also not too complicated to support.sonny73n - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Performance is entry level but price is not.nvmnghia - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
How is the HBA test designed? Read some < cache size data over and over?nvmnghia - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
I mean HMBoRAirwolf - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
I don't understand why anybody would buy one of these when you can get an SK Hynix Gold P31 for the same price on Amazon. I got an Adata SX8200 Pro 1TB for $100 from best buy the other day, which has DRAM cache. Granted it is the SM2262G with Samsung 64L TLC, but I'll still take that over a DRAM-less drive any day of the week.XacTactX - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Honestly I agree with you, the Hynix P31 is a top tier SSD and it costs $135 instead of $130 for this. A reasonable person should pay $5 extra. I also think the Phison E12 would be a nice alternative for ~$110, if only the manufacturers of all the E12 products would stop changing the flash memory and the controller every few months. I don't have faith in Adata, and I have only a little bit more confidence in Silicon Powerdsplover - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Right now “new” PCI 3.0 units are probably NOS. They’re all fast enough. This summer PCI 3 x 4 NVMe manufacturing will be competing to empty out old parts. Should be a great time for 2TB models for 149 USD.Billy Tallis - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
I really doubt Phison has stopped making new E12 controllers yet. They're still far too popular. Even E16 is still thriving as the cheaper gen4 option than E18 for use with QLC, and there are even some E16s going into gen3-only drives. Silicon Motion obviously can't stop manufacturing for the SM2262(EN) family until well after their new 8-channel controllers are shipping in volume; but they haven't hit the market yet.So I'd say it'll probably be at least another two years before a significant fraction of gen3 drives on the retail market are new-old-stock. These products aren't going away yet, and won't go away overnight.
mulamboi - Wednesday, April 21, 2021 - link
Does anyone already know how much samsung 980 pro 1tb to undermine 1 chia?Brazilian here o /