Hardware Are there any "catches" with this SSD?

[GameSystem]

@FireEmblemGuy were you referring to this one for DarkFlare?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226596&cm_re=ssd_mlc-_-20-226-596-_-Product

@DarkFlare69 that link is broken for me.

 

[YayMii]

Is this one good? I never use more than 400GB, I just wanted the extra 560GB so i never have to worry.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=N82E16820233949

...I hate to be that guy, but I fixed your link again:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233949

 

[DarkFlare69]

...I hate to be that guy, but I fixed your link again:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233949

Idk why, I literally copy the link from my URL and paste it here.

 

[FireEmblemGuy]

@FireEmblemGuy were you referring to this one for DarkFlare?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226596&cm_re=ssd_mlc-_-20-226-596-_-Product

@DarkFlare69 that link is broken for me.

Yeah, that'd be the one. MLC, decent reviews, probably the beset price on Newegg for a full 1TB SSD, but I can't speak from experience about it.

 

[GameSystem]

I'm looking at the specifications tab and I can't tell what is good because I have no knowledge on this. What I learned so far is that MLC > TLC. However, in the Memory Components pop-up it says that there is SLC, MLC, eMLC, TLC and 3-D Vertical. Which is the best out of those?

What about Max Sequential Read, Max Sequential Write, 4KB Random Read, 4KB Random Write, and MTBF (Mean time between failures). Any specific numbers we should be aware of?

How about features? There is a whole section dedicated to it, and I feel like it's just trying to trick unknowing people with superfluous information. Anything to look for?

 

[DarkFlare69]

How about I just open this up to everyone.
I'm looking for a fast SSD for general use and/or gaming.

Needs to be SATA (To fit with MSI 970a g46)
Size and speeds should be best for the money.
Nothing less than 480GB
$120 through $180

Post your suggestions here.

 

[FireEmblemGuy]

How about I just open this up to everyone.
I'm looking for a fast SSD for general use and/or gaming.

Needs to be SATA (To fit with MSI 970a g46)
Size and speeds should be best for the money.
Nothing less than 480GB
$120 through $180

Post your suggestions here.

I'm not about to do an in-depth analysis, but between a couple well-priced popular drives:
On the low end of that budget, there's a 512GB Mushkin Eco2 for $119.99; rated at 560/305 MB/s R/W respectively. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226765
Higher up: Samsung 850 Evo 500GB - $146.99; Slightly slower max read at 540MB/s, but up to 520MB/s write speeds. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-147-373

 

[GameSystem]

In OP's case, should he go for the one that has the highest read speed if he wants it for gaming? Would the cheaper Mushkin be better than the Samsung then? The Mushkin doesn't mention the memory component though.

 

[FireEmblemGuy]

In OP's case, should he go for the one that has the highest read speed if he wants it for gaming? Would the cheaper Mushkin be better than the Samsung then? The Mushkin doesn't mention the memory component though.

I would look at real-world tests to see which, on average, actually has the better read speed. Since you'll generally only need to write large files once unless you're copying them around, read speed is probably the more important factor.

The Mushkin Eco2 line appears to use MLC memory.

 

[GameSystem]

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-850-Evo-500GB-vs-Mushkin-ECO2-SMI-512GB/3477vsm37833

Real world read speeds of Samsung vs Mushkin was 488 vs 477. So Mushkin loses by 11 MB/s. Still pretty close for a $30 difference. I'm not sure what else to check.

 

[Originality]

Just woke up so I'm not the most clear headed, but...

Couple features that the Samsung drives have, Overprovisioning, which reserves a little of the drive space (5-10%) for sector reallocation, greatly improving the drives durability and lifespan, and ... Forget the name, it's "turbo" mode that can increase the speeds, making it close to the fastest SSD on the market (I think OCZ still hold that crown, but the durability of their top performance drives is low).

I don't know about mushkin, but Sandisk (one of the other popular "cheap" high capacity drives) make their drives cheap yet fast enough by relying on the cache to maintain high speeds. This means that sequential read speeds and small file write speeds are high (IIRC) but as soon as you start dealing with large files or random read/write, performance drops by half and come out near the bottom of the tables. Still very good value for money, especially with how often they go on sales (I picked up 3 during Black Friday).

And to vaguely answer the open question about the anatomy of an SSD, 3D Vertical is Samsungs technology for stacking the NAND chips to improve capacity without sacrificing speed and durability, TLC IIRC is triple layer cells (however the access method for the cells makes it triple as likely to wear out and fail), SLC is single layer cells (the best for access speeds and lifespan, but too expensive per chip so it's reserved for enterprise drives), MLC and eMLC I can't remember but they're the most common to find, and X-point is what's coming out in 1-3 years that'll improve speeds by around 1000x without sacrificing lifespan (like an evolution of 3D).

There are four main parts to a SSD, the NAND which stores the data, the cache for queuing access commands, the CPU and controller which are the brains of the drive. To find out what makes a good SSD, you need to know what type of NAND it has, who made the NAND, what controller it has, and how many cores the CPU has. IIRC, the CPU and controller tend to come on the same chip these days (in early gens they were separate).

I'm sure I missed out many things or got some things mixed up, but I'm too groggy to do the research from my iPad first thing in the morning.

 

[ElyosOfTheAbyss]

I payed $300 for a 3tb drive BRAND NEW
In US dollars thats about the same price of this drive so I think this is a bit much if you ask me

Edit:*sorry for the bump I read Yesterday at 7:06 PM*

 

[TotalInsanity4]

How about I just open this up to everyone.
I'm looking for a fast SSD for general use and/or gaming.

Needs to be SATA (To fit with MSI 970a g46)
Size and speeds should be best for the money.
Nothing less than 480GB
$120 through $180

Post your suggestions here.

This wouldn't be your main hard drive, right?... NEVER use a solid state drive in a situation where it will be written to frequently

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

This wouldn't be your main hard drive, right?... NEVER use a solid state drive in a situation where it will be written to frequently

This advice is outdated. These days, SSDs have insane life expectancy rates. Samsung's EVO SSDs, for example, are rated to last through hundreds and hundreds of TB's worth of data written. The only time this will ever be true, now, is if you're trying to write hundreds of GBs of data consistently every day, even then it'll still last at least 3-5 years.

As for the basic "which SSD should I get that's fast and awesome but also not super expensive", Samsung's EVO series are generally pretty great. As mentioned earlier, you can get a 500GB EVO for around $150 which these days isn't bad.

 

[TotalInsanity4]

This advice is outdated. These days, SSDs have insane life expectancy rates. Samsung's EVO SSDs, for example, are rated to last through hundreds and hundreds of TB's worth of data written. The only time this will ever be true, now, is if you're trying to write hundreds of GBs of data consistently every day, even then it'll still last at least 3-5 years.

As for the basic "which SSD should I get that's fast and awesome but also not super expensive", Samsung's EVO series are generally pretty great. As mentioned earlier, you can get a 500GB EVO for around $150 which these days isn't bad.

That's actually really good to hear, thank you! I didn't know that flash memory had improved that much

 

[Originality]

This advice is outdated. These days, SSDs have insane life expectancy rates. Samsung's EVO SSDs, for example, are rated to last through hundreds and hundreds of TB's worth of data written.

To add to that, I've seen reports of endurance tests showing that many modern SSDs can last over 2PB of writes before failing.