"Both these drives used QLC NAND, making it suitable only for mainstream consumers on a budget."
What? Readers here generally understand the underlying technologies at play, but why is QLC NAND unsuitable for anyone other than a vague, ill-defined category of "mainstream" users? What use cases are you arguing for here? From my perspective, it looks like an amateurish attempt to add word count and fluff to a piece. Between that and the other unsupported fluff starting that paragraph, it just looks like the writing here is half-baked at best.
Truth be told, one year ago I checked these and decided for a Kingston XS2000. I explicitly figured that after 230 s of writing with ~1.7 GB/s (i.e., ~390 GB) I'd be making my coffee anyway or multitask away. Besides, writing that kind of volume on what is essentially a thumbdrive, dunno, I'd prefer a NAS or network connection.
Maybe proprietary formats demand writing bulk for creative workloads? Not my area..
Because the performance of QLC sucks massive balls? It literally hits HDD speed on anything larger then a NES game. How about atrocious cold data retention, terrible write durability, ece?
"The performance specifications of these two products indicate suitability for power users - for the first time, the company is quoting write speeds for their PSSDs in the marketing material."
Power users won't be okay with waiting a few seconds longer for an external drive to write data? Another ill-defined, vague categorical classification with no use cases to explain. I'm so turned off by the fuzzy writing. It's almost like this article was written by someone who had Discord open on a second screen and was splitting their attention and focus onto another task during both the draft and editing/cleanup process.
I have to agree with you about the fluff, not necessarily going to savage them as bad as you are but what you are saying is correct. Having to skip/skim past the entire first part of the review to get to the substance is bad.
Time for 40gbit/s devices and USB4. They are already sold on Amazon, though price is a bit too high around $120-150. As to the disks of this article -- all they show good numbers in CrystalDiskMark but in reality 10Gbit/s devices will show transfer/copy data speeds like current harddrives 250MB/s , and 20Gbit/s ones like the older serial SSDs (500MB/s), which is hell slow and annoying. after you have seen speeds of NVMe on PCIe 4.0 around 3 GB/s, and PCIe5.0 probably get you double that
I think the author is imagining that non-mainstream users buying USB external disks are going to use them for mission-critical high-IOPS DB write workloads such that they can actually wear out the QLC storage with an abundance of writes, and simultaneously they have forgotten that today's QLC has the same TBW ratios as early eTLC drives, which as the name suggests, was used in Enterprise.
In reality even professional users won't be subjecting an external SSD to punishing high-IOPS write workloads. They will write maybe 200GB in a day, and a 600TBW rating will last them 10 years.
today's QLC has the same TBW ratios as early eTLC drives, which as the name suggests, was used in Enterprise.
well... Enterprise use cares not about longevity, only that those XX,000,000 drives they bought don't fail before the warranty claims. Enterprise backs up at fetish levels, and swaps out devices just before warranty use is reached. if a QLC SSD is ten cents cheaper than a TLC drive in the same warranty period, they'll buy it. if the QLC has a 3 year warranty and the TLC a 5 year warranty, and the QLC is $X cheaper, then Enterprise will load up; otherwise not.
consumer-users, generally, just don't behave that way.
What’s the explanation for the wildly different write bandwidths based on file type? I’m aware of performance penalties for trying to write lots of small files versus large ones, but I would think that video writing and iso writing should be pretty similar as a workload.
A practical and “mission critical” use case for high write speeds is recording high bitrate video direct from camera… if you start dropping frames, the device is essentially useless in a professional setting. Camera data rates are getting hunger and higher with intraframe and raw 6k / 8k becoming more common.
I stop shopping for portable SSD faster than 800MB/s after realizing the time I spent trying to get the right port for maximum speed is more than the time saving I could get from a theoretically faster but certainly more expensive portable SSD.
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18 Comments
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timecop1818 - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
How come there's no internal pics? Or is the enclosure not possible to disassemble without breaking?meacupla - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
I have an X9, and it's welded shutPeachNCream - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
"The increasing popularity of portable SSDs has prompted almost all tier-one NAND flash manufacturers to jump into the market."I'm not saying its not factual, but plowing open an article with an unsupported assertion does not lend credibility to the information that follows.
lmcd - Saturday, November 11, 2023 - link
dude just search usb ssd on amazonPeachNCream - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
"Both these drives used QLC NAND, making it suitable only for mainstream consumers on a budget."What? Readers here generally understand the underlying technologies at play, but why is QLC NAND unsuitable for anyone other than a vague, ill-defined category of "mainstream" users? What use cases are you arguing for here? From my perspective, it looks like an amateurish attempt to add word count and fluff to a piece. Between that and the other unsupported fluff starting that paragraph, it just looks like the writing here is half-baked at best.
lmcd - Saturday, November 11, 2023 - link
Its performance stinks once you get past the SLC cache. Read the full article?jvl - Monday, November 13, 2023 - link
Truth be told, one year ago I checked these and decided for a Kingston XS2000. I explicitly figured that after 230 s of writing with ~1.7 GB/s (i.e., ~390 GB) I'd be making my coffee anyway or multitask away. Besides, writing that kind of volume on what is essentially a thumbdrive, dunno, I'd prefer a NAS or network connection.Maybe proprietary formats demand writing bulk for creative workloads? Not my area..
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, December 1, 2023 - link
Because the performance of QLC sucks massive balls? It literally hits HDD speed on anything larger then a NES game. How about atrocious cold data retention, terrible write durability, ece?PeachNCream - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
"The performance specifications of these two products indicate suitability for power users - for the first time, the company is quoting write speeds for their PSSDs in the marketing material."Power users won't be okay with waiting a few seconds longer for an external drive to write data? Another ill-defined, vague categorical classification with no use cases to explain. I'm so turned off by the fuzzy writing. It's almost like this article was written by someone who had Discord open on a second screen and was splitting their attention and focus onto another task during both the draft and editing/cleanup process.
Dr_b_ - Saturday, December 2, 2023 - link
I have to agree with you about the fluff, not necessarily going to savage them as bad as you are but what you are saying is correct. Having to skip/skim past the entire first part of the review to get to the substance is bad.SanX - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
Time for 40gbit/s devices and USB4. They are already sold on Amazon, though price is a bit too high around $120-150.As to the disks of this article -- all they show good numbers in CrystalDiskMark but in reality 10Gbit/s devices will show transfer/copy data speeds like current harddrives 250MB/s , and 20Gbit/s ones like the older serial SSDs (500MB/s), which is hell slow and annoying. after you have seen speeds of NVMe on PCIe 4.0 around 3 GB/s, and PCIe5.0 probably get you double that
Jansen - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
8TB version would be great. Let’s encourage larger capacities please.linuxgeex - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
I think the author is imagining that non-mainstream users buying USB external disks are going to use them for mission-critical high-IOPS DB write workloads such that they can actually wear out the QLC storage with an abundance of writes, and simultaneously they have forgotten that today's QLC has the same TBW ratios as early eTLC drives, which as the name suggests, was used in Enterprise.In reality even professional users won't be subjecting an external SSD to punishing high-IOPS write workloads. They will write maybe 200GB in a day, and a 600TBW rating will last them 10 years.
FunBunny2 - Saturday, November 11, 2023 - link
today's QLC has the same TBW ratios as early eTLC drives, which as the name suggests, was used in Enterprise.well... Enterprise use cares not about longevity, only that those XX,000,000 drives they bought don't fail before the warranty claims. Enterprise backs up at fetish levels, and swaps out devices just before warranty use is reached. if a QLC SSD is ten cents cheaper than a TLC drive in the same warranty period, they'll buy it. if the QLC has a 3 year warranty and the TLC a 5 year warranty, and the QLC is $X cheaper, then Enterprise will load up; otherwise not.
consumer-users, generally, just don't behave that way.
Hresna - Saturday, November 11, 2023 - link
What’s the explanation for the wildly different write bandwidths based on file type? I’m aware of performance penalties for trying to write lots of small files versus large ones, but I would think that video writing and iso writing should be pretty similar as a workload.A practical and “mission critical” use case for high write speeds is recording high bitrate video direct from camera… if you start dropping frames, the device is essentially useless in a professional setting. Camera data rates are getting hunger and higher with intraframe and raw 6k / 8k becoming more common.
wr3zzz - Sunday, November 12, 2023 - link
I stop shopping for portable SSD faster than 800MB/s after realizing the time I spent trying to get the right port for maximum speed is more than the time saving I could get from a theoretically faster but certainly more expensive portable SSD.MDD1963 - Thursday, November 16, 2023 - link
"Booting Windows 10The read-write bandwidth recorded for each drive in the *boo* access trace is presented below."
Boo access is important! :)
GreenReaper - Tuesday, November 21, 2023 - link
Go for the ICs, Boo - go for the ICs!