Wow. How times move. 8tb m2 ssd almost mainstream

[Tom Speirs]

 

[ClassicGMR]

Heh I JUST watched this video like 20 minutes ago. (I do love me some LTT.)

Hell just ask yourself this - not 5-6 years ago you couldn't get an SD card larger than 16GB. Most were 1, 2 or 4GB and you had to order anything larger unless the PC store near you carried them. Now you can't find anything LESS than 16GB at retail. Technology is advancing so fast. I love it but I am always worried I'm going to fall behind and start showing my age.

[tthurman]

Now when this gets added to the mix, I'm in.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/samsung-is-promising-never-die-ssds

 

[RIP-Felix]

1. No one even offers SLC anymore.
2. I prefer MLC for price/performance Ratio.
3. I wasn't impressed with TLC, but dealt with speed trade-off because it made 1TB possible for a reasonable Price.
4. I'm not impressed with QLC. Once you max out the write cache, it can be even slower than a HDD, which completely defeats the purpose.

I can see this being fine for a game library, where the download process takes longer that it does to save to the drive. Playing the games would be fast thanks to SLC cache techniques. In most use cases this would be fine. However, for media content creators with large files being transferred from device to device, this would severely bottleneck workflow. If you wanted to quickly transfer folders with large files and hundreds of GBs of data, it wouldn't be an improvement over a HDD. And the longevity of QLC really has me worried. Honestly, I think QLC is the point of diminishing returns where Hybrid-HDDs (SSD cached) begin to make more sense (more reliable). I often find myself transferring hundreds of GB worth of data between drives. It would be nice to transfer hundreds of MB/s to keep larger transfers down to minutes, not hours. If I replace a HDD with a large capacity SSD, the reason I'm doing so is for that kind of speed. Otherwise, I would stick with the more reliable HDD platters.

MLC was the sweet spot IMO. TLC was tolerable, but QLC is over the line.

[Tom Speirs]

I've got to say for QLC it depends on usage. Obviously read speed is not affected too much. My Intel NUC console project uses this same QLC drive but 2tb version. There is little writing going on and when I build a PC console or cab I normally disable windows write caching too so power can be pulled. So it depends.

[RIP-Felix]

Yeah, me too. I have a 2TB Intel 660p in a USB3 adapter and I have been loving it. For the most part it's been great, but I was wondering why it was slowing down during large file transfers off my Desktop (OS drive is an OEM Samsung SM951, Evo is better). I assumed it was my USB controller or something. Now I know why it was so inexpensive! I originally bought it as an upgrade for my OS drive, but I'm using it for work to offload 4K footage from my phone / GoPro's SD card. Those devices are slow anyway, so I never noticed the write penalty there. I edit on my PC at home, directly off the drive so this never becomes a problem.

I was planning on getting more and replacing my HDDs, but now I don't think it's a good idea. The whole idea was that I could transfer files between drives quickly, making backups and upgrades easier. Now, I'm thinking I should stick with my Samsung MLC OS drive and HD Data drives. The intel 660p makes for a great portable high capacity USB storage drive, which I serendipitously ended up using it as.

[RIP-Felix]

This got me thinking. I haven't benched my OS drive in awhile and it's at 63% filled, which is supposed to diminish write performance...

Uhhhhh...yeah. It's diminish alright, alot! When it was a fresh OS install, I was getting close to the advertised 2150MB/s Read, 1200MB/s Write. That has obviously changed. Reads are more important when it comes to snappiness, load times, and user experience in general. So this has gone unnoticed.

I think I will upgrade to a larger drive so I don't come so close to filling it up. I just moved a bunch of files off my desktop because I was close to full. I think I have a pretty standard Windows installation and not uncommonly large set of programs installed. But after clenaing up my desktop and everything I can move onto a DATA drive, my widdled down OS is still 150GB/237GB. I miss the days when a 32GB drive was enough for an OS! Now they are THICK!

Edit:

My SSD was bought about 5 years ago and CrystalDiskInfo says I've written 12TB to it. Typically SSD's can have 500-700TB written to them. So, I shouldn't be anywhere near it's death throws. Why it's write performance is doing this, I'm not sure. I shouldn't see such a drastic loss of write performance at only 63% used (from 1200MB/s down to 245MB/s).