SN850X has ton of issues. WDForum itself has a thread on it. Same with 980Pro and 990Pro awful firmware issues. On top these drives have poor endurance rating for their capacity. For eg 4TB MLC 860 Pro SATA SSD had over 4800TBW this 8TB TLC has less endurance than that.
Even Sabrent PCIe3.0 drives had over 6000TBW for 4TB now with PCIe4.0 they dropped it to 3600 and their 8TB is 5400TBW. Samsung, WD, SKH all have worse than Sabrent.
Enterprise TLC SATA has over 1.4PBW, that is 14000TBW that's a damn SATA drive. Now you consumers understand how garbage these new drives and technology are ? Simply going on that useless PCIe speed which will drop after 600-900Seconds and you don't even see any improvement in gaming. And don't even get started on Handbrake etc because very few even care about REMUXing or Transcoding and writing them onto SSD is not going to be easy esp NVMe.
People should stop buying these overpriced SSDs which have poor reliability, M.2 is a weak standard. Enterprise uses SAS24Gbps which is more than PCIe4.0 M.2 and E1SS and the best U.2.
Sadly the future is all QLC which is even worse garbage. Optane was killed by Intel prematurely as they released it at exorbitant pricing vs NAND and blew cash on stupid things and lost Lithography race and now losing the Silicon quality as well.
when has the endurance rating ever matched reality?? nobody at time of manufacture or purchase would know how long any drive will last, most people dont even come close to reaching the rating anyway
"overpriced" except msrp is not what ends up in the market, i got the 2tb 850x for only $135(+tax)CAD exactly a year ago on an almost week long sale, wildly different from the $hundred or more expensive msrp
i'm still on b450 so stuck on pcie3 speeds, but at least the side effect is no need for heatsink and presumably less wear (heatsink model was more expensive, too)
and yes i did see the firmware threads, but they seemed to mostly be coming from the first half year of production and also the non-X model, my firmware was already updated to/past the "good" one (probably why they had the huge sale in the first place)
similarly i got an sn550 1tb a month after the scandal of them secretly swapping worse nand and performance, but mine had the old good nand (firmware version and benchmarks confirm it, plus i was able to personally compare to another sn550 from 2020 to double confirm)
If you're talking about the SN850X randomly not showing up after sleep/reboot, I have not had that happen to me ever in the year or so that I've owned mine.
As for the 990 Pro's firmware fail, they found it, fixed it, and shipped the firmware update, so I don't see it as *that* much of a problem. Not with how underrated the published write endurance numbers are, anyways. What is somewhat disapponting is that Samsung ships the drives with ancient firmware on em from factory, so you have to remember to update em when you get em.
On the topic of durability, it's well-known that consumer drives have hilariously small official endurance ratings, like the 1TB 850 Pro originally having an official 150TBW rating, and later revised to a just as hilariously low 600TBW. For 2LC 3D NAND (ie 40nm-class NAND).
SSDs are certainly faster, but even when copying files on a SATA drive, speed is not that grand. My 500 GB 860 EVO is *marginally* faster, in sustained copying, than my 4 TB hard disk, and an SMR one at that.
Your arguments would have been way more convincing if you hadn't gone full rant and conflated separate and unrelated points.
QLC vs TLC vs MLC vs SLC => this discussion is as old as SSDs and doesn't help anything
NVMe vs SATA vs SAS => Face it, SAS is a data-center technology which will never be used in consumer hardware, not least because it doesn't bring anything to the average person and it has a higher cost.
Writing endurance => most SSDs will see very little writes in their lifespan. The bulk of the usage is write once, read many. Not very relevant either.
Buggy firmware => Unfortunately a real issue, but not a new one. Thankfully it is being addressed. And definitely nothing to do with NVMe. I remember my two SanDisk SSD Plus in 2013 dying on me after 6 months because of a bad firmware. SanDisk fixed the issue and replaced my drives. I'm still using them today, 11 years later.
It's a shame, because otherwise pointing that certain drives (SN850/SN850X and 980/990 Pro) have firmware issues could be useful to Anandtech's readership, but you discredit yourself with this senseless rant.
As someone who owns an SSD, I have found that web browsers write quite a bit of data to their caches. I also suspect, from helping another user, that *coin applications also will do a lot of writes. We're talking in the 100s of GB/s a month.
So yes, endurance matters. Just a few years ago, you could get (IIRC) about 1700TBW for a 1TB drive. Since then, manufacturers have really backed down on the specs. IDK why.
I understand Silver5urfer's frustration. The prices seem to be going up and up, the quality down and down, and that becomes the new baseline. This technology has not replaced hard drives either. So, it is a bit of a disappointment. If we as consumers don't make a noise about it, these companies will get away with murder.
asktoomuch, this is more knowledge, experience and anger at inferior tech or greed. Despite users specifically on workstations will get broken drive much before claimed 0.33 DWPD while paying for it (my two WD SN850X got problems at less than 0.05 DWPD in 3-4 years as i write less than 100GB per day, do the math), and others with light use will be OK, you call it "senseless rant". To me your post looks more like a rant when you essentially confirm all what he said.
WD was really hitting it out of the park for awhile but I agree the current generation products seem plagued with issues not to mention they run excessively hot - hotter than competing products. They have no OEM design wins for any recent products aside from the SN530.
I won't get into Samsung but lets just say they ebb and flow generation to generation with reliability. Support is terrible, always has been.
Which leaves us with two obvious key players: Hynix\Solidigm and Micron\Crucial. Hynix has never made a bad drive and they do a good job supporting them. Many models have never had a firmware update because they don't need one. While I can't support their naming scheme (like the P41 Plus being a rebadged Intel 670, an inferior though not bad, but entirely unrelated drive to the P41) I have never seen a Hynix SSD fail. I have a stack of ancient BC311\511 drives all the way through current PC801's pulled from various machines over the years for upgrades, and they all work and are high health, many having come out of pretty demanding environments.
And Micron is Crucial is Micron. Solid products top to bottom. Support is great, they rarely fail, but performance is never class leading. Just avoid those BX500's and pay attention to firmware updates because they've had some bugs, especially those pesky M550's.
I own a 2TB SN850X and its been fine for me no issues at all I will take a peak at the WD forum to see what you are speaking about. Secondly how are you comparing MLC SATA drives vs TLC PCIe 4.0 express drives then expecting the same endurance kinda apples vs oranges there!
@Anton Shilov - Are you sure the SN850X is only a 4-channel design? I was pretty sure it is an 8-channel one, being that it still sits on top of most benchmarks for PCIe 4.0 SSDs.
Thanks Ryan! I have had one of these in my PS5 (well, SN850 but close enough lol) since the day the M.2 storage update went live for the console. And I've put maybe a dozen of them into other PC builds over the last couple of years.
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Silver5urfer - Tuesday, July 16, 2024 - link
SN850X has ton of issues. WDForum itself has a thread on it. Same with 980Pro and 990Pro awful firmware issues. On top these drives have poor endurance rating for their capacity. For eg 4TB MLC 860 Pro SATA SSD had over 4800TBW this 8TB TLC has less endurance than that.Even Sabrent PCIe3.0 drives had over 6000TBW for 4TB now with PCIe4.0 they dropped it to 3600 and their 8TB is 5400TBW. Samsung, WD, SKH all have worse than Sabrent.
Enterprise TLC SATA has over 1.4PBW, that is 14000TBW that's a damn SATA drive. Now you consumers understand how garbage these new drives and technology are ? Simply going on that useless PCIe speed which will drop after 600-900Seconds and you don't even see any improvement in gaming. And don't even get started on Handbrake etc because very few even care about REMUXing or Transcoding and writing them onto SSD is not going to be easy esp NVMe.
People should stop buying these overpriced SSDs which have poor reliability, M.2 is a weak standard. Enterprise uses SAS24Gbps which is more than PCIe4.0 M.2 and E1SS and the best U.2.
Sadly the future is all QLC which is even worse garbage. Optane was killed by Intel prematurely as they released it at exorbitant pricing vs NAND and blew cash on stupid things and lost Lithography race and now losing the Silicon quality as well.
kn00tcn - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
when has the endurance rating ever matched reality?? nobody at time of manufacture or purchase would know how long any drive will last, most people dont even come close to reaching the rating anyway"overpriced" except msrp is not what ends up in the market, i got the 2tb 850x for only $135(+tax)CAD exactly a year ago on an almost week long sale, wildly different from the $hundred or more expensive msrp
i'm still on b450 so stuck on pcie3 speeds, but at least the side effect is no need for heatsink and presumably less wear (heatsink model was more expensive, too)
ripsteakjaw - Saturday, July 27, 2024 - link
A year ago every ssd was at least half what they're priced now if not more, I don't see how useful that is to anyone now.kn00tcn - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
and yes i did see the firmware threads, but they seemed to mostly be coming from the first half year of production and also the non-X model, my firmware was already updated to/past the "good" one (probably why they had the huge sale in the first place)similarly i got an sn550 1tb a month after the scandal of them secretly swapping worse nand and performance, but mine had the old good nand (firmware version and benchmarks confirm it, plus i was able to personally compare to another sn550 from 2020 to double confirm)
ZeDestructor - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
If you're talking about the SN850X randomly not showing up after sleep/reboot, I have not had that happen to me ever in the year or so that I've owned mine.As for the 990 Pro's firmware fail, they found it, fixed it, and shipped the firmware update, so I don't see it as *that* much of a problem. Not with how underrated the published write endurance numbers are, anyways. What is somewhat disapponting is that Samsung ships the drives with ancient firmware on em from factory, so you have to remember to update em when you get em.
On the topic of durability, it's well-known that consumer drives have hilariously small official endurance ratings, like the 1TB 850 Pro originally having an official 150TBW rating, and later revised to a just as hilariously low 600TBW. For 2LC 3D NAND (ie 40nm-class NAND).
GeoffreyA - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
SSDs are certainly faster, but even when copying files on a SATA drive, speed is not that grand. My 500 GB 860 EVO is *marginally* faster, in sustained copying, than my 4 TB hard disk, and an SMR one at that.asktoomuch - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
Your arguments would have been way more convincing if you hadn't gone full rant and conflated separate and unrelated points.QLC vs TLC vs MLC vs SLC => this discussion is as old as SSDs and doesn't help anything
NVMe vs SATA vs SAS => Face it, SAS is a data-center technology which will never be used in consumer hardware, not least because it doesn't bring anything to the average person and it has a higher cost.
Writing endurance => most SSDs will see very little writes in their lifespan. The bulk of the usage is write once, read many. Not very relevant either.
Buggy firmware => Unfortunately a real issue, but not a new one. Thankfully it is being addressed. And definitely nothing to do with NVMe. I remember my two SanDisk SSD Plus in 2013
dying on me after 6 months because of a bad firmware. SanDisk fixed the issue and replaced my drives. I'm still using them today, 11 years later.
It's a shame, because otherwise pointing that certain drives (SN850/SN850X and 980/990 Pro) have firmware issues could be useful to Anandtech's readership, but you discredit yourself with this senseless rant.
ballsystemlord - Thursday, July 18, 2024 - link
As someone who owns an SSD, I have found that web browsers write quite a bit of data to their caches. I also suspect, from helping another user, that *coin applications also will do a lot of writes. We're talking in the 100s of GB/s a month.So yes, endurance matters. Just a few years ago, you could get (IIRC) about 1700TBW for a 1TB drive. Since then, manufacturers have really backed down on the specs. IDK why.
GeoffreyA - Thursday, July 18, 2024 - link
I understand Silver5urfer's frustration. The prices seem to be going up and up, the quality down and down, and that becomes the new baseline. This technology has not replaced hard drives either. So, it is a bit of a disappointment. If we as consumers don't make a noise about it, these companies will get away with murder.SanX - Thursday, July 18, 2024 - link
asktoomuch, this is more knowledge, experience and anger at inferior tech or greed. Despite users specifically on workstations will get broken drive much before claimed 0.33 DWPD while paying for it (my two WD SN850X got problems at less than 0.05 DWPD in 3-4 years as i write less than 100GB per day, do the math), and others with light use will be OK, you call it "senseless rant". To me your post looks more like a rant when you essentially confirm all what he said.Samus - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
WD was really hitting it out of the park for awhile but I agree the current generation products seem plagued with issues not to mention they run excessively hot - hotter than competing products. They have no OEM design wins for any recent products aside from the SN530.I won't get into Samsung but lets just say they ebb and flow generation to generation with reliability. Support is terrible, always has been.
Which leaves us with two obvious key players: Hynix\Solidigm and Micron\Crucial. Hynix has never made a bad drive and they do a good job supporting them. Many models have never had a firmware update because they don't need one. While I can't support their naming scheme (like the P41 Plus being a rebadged Intel 670, an inferior though not bad, but entirely unrelated drive to the P41) I have never seen a Hynix SSD fail. I have a stack of ancient BC311\511 drives all the way through current PC801's pulled from various machines over the years for upgrades, and they all work and are high health, many having come out of pretty demanding environments.
And Micron is Crucial is Micron. Solid products top to bottom. Support is great, they rarely fail, but performance is never class leading. Just avoid those BX500's and pay attention to firmware updates because they've had some bugs, especially those pesky M550's.
Gasaraki88 - Wednesday, July 31, 2024 - link
Just chill out, it's ok. Life will go on.Makaveli - Tuesday, July 16, 2024 - link
I own a 2TB SN850X and its been fine for me no issues at all I will take a peak at the WD forum to see what you are speaking about. Secondly how are you comparing MLC SATA drives vs TLC PCIe 4.0 express drives then expecting the same endurance kinda apples vs oranges there!NextGen_Gamer - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
@Anton Shilov - Are you sure the SN850X is only a 4-channel design? I was pretty sure it is an 8-channel one, being that it still sits on top of most benchmarks for PCIe 4.0 SSDs.Golgatha777 - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
Yes, it's an 8 channel memory controller and 4 channel PCIe 4.0 interface.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
Thanks! Fixed.NextGen_Gamer - Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - link
Thanks Ryan! I have had one of these in my PS5 (well, SN850 but close enough lol) since the day the M.2 storage update went live for the console. And I've put maybe a dozen of them into other PC builds over the last couple of years.SanX - Saturday, July 20, 2024 - link
$800 when it most probably will not last that claimed 0.33 DWPD? Bulk volumes at one-at-a-piece pricesmeacupla - Monday, July 22, 2024 - link
If I did my math right, it can write a theoretical 570TB/day, so you can find out in 8.5 days.