[guide] budget m.2 ssd sata 2019

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

//NOTES: I'm mostly doing research for my ownself, but if you find this useful for your own use, feel free to use or share your own thoughts (maybe i too can learn something also from the feedback)

also i tend to go slightly off topic and cover other things outside SSD M.2 SATA & bang for bucks budget, if only as a comparison. So please keep that in mind, if you want to separate out SSD M.2 SATA budget related info from other stuff mentioned

and just to be clear, your options may not necessarily just be M.2 SATA, because if your QNAP supports QM2 addon card, you could potentially use a M.2 NVME on it (this of course would require the additional purchase of a QM2, and whether or not your QNAP supports this addon card to begin with)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oxaJYJHKEM


First thing to mention, ideally i rather get a M.2 SSD NVME, but since i need M.2 SSD Sata (for compatibility reasons), so... this guide will be for that (disclaimer: mostly)


These are very useful videos and articles explaining what M.2 SSD you should get (buyers guide)

SATA vs NVMe - $40 Budget SSD Comparison - Which Should You Buy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ8_ukLzQOY

M2 SATA vs NVMe Price vs Performance @1:44:50 , @1:58:25
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXdmN9O9bIs

TeamGroup SSD Review - Are Budget SSDs Worth it? (bargain ssds or main branded ssds for budget?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimV7OUJmjQ

M.2 NVMe SSD Explained - M.2 vs SSD (i think the title meant NVME vs SATA M.2 SSD's )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvfIeTieXOI

The Marketing Is A LIE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rga2N50Ek8o

SSD 101: How Reliable are SSDs?
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-reliable-are-ssds/

Johnny Lucky SSD database
http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage ... abase.html

QNAP SSD technology & applications explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAF8rWJJCk8

QM2 Expansion Card feat. Qtier: SSD caching & auto-tiering volume to boost NAS performance (QM2 is how you can add M.2 NVME support to your QNAP NAS assuming this addon card is supported by your model)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oxaJYJHKEM

QM2 Expansion Card add M.2 SSD slots and 10GbE connectivity *they have QM2 models with just the M.2 NVME slots if that is all you want, minus the 10gbe ports
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAdHQfUEPTc



*update

basically for M.2 SSD capacity, he suggests to go for 500gb for best value. the 120gb is not best for endurance or performance, but it's still understandable if you are on a really tight budget. 250gb was looked at and considered much preferable to the 120gb, but still not ideal compared to the recommended 500gb minimum (the budget models are crucial mx500 or a wd 3d blue 500gb; the 860 evo is if you can afford to spend extra for performance and better endurance). just understand what you're getting as consequence whatever you decide.

And yes you guessed it, if possible go NVME. But if your situation is stuck with no option except for the SATA variant well, thats just what you have to get

Samsung kicked off the whole 3D-NAND-based craze with the 48-layer Samsung SSD 960 Pro and SSD 960 EVO drives last year, and it was quickly followed by all the big names. That includes Micron, with its 32-layer Crucial MX300, and Intel, with its more recent, 64-layer Intel SSD 545s Series. WD, which also owns the consumer-staple storage brand SanDisk, is specifically coming to market with a 64-layer design. The idea of 64-layer in SSDs, in a nutshell, means pretty much what it sounds like: 64 layers of memory stacked in a three-dimensional space, rather than laid out side by side (in what is called a "planar" design).

This 3D approach is a radical departure from the planar method of laying down memory dies. Making the chips ever-smaller to fit in the planar scheme gets increasingly tricky as the size goes down, so 3D NAND development's goal was to keep the chips at a reasonable size, and just stack them vertically.

Besides the spatial problem solved by the nature of 3D NAND, this approach has several other benefits, most noticeably increased endurance (at least, as rated by the SSD makers themselves). In the case of WD (and SanDisk), it places the brands alongside other industry heavyweights in being able to offer the latest technology to its SSD customers. For WD's part, its spokespeople say the move to 64-layer 3D NAND allows it to provide drives with lower power consumption as well as higher performance, endurance, and capacity, which sounds like a recipe for a mainstream SSD.

WD is also releasing this drive under a different name under the SanDisk brand, as the SanDisk Ultra 3D. That drive comes only in the 2.5-inch form factor, while WD is offering the Blue 3D in both the 2.5-inch design and in the M.2 "gumstick" form you see pictured here. If you're more of a SanDisk fan than a WD loyalist, you could buy the SanDisk-flavored one, but according to WD, they are the same SSD underneath the skin/stickers.

https://www.pcmag.com/review/358846/wd- ... sd-m-2-1tb




Looking at the budget m.2 SSD sata options, i spotted this video for WD ssd m.2 offerings. They have 3 colors, the black is NVME, and the other 2 are sata.

WD GREEN vs WD BLUE vs WD BLACK M.2 SSD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBJHjsgx_PM


other good budget options are Samsung 860 Evo, and Crucial MX500. there are probably more, but these are the ones that come to mind.

Samsung 860 EVO vs Crucial MX500 - Which Should You Buy? @9:18
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmaK4p-vmPc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2zEsBIYYn0


I already have the Samsung 850 EVO, they are pretty decent, haven't had an issue with them.

Based on the facts

- mx500 is cheaper
- endurance 100 TBW for the 250 GB MX500 (5 year warranty) vs 150 TBW for the 250 GB 860 Evo (5 year warranty)

MX500 doesn’t quite match up to the Samsung’s 860 Evo’s performance (effective speed 8% slower), however at current prices it is about 20% cheaper, and on balance offers better value for money.

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/S ... 3949vs3951


If you want to pay a bit more for better endurance and a slightly (although honestly doubt you will notice) better performer, then you can opt for the samsung. otherwise save money and get the crucial.

i'm familiar and like samsung magician for desktop usage. i particularly find the cloning capability and firmware update very convenient. I'm not too sure how the Crucicial app manages their ssds

Seems there's a video for that also

SSD Firmware Update & Toolbox Install - Samsung 860 EVO & Crucial MX500
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I77PN2DrHo

I'm not quite sure where the WD offering fits into this just yet, still researching on it

*update

spartacus-

They all perform relatively similar, all have 5y warranty, and are all similarly priced (Samsung 5-10% higher at times).

The biggest difference is the TBW or write endurance, comparing the 500GB drive crucial's is 180TB, WD is 200TB, and Samsung 300TB.

If you don't do that much then the Crucial's lowest cost with solid reliability is likely the way to go, if you do above average writes, then Samsung is the way to go.

Use crystal disk info on your current SSD and see how many Total Host Writes you've used. You can extrapolate that over the time you've had the drive to see if it might be needed.

https://slickdeals.net/f/11924823-wd-bl ... cial-mx500

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/W ... 3948vs3951

WD blue Endurance (TBW)

250GB = 100

500GB = 200

1TB = 400

so comparing the 256gb, i'd get the crucial mx 500, since tbw is dead even, and it's better performer than the WD blue.

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

interestingly, in the crucial executive storage management app, it highlights the crucial feature called momentum cache which helps with performance and also the longevity of your ssd. But it cautions that you should use a UPS for this feature.

U see there is a significant improvement BUT they warn you to use it on a
system without a battery.

Quote from the white paper:

I don't have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) or a battery backup on my gaming
PC. Can I still use Momentum Cache?
Yes, Momentum Cache can be enabled on a system without a battery-backed power
source. However, there is an increased potential for data loss in the event of an unex-
pected power loss compared to a system equipped with power backup.

There are similar technologies as example from samsung (Rapid Mode) or Plextor (Plexturbo)

@Weesni:

I think enabling Momentum Cache should have an overall positive effect on performance as the system drive operates faster. So it's beneficial even if your games are on a separate SSD.

There's always a higher risk of data loss with SSDs vs. mechanical drives IMO.
Having the cache enabled means that a larger chunk of data is cached to system memory at any given time, based on the White Paper.
Meaning that in the "worst-case" scenario, if you experience a power loss mid-transfer, such as installing a program, a larger amount of data is lost than without caching (=as more volatile data is stored in memory).
Which makes no difference as the installation is ruined anyway and you need to start over...

Backup frequently and keep the cache enabled, my opinion is it doesn't really increase the risk of data loss in practice.
The data that's already written on your disk is just as safe (or unsafe) whether you have the cache enabled or not.

PS: thanks for the heads-up on this one, have Momentum Cache running myself now!

so i'd probably not use this type of feature due to lack of UPS.


another nice thing crucial had is

The Crucial MX500 boasts an "Integrated power loss immunity" feature. What does this practically mean? Reviews claim that it saves your work if there is a powerless. How does this work? If the power is cut, the RAM gets flushed. That's where all your work is saved.

SSD's have a small ram cache, the mx500 just keeps constant backups of that ram.

BrewingHeavyWeather-

It prevents data corruption on the SSD, that could result in SSD bricking, or corrupt user data. FI, consider that voltage is falling, it's in the middle of writing, and that causes it to scramble your data as it goes to be written, or worse, scramble the address being written to. It doesn't have anything to do with the data your programs have in your computer's memory, but only in-flight write commands to the drive, and writes that the SSD has fibbed about being done (it claims they are done once it has told the NAND to do the job of writing them, but it really takes a lot longer than it looks like, sometimes over 1ms - but, as long as there is enough energy to keep the NAND chip fed while it does its thing, that doesn't really matter).

They have enough capacitance on board, and in the NAND chips themselves, so that the SSD has time to detect that voltage to it is falling, write whatever it is in the middle of writing, and shut down, with no corruption resulting. Whereas, other SSDs (and HDDs) will do who-knows-what, and then try to roll their state back by some amount of seconds, instead. They all try to prevent the worst problems, but many of them just up and stop doing anything, then pick up the pieces on the next startup, rolling back to previous state.

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comme ... _immunity/

Crucial MX series drives do not have power loss protection that is equivalent to what enterprise SSDs have. That's why Crucial refers to it as "partial power loss protection" or "power loss immunity". They protect against loss of data that has already been written to flash, which could otherwise possibly be corrupted by an incomplete second write pass over the same memory cells to program them with the second or third bit per cell.

Enterprise SSDs have power loss protection that ensures that in-progress writes actually complete. Crucial MX series drives do not make this guarantee; they only ensure that the interrupted writes do not have collateral damage.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/commen ... rotection/



i'm not sure what samsung and WD has comparable to this. that said, i've had a couple of unintended sudden power loss occur, but nothing untoward happened to my qnap, so or maybe i just got lucky.

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

A new interesting SSD is the Seagate ironwolf 110 NAS SSD (which also has a 240gb model etc)

Seagate IronWolf 110 SSDs by the Numbers
Seagate is selling the IronWolf 110 2.5-inch SSD in several capacities: 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, 1.9TB, and 3.8TB. They all feature a 6Gb/s SATA interface, so they aren’t going to outpace many M.2 cache drives when it comes to sheer speed. But they can be used for either NAS caching or in all-SSD arrays to improve performance. Each drive comes with a five-year warranty and a two-year Rescue Data Recovery service. (I always wonder a bit about NAS products with drive data recovery, since hopefully systems are set up so that a drive failure won’t lose data, but clearly, there is a need or vendors wouldn’t offer it.)

One of the knocks on using SSDs in NAS units is that most of them aren’t designed for the heavy workload and amount of writing typically needed in a NAS. The IronWolf 110 drives list a TeraBytes Written lifetime (TBW) of 7000. That is substantially more than SSDs that are currently available for NAS use. Seagate also lists an impressive MTBF of 2 million hours. The drives consume 1.2 watts at idle, and a maximum of 3.2 watts. The drives also support SSD Trim, which I was successfully able to enable on a Synology NAS.

The drives feature Seagate’s new DuraWrite technology for optimizing data layout and write performance, as well as Seagate’s AgileArray firmware. Seagate says the drives will also support its IronWolf Health Management system soon.

Seagate Ironwolf 110 NAS SSD Drive Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go4iaxTV5WY

Seagate Makes a NAS SSD...!? (Ironwolf 110 Review)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b44D6T38ung

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf ... BK5HW?th=1


seems the 240gb variant is a bit more pricier to the samsung 860
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/2 ... f-110-ssds

UPDATE: We’ve now received pricing for the Ironwolf 110 SSDs. MSRPs are $85 for 240GB, $135 for 480GB, $265 for 960GB, $480 for 2TB, and $910 for 4TB.

Capacity versus unit longevity
While Seagate is hardly the first vendor to make use of over-provisioning (the practice is as old as NAND storage itself), it’s the key to keeping an SSD running longer. In simple terms, that means there’s a lot of NAND in reserve to replace worn out cells. And yes, NAND cells may be written to only a certain number of times before they give up the ghost.

If you look at the IronWolf 110’s capacities, they’re smaller than the average: 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB, and 3.84TB. This means Seagate is likely keeping quite a bit of NAND in reserve.

Alas, the IronWolf 110 is not the longest-rated NAND-based SSD we’ve had pass our portals. Not by a long shot. That distinction would like with the Sony G Series Professional SV-G48 which is rated for 4TBW for every 1GB of capacity. Same mission, better specs, though a bit slower performance.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3390301 ... eview.html


and i don't see any m.2 SSD sata variants for this, so not particularly relevant to this thread, but still an interesting side note.

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

More M.2 sata ssd recommendations can be found here
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds

https://www.techradar.com/sg/news/best- ... rives-ssds

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

This is a reference for the 2.5'' SATA SSD. just as a comparison

Best gaming SSD under £50 / $50: Crucial MX500 (250GB)

Sizes: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB
Price: (250GB) £44 / $47

Previously, Crucial’s entry-level BX300 SSD occupied this place on our best gaming SSD list, but at time of writing its MX500 sibling is a much better deal. Prices aren’t just lower for the MX500, but you’re also getting double the storage for your money, too – 250GB as opposed to 120GB on the £43 / $30 BX300. Admittedly, the situation appears to be worse in the UK than across the pond, but when a 240GB BX300 will set you back an extortionate $70 in the US, the MX500 still comes out as the better value SSD.

In terms of performance, the MX500 is second only to Samsung’s more expensive 860 Evo, which you’ll find further down on this list. Its random read and write speeds are some of the best around, and much faster than its other main rival, the WD Blue 3D NAND. The MX500 also comes with a generous five year warranty, too, giving you peace of mind in case something happens to go wrong.

Of course, if you’re looking to keep costs to an absolute minimum, you may well be tempted by Crucial’s other entry-level SSD, the BX500. After all, this costs just £28 / $39 for 240GB at time of writing, making it much cheaper than the MX500. However, the BX500’s random read and write speeds simply don’t compare with the MX500, so I’d strongly recommended finding room in your budget for another £10 / $20 if you can. You won’t regret it.

Best gaming SSD under £100 / $100: Samsung 860 Evo (500GB)

Sizes: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB
Price: (500GB) £74 / $80

Despite not being that much faster than its predecessor, the Samsung 850 Evo, the 860 Evo remains one of the best gaming SSDs around. Its random read speeds are faster than any other 2.5in SATA3 SSD I’ve tested so far, and its warranty and endurance rating are also top of their respective classes.

The only SSD I’ve tested with a faster random write speed is Samsung’s 860 Qvo, but the smallest size available on that one is 1TB, thereby making it considerably more expensive as a result. That said, the 860 Qvo really comes into its own at higher capacities, as the way it’s been built is all about getting as much storage as possible for the least amount of money. Indeed, it’s far cheaper than the 860 Evo once you start pushing into the 1TB and 2TB categories (and arguably makes more sense than buying a smaller SSD to have as your primary drive and a larger but infinitely slower hard disk drive for storing games on), so I’d recommend opting for the Qvo instead of the Evo if you’re after something larger than 500GB.

For those looking to keep SSD costs to under £100 / $100, however, the 500GB Samsung 860 Evo is definitely the way to go. Not only is it faster than Crucial’s MX500, particularly when it comes to random write speeds, but it also comes with a much higher endurance rating: 300 terabytes written (TBW) for the 500GB model as opposed to just 180TBW on the 500GB MX500. It’s fast, durable and I’ve yet to see another 500GB SSD beat it when it comes to overall value.

That said, if you’ve got a fraction more to spend and have a motherboard that supports NVMe SSDs (which require an M.2 slot), then I’d also recommended the equally excellent 512GB Adata XPG SX8200 Pro. This has exceptional random read speeds and only mildly slower random write speeds than its more expensive competition, such as the Samsung 970 Evo below. All in all, it’s a fantastic drive, and a great alternative to the 860 Evo depending on how much money you’ve got to spend.

Best gaming SSD 2019 buying guide
Buying an SSD can be tricky. On the box, the main figure you’re often bombarded with is an SSD’s sequential read and write speeds, which can often be in the hundreds or thousands of MB/s. This all sounds very fast, but in practice it’s not actually a very good indicator at all of what kind of speeds you’ll get in day to day use. That’s because most SSDs read and write data randomly, sticking bits here and there all over an SSD’s storage blocks.

As a result, an SSD’s random read and write speeds are really what you should be looking out for when buying a new SSD for gaming, and why I place such an important emphasis on it in my gaming SSD reviews. To test this, I use AS SSD’s synthetic 1GB 4K random test, which sees how quickly an SSD can read and write one gigabyte’s worth of tiny 4K file chunks. I also test to see how gaming SSDs cope with larger workloads as well by running them through CrystalDiskMark’s 1GB 4K 8-queue-8-thread test.

Form factors explained
2.5in SSDs: The easiest drop-in replacement for a standard hard disk is a 2.5in SATA model. These are the same size and shape as a standard 2.5in hard disk, and plug into a normal SATA port on your motherboard. Most modern PC cases have mounting points for 2.5in hard disks, often on the back of the motherboard tray. If yours doesn’t, you can use a £5 adaptor (really just a 3.5in-wide metal plate with screw holes) to fit the SSD in a normal 3.5in hard disk bay.



To avoid crippling the SSD’s performance, make sure you plug the SSD into a SATA 3 port on your motherboard, rather than use SATA 2. SATA 3 SSDs will work in SATA 2 ports, but you’ll likely lose around half the SSD’s performance.

The chief disadvantage of 2.5in SSDs, compared to the mSATA, M.2 and PCI Express cards discussed below, is that they use SATA 3: an interface that’s been around since 2009, and one that isn’t quick enough to cope with the fastest modern SSDs. However, for most users, a SATA 3 SSD will be fine, and still several times faster than a mechanical hard disk.

M.2 and PCIe SSDs: If you’re in the market for a super-fast SSD that won’t be encumbered by its interface, you need to move beyond SATA to PCI Express, or PCIe (also called PCIe NVMe or just NVMe). Most PCIe SSDs are mounted directly to the motherboard in an M.2 slot. If your motherboard doesn’t have such a slot, there’s only one way to unleash the speed: a PCIe add-in card (AIC). These add-in cards will fit in a spare PCIe x4 or x16 slot and are monstrously quick, as well as monstrously expensive.

If you have a newer motherboard with an M.2 slot, an M.2 SSD is a neater way to add super-fast PCIe storage. Most M.2 SSDs are just 22mm wide and 80mm long (so about a third shorter than a stick of RAM) and screw straight into the motherboard – no more having to route SATA and power cables around your case.

However, the M.2 standard is a little complicated, chiefly due to its versatility. For starters, there are several sizes of M.2 card, such as 2280 and 22110: the first two digits denote the card’s width in mm, and the remaining numbers are the card’s length. Fortunately, the majority of consumer M.2 SSDs are the 2280 size. What’s more, as well as PCIe storage, the M.2 slot can also support SATA SSDs. These don’t have the performance advantage of PCIe M.2 drives, but score for neatness, and are about the same price as 2.5in SSDs. Check what standards your motherboard supports, as PCIe SSDs will not work in SATA-only slots and vice versa.

The good news is that many motherboards support both PCIe and SATA M.2 SSDs, giving you the versatility to choose between fast-but-expensive PCIe and slower (but still fast) and cheaper SATA. Bear in mind that the claimed speeds are for sequential transfers, rather than random reads and writes, so should be considered a best-case scenario. It’s also worth looking at a drive’s IOPS, or input/output operations per second, rating. This isn’t always listed in an SSD’s specifications, but it can make a big difference to an SSD’s real-world performance. A drive with a high IOPS rating can perform many more data reads and writes per second than a lower-rated model, which can make a huge difference in the complex data transfer tasks required by a modern operating system.

What size SSD do I need?
One of the first things you’ll notice when shopping for an SSD is that they’re an awful lot more expensive than mechanical hard disks. Spinning disks are astounding value, with 1TB models available for £40; if you want a terabyte SSD, you’ll have to find over £250. For this reason, if you’re on any kind of budget, you’ll need to think about how much capacity you need. The minimum size SSD I’d recommend is 250GB, as this will give you room for Windows, your productivity applications and a few games.

If you have a large photo and music collection that takes up around 100GB, say, it’s probably worth bumping it up to the 500GB mark. With Windows (around 20GB), Office (around 3GB), five or so big games and all my pictures and tunes, you’ll still have about 80GB left on such an SSD – and games are only going to get bigger, too. If you like to have more than a couple of big titles installed at once without compromising on load times, you may want to consider finding the cash for a 1TB SSD. Some high-performance SSDs are quicker at larger capacities as well, due to having more flash chips for the SSD controller to access in parallel.

If you need more space, it may be worth using your SSD alongside a normal hard disk, or even the hard disk you currently own. You can use the SSD for Windows, applications and games, and put your space-hungry files on the hard disk. By default the Windows Users folders, so Documents, Pictures, Videos and so on, will be on the system (C) drive, but you can redirect them to another disk by right-clicking each folder, selecting Properties, then Location. However, redirecting your Users folders away from their default locations can sometimes cause problems; if I was going to use the SSD/hard disk combo, I’d just create standard folders for the big files I wanted to keep on the hard disk, and avoid the corresponding Users folders entirely.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/0 ... sd-2019-7/

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sa ... ,5446.html


sustain write speed performance test

MX500 250gb

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cr ... 390-5.html


MX500 500gb

https://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd- ... review/14/



MX500 500gb-1tb

When you take a look at extended sustained write performance you’ll see that the performance starts out at around 490 MB/s and then significantly dropped off to roughly 390 MB/s before recovering for a brief period. After the recovery period the drive performance dropped off again and had some brief recovery period. Overall the performance was not terrible for a 3D TLC NAND based drive, but not all drives have this. Overall the average speed for writing over 256GB of data to the drive without a break was 443 MB/s.

https://www.legitreviews.com/crucial-mx ... s_202557/6


samsung 860 evo 250gb

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sa ... 446-4.html

Write Intensive Usage
When copying games from your Steam Library or other very large files (>10 GB), you might have noticed that write speeds on your SSD start out at full speed and then drop considerably. The underlying reason is that modern drives have caches that soak up write bursts to improve performance. In the fairly uncommon scenario of writing data that's too big to fit into these caches, the drive will have to write data directly to flash, and it will probably juggle some out of its write cache at the same time, which can result in a significant loss of write speed. Newer TLC drives operate part of their capacity in SLC mode for increased performance. This test can reveal the size of that SLC cache.

Testing on this page looks at exactly that scenario. We write a sequential stream of 1 MB blocks to the drive in a single thread, like a typical file-copy operation would do, and measure write speeds twice a second. The drive is fully erased before testing to ensure any caches are emptied. Please note that this test writes a lot of data in a very short time, which is something most consumers will never do.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/west ... 500/6.html

Pricing is one of the most crucial factors when we pick out an SSD. Legacy SATA drives fit in a very tight pricing box, and low-cost NVMe SSDs are just a stones' throw away. NVMe SSDs are even more attractive when you consider that SATA holds back the potential of the underlying NAND.

On the other end, SATA SSDs like the Crucial MX500, SanDisk Ultra 3D, and Western Digital Blue 3D are closing the performance gap at lower price points. You will not be able to tell the difference between those products and the 860 EVO unless you run heavy workloads frequently. The 1TB EVO is $70 than the 1TB MX500, and there is a $35 difference between the 500GB models. I would be less inclined to buy the 860 EVO in either capacity. The difference between these two drives in the 256GB class is only $15, which is more reasonable. We still wouldn't recommend it for a notebook until Samsung corrects the power consumption issues.

Samsung's response would likely be to point out the high endurance rating. The 860 EVO has half the endurance of the new 860 Pro, but it's still quite a bit more than competing products. It's a good argument, but who really cares?

Samsung's SSDs have always had excellent endurance and the company has sandbagged the rating for years. It would be a different story if Samsung drives stopped working (like Intel's) when you cross the imaginary line. Samsung drives will continue to work until there is a hard fault, and during normal use that might occur in twenty years. If Samsung wanted to make endurance and warranty a strong selling point, it should have increased the warranty length to 10 years like the 850 Pro. Time is a metric we can get behind--a magical endurance rating is not, especially when it's not a countdown before the drive moves into a read-only state.

Samsung has used the endurance strategy before, but that was when its pricing was much more competitive. The EVO series usually costs a little more than competing drives, but it delivers superior performance. With the 860 EVO series the performance gap shrinks while the price gap increases. Samsung will have a more difficult time once third-party SSD manufacturers gain more access to 64-layer NAND. Taiwanese companies like Adata and Team Group have waited a long time for competitive flash, and the very low-cost SSDs with 64-layer TLC will arrive before we pack our bags for Computex in June. Many of those products will come in the form of NVMe M.2 SSDs with higher performance than the 860 EVO, and some may even cost less if Samsung keeps these prices.

On paper, the 860 EVO is faster than the 850 EVO, but the operating system overhead will not allow you to see the difference. Even on the specification sheet, we're looking at crumbs of performance, a virtual rounding error. There isn't a reason to upgrade from the 850 EVO if you already have one. Statistically, there is a very good chance you have a Samsung if your SSD is less than four years old. That is a very large time span, and your next storage upgrade will either be for more capacity or to an NVMe SSD that delivers more performance than SATA.

In my opinion, Samsung should have brought the 850 (non-Pro/EVO) to the global market as a very inexpensive SATA series with the same capacity range as the new 860. SATA has become a price-driven commodity market, so there is very little room for a price premium when the difference in performance is 10% or less.

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

i spotted a ADATA XPG SX6000 LITE NVMe PCIe 3*4 (256/512GB) M.2 2280 SSD which was in the ballpark of crucial mx500 and samsung 860 pricing. It's a NVME M.2 SSD, but for comparison sake...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13723/ad ... cie-x4-ssd


endurance TBW: 256gb = 120 TB MSRP $65 ///512gb = 240 TB MSRP $98

MBTF 1.8m with 3 year warranty


no dram buffer? :/ The comments at the link are rather insightful.



saw the very cheapest m.2 SATA ssd for 240g was this

Kingston 240GB A400 M.2 2280 SSD (SA400M8/240G)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doQdZn3XCik

endurance

Total Bytes Written (TBW)

120GB: 40TB
240GB: 80TB
480GB: 160TB
960GB: 300TB

https://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/a400-so ... 400M8/240G

[Trexx]

I just upgraded my crucial mx300 to 1Tb WD blue m.2s. So far so good. Better speed per Ssd test tool.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

good price? there's a mid year sale for the local e seller, so i'm buying then :}

wd blue m.2 sata 1tb review here
https://www.thestreamingblog.com/wd-blu ... -2-review/

What the designers didn’t do was change the controller, as this SSD uses the Marvell 88SS1074 as before. This four channel controller sports low-density parity check (LDPC) technology for error- correcting, and can work with MLC, TLC and the 3D NAND TLC Flash used in this series.

Along with the controller, mounted on the internal board is a Micron made cache module and four BiCS (Bit-Cost Scaling) 3D TLC NAND in 128GB packages. If you open up a drive to see these, and that will involve damaging the rear label, then the little board inside occupies less than 40% of the available volume.

What is more impressive is how this drive maintains its performance over the long haul, given that it uses the TLC memory model. We’ve seen plenty of drives recently that are good until their internal cache is saturated, at which point write performance declines to about half of what it was initially.

The 3D Blue 3D NAND isn’t immune from this effect, but write goes down to the 450MB/s level, and it delivers that number consistently even with very big (25GB+) sized file transfers. Because of this TLC issue most high-end branded drives (like the Crucial BX300) use MLC flash, as it can maintain the write performance without cache support.

Overall, this drive is better than Samsung’s 750 EVO, and in some tests better than their 850 EVO. If you want significantly better performance than this, you’ll need to consider a PCIe NVMe drive.

Because the WD Blue 3D NAND is wringing the last bits per second out of SATA III bandwidth, and even the very best SATA connected devices don’t go much faster.

One mild weakness is the TBW (Total Bytes Written) which is just 100TBW on the 250GB and 200TBW on 500GB model covered here.

To put this in perspective; the 200TB level is more than the 150TB Samsung 850 Evo 500GB offers, but 33% less than the 300TB that the new 860 Evo is claiming.

Most users will never actually run into the TBW of their drives, but it is something worth considering if you hammer your storage every day.

https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/review/ss ... w-3673445/



at the 250gb, the wd blue and mx500 are dead even on endurance, i'd get whichever is cheaper, in this case is the mx500. but in the 500gb segment, the wd blue is cheaper and has higher tbw to boot, so that is a clear winner, unless you rather pay the premium for the 860 evo with higher tbw. @1tb -2tb the samsung evo tbw totally leaves crucial and wd in the dust, but yes at a premium


i read the wd blue m.2 sata reviews, but there is nothing about power loss protection, not even partial protection like what crucial offers. so i'm guessing there is none.

however the newer WD Blue SN500 M.2 NVMe SSD Review (500GB) does have power loss protection and thermal throttling. but that's already a M.2 NVME, not M.2 SATA
http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews ... iew-500gb/





apparently WD also has started to migrate from m.2 sata to M.2 NVME
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14086/ne ... es-to-nvme


so perhaps 2020 qnap stuff will also start switching over native m.2 slots to nvme's (then we won't require an addon to add m.2 nvme support then), perhaps?


i thought perhaps the M.2 SSD NVME budget were all the new low endurance qlcs, but apparently thats not the case, as the wd blue m.2 NVME proves (it's tlc)
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd ... ,6080.html


WD Blue SN500 NVME SSD Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvNkzBgr8iE
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/west ... vme-sn500/

Last but not least, WD has gotten rid of the DRAM chip, saving a few additional dollars in the process.

The DRAM chip provides caching for the SSD mapping tables, which help the controller keep track of where it put the data. Without it, performance is going to be reduced, and another system that still allows for housekeeping of this important data without compromising on integrity has to be implemented, all while minimizing the performance loss. We tested DRAM-less SSDs in several previous reviews and noticed that this design choice mostly affects random writes that are spread out over a fairly large area. Reads and sequential transfer speeds are nearly unaffected.

How SSD Technology Keeps Getting WORSE! (qlc endurance ** compared to tlc )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OffzVc7ZB-o


What Are DRAM-less SSDs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybIXsrLCgdM

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

just an update, but after 2nd thought i bumped up my budget to get 2 x 500gb WD blue or Crucial mx500 M.2 sata SSD.

because after formatting and provisioning, there's not much i can do with 250gb. Might be fine for just QTS (which is what i'm using on the ts-877, since i separately store data on raid5 4x4tb hdd raid5 array), but for like portable NAS for which it's the only storage, you need more than that to be usable.

i also read that the wd blue does not have issues with sustain write performance (i could not find a chart similar to mx500 that proves it did better than it on this). and ontop of that it has extra 20tbw over the crucial mx500 which i am also considering.

Legit Bottom Line: The WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD don’t suffer performance degradation with long file writes and are priced right!

https://www.legitreviews.com/crucial-mx ... s_202557/7

//note: they say this but another reviewer is showing a different result for sustained write that tapers off write speed after 2-4gb+ file transfers refer to below


i did not see results for 500gb, but there is a 250gb sustain write test here for wd blue. it seems to fluctuate between 60-200 MB/s for the 2-4gb+ content for sustained write speeds

@4:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBJHjsgx_PM

whereas the mx500 seems to have a steady 200 MB/s by comparison hm... and crucial has partial sudden power loss protection as well hm...

I guess i'll go with whichever between these 2 i can get for cheaper. but these are the info i could find if you want to nitpick.


*update

wd blue 3d 500gb



https://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd- ... review/12/


wd 3d 500gb and 1tb review by techdeals @ 3:00 , @4:30 (like his channel, he usually gives solid advice to us newbs )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lERuviY2BPQ

We've already tested the new 3D TLC flash in the Toshiba XG5, an OEM-focused NVMe SSD, and found it to offer robust performance. BiCS is very "Samsung-like" because it is real high-performance TLC, in contrast to planar (2D) TLC that hides its low performance behind SLC buffers. Like the Samsung 850 EVO, the new Blue and Ultra 3D SSDs do not lose a significant amount of performance after sustained write activity. The line graph above is from our third consecutive HD Tune Pro run, which is a test that writes sequential data to the entire usable capacity of the SSD. We can reach the same maximum speed with Toshiba's 15nm planar NAND, but it only lasts for a few seconds before the workload saturates the SLC buffer, while the Blue's BiCS NAND doesn't suffer the same fate. That's good news for end users because large file transfers will not drop to HDD performance levels.

The new flash/controller combination saturates the SATA 6Gbps AHCI connection. That allows these TLC SSDs to act much more like MLC-based products. However, BiCS-powered NVMe SSDs will still encounter a slight performance drop-off because the PCIe 3.0 x4 connection increases the performance ceiling, which exposes the performance decline after lengthy periods of write activity.

WD tapped the Marvell 88SS1074 4-channel controller with low-density parity check (LDPC) error correction. This is the same controller WD used in the older Blue SSD that began shipping in 2016. Crucial also uses the controller in the MX300. The controller has yet to impress us with the products we've tested, but that may change today. BiCS will only come in TLC flavors for consumer SSDs, but it may be able to take up the slack and allow the 88SS1074 to spread its wings--its performance surprised us in our XG5 preview article. Both Toshiba and SanDisk avoided some of our deep dive questions about program timing, planes, and architecture, so we're forced to compare the flash in end products rather than on paper. Conversely, Samsung has no problem publishing detailed V-NAND specifications.

The WD/Toshiba joint venture has 64-layer BiCS NAND die in 256Gbit and 512Gbit capacities, but the companies won't disclose which die they use in the Blue and Ultra. We experienced the same with Toshiba's XG5. Toshiba hasn't released the 2TB XG5, and WD/SanDisk hasn't shipped the 2TB Blue/Ultra models, so I assume all the products we've tested use the 256Gbit die. The 2TB models may have to wait for the 512Gbit die, but it could also be a delay in building high-capacity NAND packages for the larger models.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd ... ,5134.html


//note: tomshardware seems to be heavily sponsored by wd, and they disabled comments, so i'd take their review with a grain of salt

sauce:
https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=121791


i miss hardocp, but they shutdown kyle got a job with Intel. good for him, but it was my main tech site for news for many many years i liked the site because they gave honest reviews that ** a bunch of hardware brands for telling the truth

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

This was an interesting test comparisons. These hardly qualify anywhere close to budget SSDs, additionally these are all M.2 NVMEs. I merely mention them as a reference as to what the higher tier of performance ssd looks like, and whether they use MLC, TLC etc. the budget ssd users would mostly be over at the TLC and QLC tiers. And nand got killed off by v-nand/3d nand which had better everything especially endurance, so if you're looking for an SSD make sure it's the later ones.

Samsung 970 PRO
V-NAND 64-layer 2bit MLC

Samsung 970 EVO
V-NAND 64-layer 3bit MLC (TLC)

Samsung 960 PRO
V-NAND 48-layer 2bit MLC

Samsung 960 EVO
V-NAND 48-layer 3bit TLC

WD Black
SanDisk 64-Layer 3D TLC

WHICH IS BETTER TLC OR MLC NAND?
TLC, MLC, bit levels. A bit confusing for most people, so I’ll try clear up some of this confusion, as it’s actually pretty easy to understand.

The first and most important thing we need to understand is simply that the LOWER the BITS, the FASTER the SPEEDS.

Now these bit levels require a naming convention, which is as follows:

SLC (Single : 1 bit per cell) – fastest, highest price
MLC (Multi : 2 bits per cell) – fast, better priced (Samsung 970 PRO)
TLC (Triple : 3 bits per cell) – fast, affordable price (Samsung 970 EVO)
QLC (Quad : 4 bits per cell) – slowest, lowest price
The Samsung 970 PRO is a 2bit MLC (Multi-Level Cell), while the 970 EVO is also marketed MLC, but its a 3bit. Now this might have just confused you slightly, because the above bullet points tell us that MLC is 2 bit and TLC is 3 Bit.

So why is the the 970 EVO not TLC?

In reality, the Samsung 970 EVO is more correctly a TLC (Triple-Level Cell) than a MLC, due to the 3bit MLC (Multi-Level Cell) not “really existing”.

However, the conundrum here is that TLC (Triple-level cells) and the future quad-level cells QLC (Quad-Level Cells) are actually ‘sub-versions’ of MLC memory, which can store 3 and 4 bits per cell, respectively.

This is due to the naming convention “multi-level cell”, which is sometimes used specifically to refer to the “two-level cell or 2bit”, as with the Samsung 970 PRO, which is where the confusion comes in.

Not the best naming convention to be honest, but it is what it is, so as long as you are able to understand it a bit better, then my job here is done.

Basically just remember that the lower the bit levels, the faster the performance, but also the mostly it will become.

https://www.fullexposure.photography/sa ... ro-review/



I saw a video where the reviewer noted that the sustain write performance for the 970 evo dropped like a dead duck for very big file transfers. so apparently this was why. it was a TLC ssd all along
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBQfBmraanI

I believe the slc cache is just filling up causing it to slow down. After that fills up you are limited to the write speed of the TLC itself

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

something i overlooked with the mx500, apparently it also has hardware encryption. something that the wd 3d ssd doesn't have

If we were upgrading a laptop or buying the primary drive for a desktop, we’d buy the Crucial 500 GB MX500. It’s available in both 2.5-inch and M.2 SATA versions, and it’s one of the cheapest and best big-name SSDs you can buy. It’s fast enough and capacious enough for most people and it offers useful features like hardware encryption support and a five-year warranty. A handful of SATA drives are a little faster than the MX500, but you need to step up to a more expensive PCI Express drive like our upgrade pick to notice a difference.

The Crucial MX500 is one of the cheapest and best big-name SSDs you can buy, and it offers useful features like hardware encryption support and a five-year warranty.

You wouldn’t notice a speed difference between the MX500 and much more expensive SATA drives in use. Drive benchmarks from reviewers at AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware show that the MX500 is occasionally 10 to 20 percent slower in some individual tests than Samsung’s 860 Evo drives, and it consumes a bit more power, but its overall performance is better than that of the rest of the competition and near the limits of the SATA interface. Compared with the previous-generation MX300, the MX500 improves performance when the drive is full or near-full, one of the MX300’s major shortcomings.

In a review of the 1 TB version of the MX500, AnandTech’s Billy Tallis writes: “It isn’t at the top of every benchmark … but it is clearly a top-tier choice.” In a review of the 500 GB version, Tallis says that while it is slower than the 1 TB version, it still comes with no major shortcomings and is “easy to recommend.”

Crucial offers the MX500 in a typical range of capacities: The 2.5-inch SATA drive is available in 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB versions, while the M.2 SATA drive comes in 250 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB versions. Crucial doesn’t make an mSATA version of the MX500, so if you’re using an older ultrabook that needs such a drive, look at our runner-up pick instead.

The 500 GB MX500’s limited warranty lasts for five years or 180 terabytes written (TBW), whichever comes first.4 That coverage is not quite as good as Samsung’s five-year, 300 TBW warranty for the 500 GB version of the 860 Evo, but you would still need to completely fill up the MX500 once every 10 days to even come close to wearing that drive out in less than five years. Most people just don’t use their computers that way (and the people who do would be better served by our upgrade pick’s speed boost, anyway).

The MX500 supports native encryption acceleration—something not found in most SSDs in its price range, including the WD Blue 3D NAND, the SanDisk Ultra 3D, and Crucial’s own BX300—and comes with a (Windows-only) license for the Acronis True Image data-transfer software if you need help moving your stuff over from your old drive. The (also Windows-only) Crucial Storage Executive software comes in handy if you want to monitor your drive’s health or install firmware updates. And Crucial includes a spacer (7.5 mm to 9 mm) with the 2.5-inch version of the MX500, so it can fit more snugly in older laptops designed to use thicker hard drives.

WD’s Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk’s Ultra 3D are identical drives—the only difference is the label on the front, and the fact that the WD Blue includes an M.2 version while the SanDisk comes in only a 2.5-inch SATA version. Both are well-reviewed, good-enough SATA SSDs with solid performance, and both are available for around the same price as the Crucial MX500. But their lack of hardware encryption support and their shorter, three-year warranty ultimately make the MX500 the better buy.

https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-ssds/

*update

the above says the wd blue 3d is 3 year warranty, but when i checked the local seller, there is a 5 year warranty quoted ? i even checked wd's website, it also says 5 years
https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ss ... DS500G2B0A



but i wonder if they fixed the issues found not too long ago

What are the specific vulnerabilities?
Summarising the issues found, one of the researchers tweeted, likening the situation to “leaving the keys to the safe, under the safe”. The main vulnerabilities were as follows:

-No proper link between the DEK and the AK. The researchers said they were able to connect to the drive’s debug interface on its circuit board. This gave them direct access to the drive’s firmware, enabling them to modify the password-checking routine to accept any passphrase.

-A blank master password by default. With the Crucial MX 300 SSD, the researchers found that the device’s master password was set as an empty string by default. If this remained unaltered, it meant that the data could be unlocked simply by submitting an empty field!

How to deal with the problem
For the BitLocker issue, you can change the default setting and instruct the program to use software-based encryption only. This is done by accessing the Local Group Policy Editor (enter “gpedit.msc” in the Run dialog. Navigate to “Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/BitLocker Drive Encryption. Double click on “Configure use of hardware-based encryption for fixed data drives – and select “Disabled”.

As an alternative to BitLocker, you can also use the open source ​VeraCrypt​ tool for ​encryption. (Unlike BitLocker, this can also be used on Windows Home editions).

For its EVO drives, Samsung now recommends installing encryption software. Crucial has already released patches for its affected drives – as has Samsung for its T3 and T5 SSD models.

I have always been concerned about possible flaws in SSD encryption, so have always been recommending open source software encryption like VeraCrypt​ instead of SSD encryption, where the code has been audited.

The message is clear: consider using full disk encryption at the software level – and always keep on top of your patch updates.

https://www.stationx.net/think-your-ssd ... ink-again/

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

apparently wd blue 3d released a 4tb sata ssd but in 2.5''. It's a mystery whether there will be a m.2 sata for it (they've already recently released a m.2 NVME wd blue)
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/weste ... 39189.html

endurance: 600 TBW MSRP~$503.26 price per gig: $0.13


m.2 sata SSD highest afaik is up to 2tb so far

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

ssd raid?

RAID arrays have been used for more than 40 years to increase the performance of hard disk drive (HDD) storage systems. But a single solid state drive (SSD) RAID array can offer performance which is comparable to many HDD RAID arrays, and is therefore often seen as an alternative to an SSD RAID array.

Plus, using SSD RAID arrays can lead to further performance gains, so rather than being an alternative to RAID, SSDs should really be seen as a complement to RAID. When it comes to the SSD vs. HDD debate, the SSD RAID clearly shines in performance.

Some SSD RAID configurations can also be used to protect data in the event of a disk failure. Although SSDs tend to be more reliable than HDDs because they have no moving parts, they are still prone to failure. Clearly, flash storage memory has its challenges

For that reason, SSD RAID can also be extremely useful when used with SSDs in applications where data protection is particularly important.

SSD and RAID
Here's how RAID and SSD are used together to prevent failure/losing data:

SSDs tend to be highly reliable as they have no moving parts and because they generate less heat than HDDs so do not suffer wear from thermal expansion. But even though complete disk failures are rare, data stored on an SSD can still be lost. This is due to the corruption of individual bits stored in the NAND cells through interference between cells or even complete cell failure due to heavy usage.

Using an SSD RAID in a RAID 1 configuration, if one drive fails then no data will be lost, because the data it stores is also mirrored on the other drive in the SSD RAID array. RAID 1 also provides a degree of performance enhancement because any read request can be handled by either drive in the SSD RAID array.

The main drawbacks to an SSD RAID 1 array are:

-Users can only use half of the total storage capacity of the two drives (a storage efficiency of 50%).
-Users consume about twice the power of a single drive system. (SSDs are much more energy efficient than HDDs, so this point is less. important with an SSD RAID array

In fact there are many other RAID configurations which use different numbers of disks, and techniques such as RAID stripe storage (splitting data between different disks) and storing parity bits. These different RAID configurations offer different combinations of performance gains, data protection, and storage efficiency.

Using SSDs with Different RAID Types
Using an SSD RAID array can offer effective protection against data loss and performance enhancement. The big question is: which RAID level should you use in an SSD RAID array?

SDD RAID Stripe
For data protection purposes, RAID 0 can be ruled out because it uses a RAID stripe pattern written to two disks to increase performance, but this offers no data redundancy. RAID 1, on the other hand, offers complete redundancy but only modest performance gains, and should therefore be considered if performance enhancement is not a driver for SSD RAID adoption.

SSD RAID 5 and 6
Popular alternatives that provide redundancy are RAID 5 (which uses data striping with parity bits with a minimum of three disks) and RAID 6 (which uses striping and double parity with a minimum of four disks). This has the benefit that any two disks can fail without losing data. Both these SSD RAID configurations offer increased performance, but the boost is not as great as the difference between SSD RAID 0 vs an SSD running alone (i.e. not part of an SSD RAID array).

The problem with RAID 5 and RAID 6 in SSD RAID arrays is that both these systems require large numbers of disk write operations to accommodate the parity information. (RAID 6, in particular, requires two extra parity writes each time any data is written) Since SSD NAND cells have a limited number of writes before they wear out, this makes RAID 5 and RAID 6 less suited to SSD RAID arrays.

SSD RAID 10
A better alternative to RAID 5 or RAID 6 may be to use an SSD RAID configuration at level 10. RAID 10 uses RAID stripe (a common SSD RAID 10 stripe size is 128 or 256 kb) and mirroring to provide fault tolerance with a minimum of four SSDs. An additional benefit of RAID 10 is that it offers very high performance, but storage efficiency is low (50% in a four disk SSD RAID array).

SSD RAID Performance
Connecting multiple SSDs to a RAID controller to create an SSD RAID array in certain SSD RAID configurations can have an enormous impact on performance, with the proviso that peak performance is limited by the throughput capacity of the RAID controller itself. The RAID level that offers the best performance is RAID 0.

RAID 0 vs. SSD
As discussed earlier, a simple two SSD RAID 0 setup which uses RAID stripe techniques to RAID stripe data between two SSDs can result in a doubling of performance compared to a single SSD, although this setup provides no redundancy.

If storage efficiency is no object, then a four SSD RAID 0 array would offer up to four times the performance of the slowest disk in the array (subject to the SSD RAID controller limit).

Other SSD RAID levels such as RAID 1 offer small performance gains – a two SSD RAID 1 array is principally designed to protect data, but since both disks can be read at the same time there is some improvement in read speeds (but none in SSD write performance).

RAID 10, which used a combination of RAID 0 (which uses RAID stripe storage) and RAID 1 (which uses mirroring) can offer significant increases in SSD performance, but it is less storage efficient than RAID 0, and the performance gains are about half as great.

Is a SSD RAID "Worth It"? (Hint: It's All About Cost)
The purpose of a SSD RAID array is to provide protection against data loss, or to increase disk performance, or both.

When it comes to data loss protection, there is no doubt that appropriate RAID levels have much to offer, and this is equally true with HDD RAID arrays and SSD RAID arrays.

As for performance, if storage redundancy is not required then a suitable SSD RAID configuration such as RAID 0 offers a reliable way to get a big performance boost, as an alternative to using technologies such as Intel Optane based SSDs or NVMe Fabrics.

The biggest limitation of SSD RAID arrays (again, aside from the SSD RAID controller speed limit) is the cost. SSDs are more expensive per Gigabyte than HDDs, and using an SSD RAID configuration that offers 50% storage efficiency such as a two SSD RAID 0 array or a four SSD RAID 10 array effectively doubles these costs.

Ultimately, when it comes to using SSD RAID arrays for performance, the future will be dictated by economics. If newer, faster non-volatile storage technologies can offer better performance for the same or lower costs then there may be no need to use a standard SSD RAID array.

https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/ ... -raid.html


Should you RAID NVMe SSDs? - 2x Samsung 970 EVO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgH0LPU9oes

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

more links to help decide between mx500 and wd blue 3d 500gb

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/98 ... 0-1tb-ssd/

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/10 ... all-500gb/

https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/2 ... sd-m2-2280

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads ... 2.3349076/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds

https://www.techspot.com/products/stora ... 00.177698/

https://alternative.me/m2-ssds

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/cruc ... -gb/6.html

The MX500 is the first Crucial drive based on Micron's 64-layer 3D TLC NAND, and is the second generation of Crucial's mainstream MX series to use TLC NAND instead of MLC NAND. The MX500 breaks from previous MX generations by using Silicon Motion's SM2258 controller instead of a Marvell controller, but all the usual features of the MX series are still present. This includes both TCG Opal encryption support and Crucial's partial power loss protection, features which are uncommon on mainstream or budget consumer SSDs. As usual for Crucial, the SLC write cache is dynamically sized based on how full the drive is.

The MX500 uses the SMI SM2258 controller. We wrote a detailed preview of the SM2258's capabilities back in August of 2016. The controller is an older model, but Crucial says its LDPC (Low-Density Parity-Check) error correction algorithms are powerful enough for the new 64-layer 3D NAND.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cr ... ,5390.html
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/si ... ,4698.html
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12263/th ... 0gb-review


the WD Blue (and apparently the MX300) uses the Marvell 88SS1074 controller
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/marve ... oller.html
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11029/ma ... d-88ss1074



Anandtech was one of the most recent reviews i saw that took a 2nd look at MX500 because of the latest cheaper price on market making it very attractive

With capacities from 250GB to 2TB now available at MSRPs that are highly competitive, the Crucial MX500 is shaking up the SATA SSD market. Last year's budget SSDs need big price cuts, and even mainstream drives like the SanDisk Ultra 3D are having to drop in price. M.2 versions of the Crucial MX500 up to 1TB are also on the way, so ultrabook users will have most of the same upgrade options.

For this review, we are focusing on the 500GB Crucial MX500. This is a lower capacity than we initially tested, making it more affordable and a bit slower than the 1TB model. With a MSRP of $139.99 and current retail prices slightly lower, the 500GB Crucial MX500 should prove to be a very popular product. Testing at the 500GB capacity point gives us the opportunity to make more direct comparisons against some other drives in our collection, especially the Intel 545s and the Crucial BX300.

can't go wrong with either, but i like to nitpick