Eight budget-friendly 1TB SSD data packers for real people

Re: Good qulaity, low price

It'll all depend on the foundries. Some wonder if they can actually crank the chips out quickly enough to keep up the pace. If they can't, the parity point will be pushed back. Still, if 3D Flash keeps up, this will represent a significant step forward in mass storage tech and may actually present a sunset for spinning rust, provided it can deal with any issues of longevity and cold storage.

Re: Good qulaity, low price

> It looks like we are still on course for price parity between SSD and HDD in 2017.

I bet ye not. The cost/GB difference is currently something like 10-to-1 if you include 3.5" HDDs. Even if you consider only 2.5" form factor, it's more than 5-to-1.

So you're saying that SSDs will come down in price by a factor of 10, and at the same time HDDs will not come down at all during that time?

Re: SanDisk?

The BX200 has been reported to have performance issues, so it may not be a good benchmark for comparison.

Re: SanDisk?

Almost a year on... are you sure you paid those prices?? They're a good £100 a piece more than that today?

"Amazon currently sell it for £185. I picked one up from Amazon before Christmas for just £149"

Re: Wierd layout

I actually love that article layout.

My usual problem with the avalanche of data that exists to be absorbed in this field is when I see a long review of a bunch of products, I have this sense of dread that I have to slog through it, from beginning to end, looking for things of interest, and half the time I lose interest because of all the unrelated junk I'm forced to slog through to find a nugget or two. (Yeah, I do a lot of skipping to the "conclusion" page but oftentimes the info I'm looking for isn't there)

Not only was this article short and to the point, it allowed me to browse through each product description while simultaneously taking-in the performance measurements for the whole slate of products, which I thought made a much better use of my "eye-time".

Re: 2.5"

M.2 motherboards have been around since the beginning of last year, if not sooner.

The real problems are:

1. That dead end named mSATA - it should never have lived.

2. SATA based M.2 drives (IMO they should all be PCIe)

3. Transitioning to NVMe based M.2 drives (and getting BIOS/UEFI to boot from 'em)

4. Not having to pay an arm and a leg for the result

Re: 2.5"

Already here...

My current PC (built is September 2015) uses an ASUS Z170 with a Skylake 6600K. I have am OEM Samsung SM951 AHCI drive (as boot) in a PCI-E adapter, and an OEMSM951 nVME 512GB as a secondary in a M.2 PCIE/NVME slot on the motherboard itself.

The SM951 OEM drives can be picked up pretty cheaply online (e.g. FlexxRAM in the UK), the only issue you will have is getting it the nVME one to UEFI boot.

Steve

Re: Good sign of how far SSDs have come

At the moment the sweet spot for spinning rust (in $/TB terms) is 3TB. For the same price you can get a 250GB SSD. Or to put it slightly differently, you can get a 2TB SSD for the price of ten 2TB HDDs.

The day that HDDs become obsolete is probably closer than we think, but not just yet.

First off, you're being alarmist. That's not going to happen, and people wouldn't buy it.

Regards to the general trend of motherboards being more SoC-like. I am definitely OK with that. My GPU and North bridge already migrated onto the CPU die. The last several motherboard upgrades, I've just maxed the RAM slots, then I switch off swap because I've got vastly more RAM than I'll ever use.

If say 64gig of RAM came in the APU package, there would be cost and space advantages to that, I wouldn't mourn the loss of upgradable RAM because I'm not using it that way anyway.

Motherboards are becoming nothing but break-out boards for CPUs. And I like it.

If SSDs actually do overtake spinning rust, perhaps a variant of this will take hold in future. Without so much need for bulk space to hold drive enclosures, the cases can shrink without compromising power. Perhaps in future internal drives will be, like you say, slotted in much like how expansion cards are now. Not discounting nor noting it as a bad thing.

If the market was just for consumer PCs then yes, this might happen. I can definitely see it happening to laptops and of course it's always been the case for tablets.

Fortunately, businesses doing serious storage need drives that can be swapped out as they fail. So storage manufacturers will be making drives for a long time. Therefore, we'll get the trickle down from that.

I feel your pain. My associate was singing the virtues of SSD performance until, one day, the thing just died out of the blue. Took two days to get a replacement for his laptop.

He doesn't sing the SSD song anymore . . .

That being said, HDDs could be treacherous as well. I remember trying to get data off a failing one, only to find that every file I recovered was corrupt and unreadable.

Thank God for backups.

Re: Ever had an SSD fail?

My only SSD to have failed so far was also a Vertex 2.

Re: Ever had an SSD fail?

Sure :-) We sell SSD's mostly as boot drives in "industrial process control" PC's. The endurance of an SSD depends greatly on how you configure your OS and apps. An SSD in read-only mode can last for ages. I have some firewalls booting Linux from read-only CF cards, running for almost a decade. Same thing for simple DOS-based systems that don't ever need to write to the drive (or scarcely). Same thing for Windows Embedded with EWF locked all the time.

But I also know cases where a SCADA app (configured to log data or keep a persistent image on disk) can thrash a decent 2.5" SSD in three months. Spinning rust still has its merits. Yes it can fail too - but it's not *prone* to fail in some deployments where SSD's *are* prone to fail pretty soon. And, in terms of spinning rust, you'd better shop for the *lowest* capacity currently available on the market = the simplest and proven construction, the lowest data density. The terabyte race is not a nice prospect in that context.

Ironically, most people still think that strictly nothing beats the endurance of an SSD in the role of a Windows boot drive... any SSD, in unmodified stock Windows, running Windows Update, an antivirus, a dozen self-updating apps etc.

You know - you install Windows on your shiny new expensive SSD, ohh the joy of how *fast* it is, then you go entertain yourself with something else... and a couple months down the road, when the SSD slows down noticeably, or fails outright, you tend to blame the piece of the SSD, or the early SSD model, or the brand... "Gosh, the SSD's were *crap* a year ago... must've been a bad batch or something... let me have a new one, that will surely last longer!" ;-)

It hardly comes across your mind that maybe the SSD thing is *principally* wrong for the position.

Re: Ever had an SSD fail?

Living through the days when HDDs failed a lot more frequently perhaps places a different light on these things.

The problem with SSD failures is that there is no "Plan B" where you can take it to a fabulously expensive outfit that will find a way to retrieve the magnetic bits, usually. If the chips fail, they fail. There is no resurrecting them at any price, usually.

And then there is that pesky problem where SSDs in powered-off state (particularly after they've been used a while), tend to "forget" what was stored on them, randomly. Oops.