Cheap VS expensive SSD

[VirtualLarry]

Do you drive a Formula 1 car when you go shopping?

That's exactly the right analogy to use, when a customer comes to you, and asks if they need a Samsung 960 Pro for web browsing. The answer, in most cases, should be "no".

There have been a number of threads, of people here, that have upgraded from a regular SATA SSD, to a high-end PCI-E SSD, for essentially browsing, and they question the move, because they can't see the improvement.

The answer is not a universal YES, unless you have have an unlimited budget.

 

[Valantar]

No.

Sorry, but that's quite easily measurable, and it's down to simple math. Let's look at boot times. Windows 7 on an HDD used to boot up (after POST) in ~40 seconds or so. A SATA SSD brought that down to 10-15s. An NVMe SSD might bring that down to 7-8 seconds. Noticeable? Sure, if you're really paying attention. Otherwise, no. And, of course, W10 has drastically improved boot times anyway. The same goes for program launches and game load times, except that the differences are even smaller as the workloads are lighter than loading an entire OS. An application that took 3-5 seconds to load from an HDD is near instantaneous on a SATA SSD. If it's .5 seconds on SATA and .3 on NVMe, again, that's not noticeable. If your game level loads in 3 seconds instead of 5, that's not noticeable either. And so on, and so on.

The leap from HDDs to SATA SSDs was ~5X sequential performance and ~100-300x random performance. The jump from a half-decent SATA SSD to a high-end NVMe SSD is ~6X sequential performance and ~2X random performance (at queue depths actually seen in client computing, i.e. <=4). So if you use your SSD for sequential transfers in the multi-gigabyte scale every day, then you'll have huge performance gains. Otherwise, they'll be there, just barely noticeable at best.

I'm not saying NVMe doesn't have a place in enthusiast computing, nor that it's anything other than the future of storage. It's just complete overkill for the vast majority of users, and denying that is just buying into an illusion. Of course, some like to pay for the fastest stuff regardless of gain. That's where the placebo effect comes in, but regardless - more power to them. Buy what you want. Just don't come dragging nonsense claims of huge differences.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Not sour grapes, and not denying that the sight of something like the following gives me a nerd hard-on

However, unless your workload REALLY warrants it (you're moving massive data sets / 4K RAWs around all day), just about any SATA SSD is good enough. Preaching "NVME or death" is essentially the same kind of dick-waving as people claiming that Sandybridge can no longer game, even though it's a <sarcasm>MASSIVE</sarcasm> ~25% lower in absolute OCed performance than Kaby/Skylake

Even among SATA SSDs, I don't notice much difference in everyday usage between my various models (850 Pro, 840 Pro, Vector 180, Arc100, M4, M500, Extreme Pro, lol-no-model# Kingston, etc.)

 

[deustroop]

... Let's look at boot times. Windows 7 on an HDD used to boot up (after POST) in ~40 seconds or so. A SATA SSD brought that down to 10-15s. An NVMe SSD might bring that down to 7-8 seconds. Noticeable? Sure, if you're really paying attention....

I'm not saying NVMe doesn't have a place in enthusiast computing, nor that it's anything other than the future of storage. It's just complete overkill for the vast majority of users, and denying that is just buying into an illusion. Of course, some like to pay for the fastest stuff regardless of gain. That's where the placebo effect comes in, but regardless - more power to them. Buy what you want. Just don't come dragging nonsense claims of huge differences.

I don't think anyone "dragged" anything like "nonsense claims of huge differences". Show us one ?
That's a straw-man argument, defeating an unmade point.
Sure, the latest and greatest are way more popular with we few enthusiasts (I am one and I know there are others) but its an error to offer the ridiculous, that we like to pay for the fastest stuff regardless of gain.
Listen up !
The fastest stuff is the gain.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think that the point is, it's a severe case of diminishing returns. If a GTX 1080 is 80-90% of the performance of a Titan XP, but only 50% of the cost, would you likewise argue that "everyone" "needs" a Titan XP, for gaming? (Cause like, "it's faster".) What if they only play Facebook games?

I think that most people will agree, that at the very minimum, an SSD is beneficial to the vast majority of PC users, even if all they do is Facebook.

But paying 2x the cost of a higher-end SATA SSD, for "faster" performance (benchmark-wise), that may not even be noticeable to the user? Seems kinda foolish, kind of like buying 32GB of RAM.

Sure, if you're the type that "only buys the best", then have at it. Be my guest, and buy me one too while you're at it.

But for most people, a decent SATA SSD is good enough.

I know that I was disappointed by my Intel 600p 256GB, as well as my Adata XPG SX8000 128GB SSD. They honestly don't "feel" any faster than any of my mid-range or higher SATA SSDs, yet were more expensive per GB. Not to mention the throttling issues.

 

[bononos]

My 2nd tlc drive Kingston UV400 512Gb using an i3 for light duty tasks didn't perform well. It seems to be bogged down quickly and the advertised sequential results is meaningless for real life tasks. I just ran AS copy benchmark for this post as an example and the results were: ISO 284Mb/s 3.78s, Program 6.79Mb/s 207.10s, Game 0.0 0.0. The AS benchmark failed to complete the last portion and was slow so I just minimized the program and got back to it later. I get similar results when I first benched it after getting the drive. Sometimes the last Game portion will complete but its dog slow anyway. Real life installs for programs feel faster than spinners but can sometimes feel really slow which confirms the awful benchmark score.

Theres nothing wrong with the mb, os settings as far as I can see (AHCI, cache settings all ok). Spinning disk benchmarks are fine. I can't set the UEFI to disable c-states support but it shouldn't suck that bad anyway.

 

[Valantar]

Listen up !
The fastest stuff is the gain.

My point exactly. Welcome to placebo-town. Also, please don't conflate "enthusiast" with "compulsive money waster".

My 2nd tlc drive Kingston UV400 512Gb using an i3 for light duty tasks didn't perform well. It seems to be bogged down quickly and the advertised sequential results is meaningless for real life tasks. I just ran AS copy benchmark for this post as an example and the results were: ISO 284Mb/s 3.78s, Program 6.79Mb/s 207.10s, Game 0.0 0.0. The AS benchmark failed to complete the last portion and was slow so I just minimized the program and got back to it later. I get similar results when I first benched it after getting the drive. Sometimes the last Game portion will complete but its dog slow anyway. Real life installs for programs feel faster than spinners but can sometimes feel really slow which confirms the awful benchmark score.

Theres nothing wrong with the mb, os settings as far as I can see (AHCI, cache settings all ok). Spinning disk benchmarks are fine. I can't set the UEFI to disable c-states support but it shouldn't suck that bad anyway.

That sounds like a bad drive to me. An odd way for an SSD to be broken, but performance like that shouldn't be possible.

 

[mikeymikec]

The thing is, 99% of PC users dont "hammer the drive daily even with semi serious multitasking and writing at the same time." 95% of users don't even come close to that.

Lots of people switch their computer on (chances are, it's a laptop that's not in sleep mode), and then immediately set to work doing one or multiple things, while Windows Update is doing its daily check, many AVs are updating and maybe even doing a "scheduled scan", and other startup apps and services are still kicking in. I've seen scenarios where lower-end SSDs have clearly hit their limit and some tasks have to wait despite the CPU not being saturated, yet higher-end SSDs (such as a Samsung PRO drive) allow the system to carry on chewing through stuff at its usual pace.

 

[Valantar]

Lots of people switch their computer on (chances are, it's a laptop that's not in sleep mode), and then immediately set to work doing one or multiple things, while Windows Update is doing its daily check, many AVs are updating and maybe even doing a "scheduled scan", and other startup apps and services are still kicking in. I've seen scenarios where lower-end SSDs have clearly hit their limit and some tasks have to wait despite the CPU not being saturated, yet higher-end SSDs (such as a Samsung PRO drive) allow the system to carry on chewing through stuff at its usual pace.

I do that on my 2010 ThinkPad with an 80GB Intel X25-m SSD in it. Turn on PC, open Outlook, a few PDFs, Chrome and whatever I've been working on lately (mostly large Word documents, some PowerPoint, some Excel). No inexplicable slowdowns to find. I doubt that drive holds a candle to the average mid-range drive today. The only time I've seen slowdowns like that is on the stock drive in my girlfriend's Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro - which was an OEM version of the doomed 840 Evo, with no available firmware fix.

 

[bononos]

......
That sounds like a bad drive to me. An odd way for an SSD to be broken, but performance like that shouldn't be possible.

I would've thought it was broken or had fake chips substituted like the V300 scandal. But my other tlc drive (another brand/model) also performed poorly in that benchmark, failing to complete the final portion with poor scores. Testing that tlc drive in a laptop also gave similar poor results in that benchmark.

 

[mikeymikec]

I do that on my 2010 ThinkPad with an 80GB Intel X25-m SSD in it. Turn on PC, open Outlook, a few PDFs, Chrome and whatever I've been working on lately (mostly large Word documents, some PowerPoint, some Excel). No inexplicable slowdowns to find. I doubt that drive holds a candle to the average mid-range drive today. The only time I've seen slowdowns like that is on the stock drive in my girlfriend's Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro - which was an OEM version of the doomed 840 Evo, with no available firmware fix.

AFAIK the X25-M would just plod along at its usual pace, whereas (excluding firmware problematic EVO drives) many drives such as the EVO can do a burst bit of high speed, then their throughput drops sharply.

 

[Valantar]

AFAIK the X25-M would just plod along at its usual pace, whereas (excluding firmware problematic EVO drives) many drives such as the EVO can do a burst bit of high speed, then their throughput drops sharply.

That's for writes, not reads. Workloads like that are almost purely read-based. TLC writes far slower than MLC (which is what the SLC buffers are for), but reads more or less as quickly.

 

[tamz_msc]

Lots of people switch their computer on (chances are, it's a laptop that's not in sleep mode), and then immediately set to work doing one or multiple things, while Windows Update is doing its daily check, many AVs are updating and maybe even doing a "scheduled scan", and other startup apps and services are still kicking in. I've seen scenarios where lower-end SSDs have clearly hit their limit and some tasks have to wait despite the CPU not being saturated, yet higher-end SSDs (such as a Samsung PRO drive) allow the system to carry on chewing through stuff at its usual pace.

None of those tasks require moving of multi-GBs of data over period of time, lets say, of the order of a few minutes. When cheapo SSDs choke at those tasks, it's usually due to their low random read/write performance.

Now if you're working with huge data sets - like running code that take large files as input and write even larger files back as output, which in my workplace can be anything from text files >300MB to a large set of high-resolution images, then you will see the difference going from a top SATA drive like the 850 Pro to a top NVMe like the 960 Pro.

 

[snarfbot]

i got one of those sandisk 1tb's at best buy, it was on sale. its really big for a ssd. i reccomend it 100%, no tangible difference from my older samsung in speed.

 

[deustroop]

My point exactly. Welcome to placebo-town. Also, please don't conflate "enthusiast" with "compulsive money waster".
.

Enthusiasts who post here have bought the 960 series. I can name several, look at their signatures. Ask usandthem, for example, who has the 960 EVO . You call him a compulsive money waster ? Many of us wasters spent considerable time doing a cost benefit analysis.

Buys of many components are not necessary. Something less rated will always do.
But 33 people put down full deposits for the 960 series at the local store here. All compulsive buyers?
Guess what. They "drive" the business.Like video games drive the gpu and cpu business.

Institutions buy the middle of the road units and low end products because like your majority those items will satisfy the criteria of "get the job done". If what you say were accurate, then most sales of the 960 series can be put down to a placebo effect ? Thousands and thousands and thousands of drives. Why buy any 960s when the 840 works great ?

Who needs an Ipod anyway ?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Enthusiasts who post here have bought the 960 series. I can name several, look at their signatures. Ask usandthem, for example, who has the 960 EVO . You call him a compulsive money waster ? Many of us wasters spent considerable time doing a cost benefit analysis.

Buys of many components are not necessary. Something less rated will always do.
But 33 people put down full deposits for the 960 series at the local store here. All compulsive buyers?
Guess what. They "drive" the business.Like video games drive the gpu and cpu business.

Institutions buy the middle of the road units and low end products because like your majority those items will satisfy the criteria of "get the job done". If what you say were accurate, then most sales of the 960 series can be put down to a placebo effect ? Thousands and thousands and thousands of drives. Why buy any 960s when the 840 works great ?

Who needs an Ipod anyway ?

Thousands vs. millions.

What do you do for a living and how was it I/O limited?

 

[deustroop]

Thousands vs. millions.

What do you do for a living and how was it I/O limited?

Nothing I do, besides gaming, is performance constrained. And as you know, the video card and cpu do most of the heavy lifting in FPS. I used to sell and repair computers back in the i486/ Pentium III days but I'm retired from that. When advising a novice , I too would not advise a hot shot product unless that person wanted the performance, e.g., for gaming, and would learn up to the technology. Now its mostly hobby and supporting my wife's work office arrangement.

In drives, " best performance" includes endurance, reliability and speed in computing. The 960 Pro series is the same or better than the 950 in each respect and better still than the 850, etc.I've owned each one as you can tell and reselling the old makes buying the new well within range.

My current SSD needs would be satisfied with a drive two tiers below what I use. Hell my old SCSI drives would do in a pinch. But few compute that way, by necessity only, so need is the wrong word to apply to purchases. ( Virtual Larry is a true exception). Cost /performance mostly affects a decision, but these drives will last quite a long time so one always gets one's money worth, if one has the price in the first place. Otherwise its all about performance. (Wasn't there a sizzle/steak comment along the same lines ?)

One other argument was that we compulsive money wasters can't tell the difference unless we really try. Know the Windows Welcome screen ? See it on every boot ? Hello Joe ! Isn't that a pain ? Well starting with newer drives, that screen was slowly taking up less time on my monitor. With the 960 series, its gone.
How hard to see is that ?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I mean, don't get me wrong, more speed is usually good, and speed is addictive, but ... for the majority of builds I do, the cost/benefit analysis doesn't favor the PCI-E M.2 drive. Maybe in the future, when they come out with the NVMe 1.2 DRAM-less SSDs, that use a Host Memory Buffer (@cbn has talked about this at length), then the cost of such will go down. But, comparing my Adata XPG SX8000 128GB M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 SSD, to my Adata SU800 Ultimate 128GB 2.5" SATA6G SSD, there's really not a whole lot of real-world difference for what I do. Yet, the SU800 128GB was $39.99 shipped, and the SX8000 128GB was $69.99 (and that was $20 off).

For my personal Z170 rigs, when I was running some Skylake G4400 CPUs BCLK OCed to ~4.5Ghz, I had a pair of Samsung SM951 AHCI PCI-E 128GB SSDs, and they were FAST. Like, noticeably faster than SATA6G SSDs that I had been using. Subtle, but noticeable to me. Probably only noticeable since my CPUs were juiced up.

For my personal rigs, sure, they were worth the extra $$$, just to "feel the speed".

But for the vast majority of people, that are not enthusiasts, and even some that are? Pretty-much overkill.

And the Samsung 960 Pro is way, way, faster than my SM951 AHCI drive.

I will say, that my workload probably DID benefit somewhat from the huge Seq. QD32 Read scores of those drives, which were 2000MB/sec. I was slinging around lots of Linux ISOs, to my NAS, and whatnot. Ok, so probably the NAS was the bottleneck, realistically-speaking, but the rig never stuttered or "paused", that I remember.

Well, except for when I was doing DC work too, and put in two 7950 dGPUs, which sat on top of the M.2 slot area, and they were running 85C and up, and the M.2 (then, an Intel 600p) started heating up pretty badly. One time, I had to reboot, and then the PCI-E M.2 SSD wasn't even detected, it had overheated so badly.

 

[Valantar]

*snip*

The thing is this: with SSDs, the main constraint is space, not performance. Whether it's for an OS drive or a game library (or both), SSDs are rather small - especially with games these days easily topping 50GB and any media creation application (Photoshop, whatever) consuming large chunks of storage for whatever projects might be worked on. Four-five-six years ago, this was no problem at all, as you could just stock up on cheap 2TB HDDs and live happily ever after. Then SSDs started showing us just how I/O constrained we had been all these years. But they're still tiny.

If you're building a $1000-1500 PC, or have $150-200 to spend on a drive for a game library (which seems to be the main driver of storage needs for enthusiasts of today), what makes more sense: buying a $125 Mushkin Reactor 500GB, or a $130 960 Evo 250GB? Or in the tier above, what makes the most sense of a $240 960GB Reactor or a $275 500GB 960 Evo? The former, each time. While the 500GB 960 Evo to a certain degree can be justified from a "it's faster, and large enough that it won't bother me" perspective, it's still awful value.

Is the performance worth it for some? Sure. Is it noticeable? Probably in some cases, yes. In others, possibly not. Are consumer workloads I/O constrained any more? Very, very rarely.

Remember, PC enthusiast doesn't mean rich, or even well-off. The vast majority of PC enthusiasts can't afford a GTX 1070, let alone multiple SSDs. Which is where the 'compulsive money waster' aspect comes into play. This is the same crowd that upgrades their GPU every single year to the newest high-end model for no other reason than never, ever wanting to reduce a single setting in any game unless they damn well have to. Would they notice the difference between 190fps and 220fps in CS:GO, or the difference between "ultra" settings in GTA V and reducing a few well-thought out settings? Very unlikely. They still do it. Which is perfectly fine, of course. But to say they're not compulsively wasting money for barely-tangible gains, that's just lying to yourself. The same goes for SSDs. The gains are there, and are clearly measurable, but are barely noticeable in day-to-day use.

Will I buy an NVMe SSD in the coming years? Probably. But not until they lose their 2x price premium over SATA drives. Until then, the only sensible choice for anyone with a budget in mind is to choose capacity first. If I were to buy a new drive for my Ryzen system, it would be a ~1TB games drive, not a replacement for my 240GB 840 Pro boot drive.

Oh, and the Windows Welcome screen? You mean the Windows logo with the loading symbol beneath it? I see it for around a second (from time to time not at all) on that 840 Pro running on a SATA 2 motherboard ...

 

[deustroop]

Oh, and the Windows Welcome screen? You mean the Windows logo with the loading symbol beneath it?.

No, that screen would be called the boot logo.

I mean after the locked screen, or if a machine has no lock, then windows boots into the User Account, and with drivers loading in the background, there appears the Welcome screen with the picture place holder, then the desktop appears. Hard to describe it now. I don't see it anymore. (Course if one has a value notebook with inexpensive hardware , that screen may never appear)