Buying a new SSD

[Deleted User]

I'm planning to buy a new SSD and have a few questions.

On the store I'm looking at all the SSDs seem to have similar prices (with one exception) and read/write speeds.

Of all the brands available the most well known ones are Samsung and Kingston. They don't have the fastest or best priced hard drives but I suspect that having a good reputation at stake pressures them to make products which more closely adhere to their advertised claims.

Some of the more expensive ones claim to support disk encryption. Is there a difference between the LUKS disk encryption I currently use and what the encrypted drives are advertising? I believe all the drives are capable of being encrypted, even if it's not an advertised feature.

I can't tell if they have a DRAM cache, which improves read speeds.

I suspect their warranty lengths hint to their expected lifespans.

So is it worth choosing the hard drive with the best advertised read/write speeds, disk encryption or the best brand name? Pretending all the SSDs linked below are in stock, which one would you recommend and why?

The SSDs I'm looking at are the following:

- Crucial BX500 (my favourite so far)
$168, 540 MB/s read speed, 500 MB/s write speed
https://www.msy.com.au/crucial-bx500-ct1000bx500ssd1-1tb-3d-nand-sata-solid-state-drive-ssd

- Crucial MX500
$199, 560 MB/s read speed, 510 MB/s write speed
https://www.msy.com.au/crucial-mx500-ct1000mx500ssd1-1tb-sata3-ssd-solid-state-drive

- Kingston SUV500
$208, 520 MB/s read speed, 500 MB/s write speed, encrypted
https://www.msy.com.au/kingston-suv500960g-960gb-ssdnow-uv500-sata3-25-solid-state-drive

- Kingston A400
$208, 500 MB/s read speed, 450 MB/s write speed
https://www.msy.com.au/kingston-a400-sa400s37960g-960gb-sata3-25-ssd-solid-state-drive

- WD Blue 3D NAND
$219, 560 MB/s read speed, 530 MB/s write speed
https://www.msy.com.au/wd-blue-3d-nand-wds100t2b0a-1tb-sataiii-ssd-solid-state-drive

- Samsung 860 EVO
$238, 550 MB/s read speed, 520 MB/s write speed
https://www.msy.com.au/samsung-860-evo-mz-76e1t0bw-1tb-sata-iii-ssd-solid-state-drive

- Samsung 860 PRO
$399, 560 MB/s read speed, 530 MB/s write speed, encrypted
https://www.msy.com.au/samsung-860-pro-mz-76p1t0bw-1tb-sata-iii-ssd-solid-state-drive

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

In regards to encryption, it's likely referring to the hardware based encryption that nearly all SSDs have these days on-board. It's a separate chip that uses AES to encrypt the entire contents of the drive, without sacrificing speed or using any additional processing power from the PC (as there's usually a built in ASIC which handles it for you). It's about as good as any other encryption method.

In regards to life, warranty lengths aren't really a good metric to go by as modern flash storage has an incredibly high TBW endurance these days (in the hundreds, if not thousands, of terabytes of writes at this point). Unless you're constantly writing the entire contents of your SSD every other day, you likely won't ever use the warranty anyways.


On regards to DRAM cache, to be frank never buy an SSD without one. In some cases you can saturate the controller bad enough that speeds will slow to a crawl, sometimes slower than HDDs depending on how cheap the NAND and controller are. That Crucial BX500 does not have a DRAM cache, so I wouldn't buy it. To find out if an SSD does, you can generally search the model and "dram cache" and find specs or a review that mentions it.

The MX500 would be your cheapest one listed there that has a DRAM cache, which is on-par performance wise with the rest of the SSDs, so I would go for that personally.

Samsung's offerings are generally the "best" of the best in the SSD area, however. If you want absolute top quality, go for one of those. Old SSD endurance tests have shown some of Samsung's older Evo SSDs have gone way into petabytes of data writing before it started to fail, so it'll basically be guaranteed to last for years of abuse.

 

[Xenophy]

Personally I would definitely go with the MX500.
The performance xhanges for the Samsung ones are not worth the difference in price. Therefore go with the mx500.

Erspnally I am also a fan of the WD but thats purely personal.