# single big ssd vs a few smaller ones



## cucker tarlson (Apr 17, 2019)

I'm wondering if moving to a single 2TB ssd would benefit me in any way.

my current setup
su900 128gb (3d mlc,bought last year for os only)
2x850 pro 256gb (3d mlc,biught in 2015-16 as os/game drives,now used for games only)
1x850 pro 512gb,bought in 2017 for games
1x860evo 500gb,3d tlc,bought this or last year for games
1x xpg sx950u 480gb,3d tlc,bought this year for games

all fit nicely in my full tower case,my hdds are in docking station.

would selling them for a single 2tb make any sense,apart from using less space in my case,which is not a problem for me.I've always thought having more smaller drives is better since the drives don't have to write and read at the same time and if one fails that only screws up a portion of my data,not all of it.
should I reconsider?


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## _UV_ (Apr 17, 2019)

CONS
single point of failure
PROS
possible better speed (if you consider PCI-E/NVME SSD)  
single big drive with 1 partition for a possible single very big app like modern games


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## Rahnak (Apr 17, 2019)

If it ain't broke don't fix it?

Personally I'd prefer to have a single, bigger drive as that would let me keep all my stuff in a single place (also a very slight boost in performance for some drives). Also lower power consumption and less physical space taken (which isn't an issue for you).

Also when SSDs fail doesn't it still let you read the data but not write? Unless it's some spectacular fail (Luckily never had any kind of drive fail on me, so I honestly don't know).


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## bonehead123 (Apr 17, 2019)

I would sell them all, get a new 4TB (or 2x 2TB) for your games, and a 256/512GB for your OS and be done with it.

If your mobo supports it, I would make that OS drive an nvme drive, as their prices (and all SSD's in general) are dropping like crazy right now 

FYI, I saw a 500gb WD Black SN750 nvme with a 2TB spinner somewhere for ~$100 last week...


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## R0H1T (Apr 17, 2019)

Yes larger capacities are better but looking at your setup you should keep some of the 500GB drives, even if just for backup.


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## bug (Apr 17, 2019)

It really depends. I expect many people have multi-SSD setups because, like me, they upgraded some of their storage as SSDs got cheaper.
A multi SSD setup allows you to use a bottom of the barrel, dirt cheap QLC drive for stuff like video or audio that you mostly never write. In my case, having Linux on a separate drive meant I didn't have to worry about Windows' nasty habit of taking over the boot sector.
But there's nothing inherently wrong with a single SSD setup either.


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## Vayra86 (Apr 17, 2019)

1. Capacities under 256GB are detrimental to performance
2. Filling up an SSD to near-capacity slows it down

Based on that I would toss out the 128/256GB SSDs and replace them with a single large one if you want to burn money. If you're sensible about it, just wait until they start complaining.

These are non issues for regular use. In a general sense, bigger is better for SSDs (more options for the controller to move data around and use wear levelling properly). Too big however tends to bring a cost aspect (I believe 2TB is still higher $/GB for many brands) but has the advantage of taking up less space/SATA/NVME.

Apart from the speed considerations its all common sense really, if you ask me. About the single point of failure... meh. This is why you make backups anyway of important stuff. Two SSDs can fail too.


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## R0H1T (Apr 17, 2019)

Vayra86 said:


> If you're sensible about it,* just wait until they start complaining*.


I seriously doubt that.


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## cucker tarlson (Apr 17, 2019)

Vayra86 said:


> 1. Capacities under 256GB are detrimental to performance
> 2. Filling up an SSD to near-capacity slows it down
> 
> Based on that I would toss out the 128/256GB SSDs and replace them with a single large one if you want to burn money. If you're sensible about it, just wait until they start complaining.
> ...


I don't fill them up to the max.On 256gb ones I found that you really have to fill them up to almost max to see real slowdowns.I leave +30 free on each of them so no worries.They're 850pro's too so 3d mlc doesn't give up as easily as tlc on cheaper 250gb drives.

the 128gb one works great as well,but it's only ever about half full.it's 3d mlc as well,I'm getting as good sequential/random performance as people are gettng on bigger 3d tlc drives.Only thing it sucks at is high thread/high queue workloads,which are non-exsitent on my rig.I wouldn't buy a 128/256 drive on tlc,I know better than that 

I don't have any problem with capacity,got hundreds of gigabytes free atm (552gb free across all drives),rather the pros and cons of single vs multi.

I gotta admit I'm a bit of a ssd whore too.I like having many and benching them.I like having quality ones on 3d mlc too,even if I have to sacrifice the capacity.


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## bug (Apr 17, 2019)

The only reason to change your setup would be if you went for NMVe drives, because motherboards don't have nearly the same number of M.2 connectors as they do SATA. I almost forgot about that.
But otherwise, don't worry about it.


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## R0H1T (Apr 17, 2019)

With the 5775c he'll be limited by PCIe lanes more than anything else.


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## bug (Apr 17, 2019)

R0H1T said:


> With the 5775c he'll be limited by PCIe lanes more than anything else.


Unfortunately, as NVMe catches on, we'll all be limited by the number of available PCIe lanes 
Still, the point of NVMe isn't about the high sequential speeds (you rarely need those), but the lower protocaol overhead that lets you do more small reads per second. And you can benefit from that even if you run the drive on a couple of PCIe lanes.


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## cucker tarlson (Apr 17, 2019)

R0H1T said:


> With the 5775c he'll be limited by PCIe lanes more than anything else.


I can go with a pci-e one that'll be limited to 2.0 x4.
Not really a problem since this only affects sequential transfers,which frankly is the last thing we do on home/gaming rigs.

pci-e 2.0 can do +1700mb/s


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## Ruyki (Apr 17, 2019)

cucker tarlson said:


> I've always thought having more smaller drives is better since the drives don't have to write and read at the same time and if one fails that only screws up a portion of my data,not all of it.
> should I reconsider?


Reading and writing to a multiple SSDs can probably be faster that a single SSD. But for most normal uses a single large SSD should be plenty fast since SSDs are good at doing multiple things at a time anyway.

I say one big SSD or many small SSDs are both ok so you're fine.

But I would not recommended getting multiple SSDs in case you're just building a new system or adding SSD storage to a system that has none. In this case, you're probably better off getting one large SSD.

The biggest advantage of having less bigger drives than more smaller ones is having free case spots and SATA connectors for future upgrades.


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## trog100 (Apr 17, 2019)

leave your drives as they are and find another way to spend your money.. 

trog

ps.. i just spent £200 quid on a evo 970 plus nvme 1 T drive 3500 read 3500 write.. Division 2 still takes an eternity to load from it.. he he..


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## Bones (Apr 17, 2019)

I can only speak for what I've done before - I have used a pair of SSD's in RAID 0 and had another drive as a data drive for things like game installs. Used the RAID setup for the OS itself and that did improve overall performance in how quickly it executed programs and the like but for things like loading games from the other drive I don't recall it making a real difference, perhaps a little but certainly nothing to write home about.

I do agree having everything based on a single drive creates a single point of failure, that much is certain. For all the drives the OP has, doing a RAID 0 setup at least shoudn't be much of a problem with the 2x850 pro 256gb drives with all the rest used as extra drives for whatever else - Would also depend if his board supports RAID and I don't see why it woudn't.
Only real con(s) is the usual with a RAID setup that we all know about.

For m.2 stuff I have nothing for that since I don't use those kind of drives.


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## cucker tarlson (Apr 17, 2019)

trog100 said:


> leave your drives as they are and find another way to spend your money..
> 
> trog
> 
> ps.. i just spent £200 quid on a evo 970 plus nvme 1 T drive 3500 read 3500 write.. Division 2 still takes an eternity to load from it.. he he..


cause nvme does dick to loading times.you could take a cheap ass sata ssd and loading times would be the same.



Bones said:


> I can only speak for what I've done before - I have used a pair of SSD's in RAID 0 and had another drive as a data drive for things like game installs. Used the RAID setup for the OS itself and that did improve overall performance in how quickly it executed programs and the like but for things like loading games from the other drive I don't recall it making a real difference, perhaps a little but certainly nothing to write home about.
> 
> I do agree having everything based on a single drive creates a single point of failure, that much is certain. For all the drives the OP has, doing a RAID 0 setup at least shoudn't be much of a problem with the 2x850 pro 256gb drives with all the rest used as extra drives for whatever else - Would also depend if his board supports RAID and I don't see why it woudn't.
> Only real con(s) is the usual with a RAID setup that we all know about.
> ...


I did have them in raid.sequential r/w were over 1000mb/s and high queue speeds improvd by 40% iirc,but where it actualy matters,it improved absolutely nothing.


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## delshay (Apr 17, 2019)

I started off with 512MB, then I moved to 1TB, but now on 2TB, all Samsung 850 pro. I moved to the larger disk space as I noticed AAA games tended to be getting bigger in size over time.

Also Samsung disk has a larger cache memory as you go up in disk space, ie my 2TB 850 pro has 2GB LPDDR3. My next update will most likely be the newer 860 pro either 2TB or 4TB.


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## bug (Apr 17, 2019)

@Bones Raid is probably the worst thing you can do to a SSD. It only improves sequential transfers and you have NMVe for that. If you want better reads/writes, you need to go RAID0 and then you're more susceptible to drive failures. If you do it like you did and only keep the OS and apps on the raid array, then yes, there's nothing there to lose. But otherwise just no.


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## Bones (Apr 17, 2019)

Thanks - Since I did mention it I did a little digging around for those that may be curious about it anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID


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## Vayra86 (Apr 17, 2019)

People tend to forget that the amount of times storage is a limiting factor in responsiveness or speed is incredibly limited and for commercial use barely even exists apart from boot and load times. And even then, with a regular SSD you're already looking at other bottlenecks such as the CPU. That is part of the reason SATA > NVME barely pays off.


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## bug (Apr 17, 2019)

Vayra86 said:


> People tend to forget that the amount of times storage is a limiting factor in responsiveness or speed is incredibly limited and for commercial use barely even exists apart from boot and load times. And even then, with a regular SSD you're already looking at other bottlenecks such as the CPU. That is part of the reason SATA > NVME barely pays off.


That is true. There was a chart illustrating how little difference is there between SSDs compared to HDDs, but Idk if I can dig it up again.
Still, for more intensive usage, the better 4k random reads of NVMe won't hurt


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## cucker tarlson (Apr 17, 2019)

Vayra86 said:


> People tend to forget that the amount of times storage is a limiting factor in responsiveness or speed is incredibly limited and for commercial use barely even exists apart from boot and load times. And even then, with a regular SSD you're already looking at other bottlenecks such as the CPU. That is part of the reason SATA > NVME barely pays off.


I think that nvme doesn't really help with the bottlenecks that hamper sata ssd perfromance in the first place,or at least they don't help with most of them.the reason why a sata ssd can't load every game level in 1 second but instead takes 10-20 seconds is not that it's lacking sequential read performance.
nvme ssd should be purchased if you're gonna use sequential r/w speed on  a regular basis.that's it.


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## Vayra86 (Apr 17, 2019)

bug said:


> That is true. There was a chart illustrating how little difference is there between SSDs compared to HDDs, but Idk if I can dig it up again.
> Still, for more intensive usage, the better 4k random reads of NVMe won't hurt



Meh, Price/GB is still a bit too far off from the SATA alternative iMO. 1,5x the price is just too much for a negligible perf boost. Nothing hurts more than an empty wallet  I feel a LOT better spending that money on killing off everything mechanical HDD in my rig first. I do actually notice the spin-up time now, its annoying and noisy 

We are spoiled.


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## bug (Apr 17, 2019)

Vayra86 said:


> Meh, Price/GB is still a bit too far off from the SATA alternative iMO. 1,5x the price is just too much for a negligible perf boost. Nothing hurts more than an empty wallet  I feel a LOT better spending that money on killing off everything mechanical HDD in my rig first. I do actually notice the spin-up time now, its annoying and noisy
> 
> We are spoiled.


As proof I don't disagree with you, check out my system specs


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## las (Apr 17, 2019)

Single SSD over RAID any day for desktop usage. You'll only see longer boot up and sometimes worse performance in random read and write.


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## cucker tarlson (Apr 17, 2019)

Vayra86 said:


> Meh, Price/GB is still a bit too far off from the SATA alternative iMO. 1,5x the price is just too much for a negligible perf boost. Nothing hurts more than an empty wallet  I feel a LOT better spending that money on killing off everything mechanical HDD in my rig first. I do actually notice the spin-up time now, its annoying and noisy
> 
> We are spoiled.


spin up is the friggin worst part about hdds.
get a docking station I tell ya.



las said:


> Single SSD over RAID any day. You'll only see longer start up and sometimes worse performance in random read.


that is not what we're discussing.
but yeah,raid is useless on ssds,at least for regular users.


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## dirtyferret (Apr 17, 2019)

cucker tarlson said:


> I'm wondering if moving to a single 2TB ssd would benefit me in any way.
> 
> my current setup
> su900 128gb (3d mlc,bought last year for os only)
> ...



I have a similar set up, two 500GB SSD and 3 256 SSD.  None of my SSD are even half full as four have a specific game stores on each one (steam, origin, blizzard, and gog) while the 5th SSD holds the MS windows, MS office, a few apps and drivers.  All my important information (family photos, taxes, etc.,) go onto my 1TB passport HDD, USB sticks, and I have several HDDs that I make backups of backups using a docking station.



cucker tarlson said:


> I don't have any problem with capacity,got hundreds of gigabytes free atm (552gb free across all drives),rather the pros and cons of single vs multi.



If there's no problem, why fix it?  Once it becomes a problem, just get another SSD.  I have scandisk, crucial, and samsung SSDs connected through  M.2 NvME & SSD and SATA.  When I bench them I get different scores similar to ones in reviews, when I use them in the real world I can't tell the difference between any of them.


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## xkm1948 (Apr 17, 2019)

How about 2 big SSDs in redundancy raid?


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## bug (Apr 17, 2019)

xkm1948 said:


> How about 2 big SSDs in redundancy raid?


Not the worst thing you can do, but pretty much the biggest waste of space possible.
You can use the second drive for regular backups and it will store more snapshots than a simple RAID. Or if you need a secure solution, get a NAS and set it up in RAID5. You'll have 3+ disks, but only lose the capacity of one


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## Ruyki (Apr 17, 2019)

xkm1948 said:


> How about 2 big SSDs in redundancy raid?


Costly but useful if you need high availability.
Not sure if it's worth for a desktop. I guess if you use your desktop to make money and/or it absolutely has to never be not available.


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## eidairaman1 (Apr 18, 2019)

256-512GB OS SSD, big HDD or SSD with backups


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## cucker tarlson (Apr 18, 2019)

eidairaman1 said:


> 256-512GB OS SSD, big HDD or SSD with backups


why would I need a 512gb os ssd?


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## Abaidor (Apr 18, 2019)

cucker tarlson said:


> why would I need a 512gb os ssd?



I use a Samsung 960Pro 512GB but I also install all my Content Creation software on it (Adobe Creative Suite, Office 365, + 1VM with Autodesk Apps)...I still have about 200GB free though but I did not want to fill a 256GB 100%...

I was going to get an Intel 900/905p 480GB as an OS drive that has by far (8X) the best 4K Random Read performance out there but could not justify the price....well maybe in the future. My next SSDs will be 2TB SATA volumes one for Games and the other for storing small files like fonts and vector graphics from my content library...


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## cucker tarlson (Apr 18, 2019)

I only need ssd space for games and os.
I guess it's easier to manage your space on a single drive but I'm not finding it hard manage across six either.

I thought about replacing the hdd in my ultrabook with the su900 I have and then getting a 512gb nvme for os/games.I still have almost 500gb free though.


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## delshay (Apr 18, 2019)

Out of curiosity has anyone look at the timings of the of the cache memory on SSD drives. After all they are LPDDR3/4. I don't think there's anything to gain from changing it's setting, but it would be interesting to know what they are set to. Does anyone know if there is any software that can read this.


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## cucker tarlson (Apr 18, 2019)

delshay said:


> Out of curiosity has anyone look at the timings of the of the cache memory on SSD drives. After all they are LPDDR3/4. I don't think there's anything to gain from changing it's setting, but it would be interesting to know what they are set to. Does anyone know if there is any software that can read this.


question is,does this matter?
ssd acces time is measured in milliseconds 
ram acces time is measured in nanoseconds


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## bug (Apr 18, 2019)

delshay said:


> Out of curiosity has anyone look at the timings of the of the cache memory on SSD drives. After all they are LPDDR3/4. I don't think there's anything to gain from changing it's setting, but it would be interesting to know what they are set to. Does anyone know if there is any software that can read this.


I don't imagine the timings will make a difference. DRAM is at least an order of magnitude faster than the fastest SSD. If you're doing something that even remotely approaches the latency of DRAM, you'll run out of cache's capacity in a blink of an eye anyway.


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## newtekie1 (Apr 18, 2019)

For me, one big SSD.  But then, I have so much stuff that would need to go on it, that the cost would be enormous.  That's why I have a 500GB OS SSD, and a 3TB HDD that has a 500GB SSD cache.  It works pretty well and gives me all the space I need for installing games.  All my games go on the 3TB HDD.  I could have got away with a much smaller OS drive, 250GB would be enough, but the 500GB was the same price at the time, so why not.


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## Vario (Apr 18, 2019)

cucker tarlson said:


> cause nvme does dick to loading times.you could take a cheap ass sata ssd and loading times would be the same.
> 
> 
> I did have them in raid.sequential r/w were over 1000mb/s and high queue speeds improvd by 40% iirc,but where it actualy matters,it improved absolutely nothing.


NVMe made a huge difference for loading times for FiveM for me.  Seems like it was like 5 minute load on my WD10EZEX mechanical HDD, 2 minute load on my Seagate 600 240GB SSD, and 1 minute on my 512MB 970 Pro. I didn't stop watch it but it definitely loads faster.  But for most games not a big difference.
I like NVMe a lot and now that the price is about the same between NVMe and SATA, I plan to replace the WD10EZEX with a second NVMe 1TB, probably a PM981.

I like having multiple drives, OS and a few games on one, games and storage on the other.  Having one big drive would be putting all my eggs in one basket, I'd want to do backups more frequently if I did that.


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## delshay (Apr 18, 2019)

bug said:


> I don't imagine the timings will make a difference. DRAM is at least an order of magnitude faster than the fastest SSD. If you're doing something that even remotely approaches the latency of DRAM, you'll run out of cache's capacity in a blink of an eye anyway.



I have to agree with you on this one, but you have to ask yourself. What was the point of moving from LPDDR3 (850 pro) to LPDDR4 (860 pro).
It must have had some benefit otherwise, why not stick to LPDDR3 in the 860 pro.


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## cucker tarlson (Apr 18, 2019)

delshay said:


> I have to agree with you on this one, but you have to ask yourself. What was the point of moving from LPDDR3 (850 pro) to LPDDR4 (860 pro).
> It must have had some benefit otherwise, why not stick to LPDDR3.


lower power consumption.samsung is not a company to cut corners on ssds.


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## delshay (Apr 18, 2019)

cucker tarlson said:


> lower power consumption.samsung is not a company to cut corners on ssds.



Looking at Samsung website seems to show 860 pro has higher power consumption than the 850 Pro. Nothing saved here, not unless i'm reading it incorrectly.

So we must be talking about LPDDR specifically.


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## bug (Apr 18, 2019)

delshay said:


> Looking at Samsung website seems to show 860 pro has higher power consumption than the 850 Pro. Nothing saved here, not unless i'm reading it incorrectly.
> 
> So we must be talking about LPDDR specifically.


Higher power for the whole package, but DDR4 draws less power than DDR3. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPDDR#LP-DDR4
Another factor may be related to availability. As the industry moves to the new standard, the old one becomes increasingly harder to come by (and thus more expensive).
I hope this clears things up a bit.


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## cucker tarlson (Jun 2, 2019)

I just did a test to see how my drives are doing
took 20gb of data and copied it accross the drives
what I found out

1.copying and pasting from ssd to ssd is noticeably faster than within the same drive.Up to 2x
2.ssds work on percentages.I had 48gb free on 250gb 850 pro and 44gb free on 850 pro 512gb.Guess which one was faster ? 256gb maintained +450mb/s all the time while 512gb started at +450mb/s and about 1/4th way in it started dropping.Good thing is it still maintaned about 230mb/s
3.su900 128gb using micron's mlc also started at 450mb/s but droped,this time more severely.Micron's 15nm 3d mlc was only good for 100-120mb/s.Still a lot better than qlc drives that drop to 30-40mb/s,but meh anyway.Samsung's 3d mlc was 2x faster when the drive was full.
4.how full the disk is has no impact on read speeds,only write
5.positively surprised by xpg 950u,along with 850 pro's it was the fastest in the file copy test.Compared to 860 evo it was both faster to write to and other disks wrote faster reading from xpg950u.The difference was seconds though.

update: seems like su900 needs manual trim execution.after lanuching trim command in adata toolbox the write speed on su900 128gb was matching the other drives.This is pretty weird and something to look out for if you're a su900 owner.run manual trim regularly.


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## Aquinus (Jun 2, 2019)

bug said:


> @Bones Raid is probably the worst thing you can do to a SSD.


No, constantly writing to an SSD (particularly one that's rather full,) is the worst thing you can do to it.

Also tell that to my >7 year old SSD SATA RAID in RAID-0. It's still going strong after all of these years. Also FWIW, at the time, two 120GBs was considerably cheaper than a single 240 when I bought them, so cost was a motivating factor.


cucker tarlson said:


> update: seems like su900 needs manual trim execution.after lanuching trim command in adata toolbox the write speed on su900 128gb was matching the other drives.This is pretty weird and something to look out for if you're a su900 owner.run manual trim regularly.


It could depend on the OS as well. Ubuntu does a full TRIM on all of my SSDs every Monday morning unless I explicitly run fstrim myself.


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## delshay (Jun 2, 2019)

AFAIK the only problem I see with a RAID set-up is you can't do a firmware update. A user pointed this out some time ago that samsung software can't see a raid set-up & if you do happen to do a firmware update, which drive will get the update if two or more drives are identical. I don't know if anything has changed in samsung software as this was pointed out a long time ago.


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## cucker tarlson (Jun 2, 2019)

interesting.
samsung's 64-layer 3d tlc on 860 seems faster than 48-layer 3d mlc on 850 pro.
like I mentioned before,850 pro 512gb slows down to 230mb/s when near full (around 7-8% free)
so I took 184gb of data and copied it to my 860 evo that had 184gb free. It maintained 300mb/s till the end like a boss. 
for comparison,xpg 950su with micron's 3d tlc saw transfer rates as low as 10mb/s when put to the full drive test  though I gotta say the way caching works on xpg950su 480gb you'll not see that until below 30gb free (7%)

what I saw on 860evo was absolutely amazing though.this drive is badass.

I wanna get a toshiba bics drive for comparison,so far I'm really amazed with samsung's 3d tlc performance and disappointed with micron's 3d tlc pefromance,though adata did a very good job with caching.Until that last 7% sx950u is even faster than 860 evo by a whisker!


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## delshay (Jun 2, 2019)

cucker tarlson said:


> interesting.
> samsung's 64-layer 3d tlc on 860 seems faster than 48-layer 3d mlc on 850 pro.
> like I mentioned before,850 pro 512gb slows down to 230mb/s when near full (around 7-8% free)
> so I took 184gb of data and copied it to my 860 evo that had 184gb free. It maintained 300mb/s till the end like a boss.
> ...



& there's me thinking most users are streets ahead of my laptop SATA 2


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## cucker tarlson (Jun 2, 2019)

delshay said:


> & there's me thinking most users are streets ahead of my laptop SATA 2
> 
> View attachment 124164


this is a comptletely different test.all my drives do 550mb/s in this.



I re-did the test on xpg950u,this time I picked bigger files,3-5gb.The improvement was visible.The drive slowed down around 20gb before full,and maintained around 160mb/s.A few momentary slowdows to 50-80mb/s.

Still,samsung's nand proved much,much better.


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## bug (Jun 2, 2019)

Aquinus said:


> No, constantly writing to an SSD (particularly one that's rather full,) is the worst thing you can do to it.
> 
> Also tell that to my >7 year old SSD SATA RAID in RAID-0. It's still going strong after all of these years. Also FWIW, at the time, two 120GBs was considerably cheaper than a single 240 when I bought them, so cost was a motivating factor.


I meant it's a lot of fuss with nothing to show for. RAID0 only increases sequential r/w, but doesn't improve 4k random reads in any way. Plus, as reliable as SSDs are, if one drive fails, you still lose the content of both.


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