Samsung 870 EVO 4 TB

[Readlight]

I regret purchasing for 80 euro 250GB

 

[Chrispy_]

I have one, a 500GB model, and no, it doesn't come close to 7000 cycles.
600 cycles is actually pretty normal for a TLC SSD with DRAM, it matches the 2TB models of the SN850X, P5 Plus, KC3000, P44 Pro and 990 Pro.

edit: source for 7000 P/E cycles that I used. Accuracy taken in good faith, though possibly a shady website that I wouldn't recommend reading

That's interesting, though it's VERY important to realise that PE cycles and TBW are NOT the same metrics. You have to multiply by write amplification which is a factor of how many times 1 bit of data is actually written to NAND for things like garbage collection, page re-writes for small files, page refreshes to prevent voltage drift, and other undisclosed housekeeping. I remember in the early days of MLC SSDs like the X25-M, write amplification was about 5x, so 7000 PE cycles would be about 1400 full drive writes. That was massively improved by SandForce controllers which boasted WA values of under 3x, effectively squeezing ~2500 full drive writes from the same NAND.

Has write amplification become far worse at the same time as NAND PE cycles going down? I'm happy to be corrected, it just seems odd that technology has regressed rather than progressed since the old Sandforce days. It's also entirely possible that the warranties are just ridiculously understated compared to the drives' actual endurance - the same way cars are warrantied for 3 years or 50,000 miles, even when the overwhelming majority of those cars will still be on the road a decade later at 200,000 miles....

Interesting, I was eyeballing the 870 Evo 4tb as my documents drives since the random read performance on my NAS is not sufficient (and keep the NAS drives as backups). If the Samsung model is so bad, what else would you recommend, with a similar price but better reliability?

When I was building my own NAS solutions from Supermicro servers, I'd look for MLC options like the 970 Pro. They are supposed to have vastly better endurance than TLC and QLC drives. I've since bought pre-configured QNAP NAS solutions and the various suppliers/configurators have picked 980 EVO which is TLC and they're too young to say for sure but so far their SSD health appears to be degrading at comparable, though slightly faster rates based on the SMART values and firmware.

Realistically, if it's just home use for documents, you don't have to worry about endurance. I deal with SMB hardware mostly which is more like Prosumer/Enterprise use-cases. I'm talking about a RAID1 SSD cache of 2TB SSD capacity overprovisioned for improved endurance, and backing hundreds of Terabytes of data on mechanical drives, running 12 data syncs a day that typically result in 30-90GB of new writes every sync. Call it ~500GB a day and the drives ought to die at around 3 years old, compared to the MLC models which are expected to outlast the useful life of the NAS and mechanical drives.

TL;DR if you are a single user you don't have to worry about endurance. If you are an office of 50+ people creating content then yes it's going to be an issue. This is why Enterprise SLC or MLC drives exist but they also each cost as much as the whole NAS build with a full complement of mechanical drives and two prosumer/consumer 'disposable' SSDs that will likely need to be replaced part way through the NAS' lifespan as all the NAND is expected to wear out.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Used as in RMA replacements is more likely
I see the use case for 2.5" sata ssd hell I only have two m.2 slots myself on z490 apex and just now starting to populate them
980 pro 2tb with heat sink 120.us on amazon = added to cart !
Was going to get the WD sn850x 2tb but hell if I want any utility that insists on using game mode.. in windows plus 30.us more

 

[Gucky]

Those who think endurance is an issue... you guys need enterprise SSD then.
My 512GB bootdrive, which has the most wrote data due to savegames and Windows has about 10TB data written on it per year. It is now at 93% health left, after 6 years with 60/400 TBW.
My second SSD, which is a 860 Evo 2TB also collects about 10TB a year, after ~3 years it is now at 98% health with 31,6/1200TBW.

We are living in the golden age of SSD storage. But prices still need to come down.

Yes, they need to come down.
BTW I paid for my 512GB and the 2TB the same 300€, 3 years apart.
Today I can get a fast PCIe4.0 4TB NVME for 260€ or 8TB Sata QLC for 300€, again 3 years later.
So I expect a 8TB NVME or 16TB Sata QLC for again 300€ in 3 years...

 

[chrcoluk]

I regret purchasing for 80 euro 250GB

If it was years ago it just was how things have progressed.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

The problem with SATA SSDs, at least in my region, is that TB for TB, NVMe drives are cheaper....

 

[Chrispy_]

The problem with SATA SSDs, at least in my region, is that TB for TB, NVMe drives are cheaper....

SATA drives are more complicated. Ignoring the fact that a SATA controller has to do more stuff to emulate the behaviour of mechanical drives for the protocol with cylinders, heads, and other nonsense that SSDs don't actually have, SATA SSDs also have additional costs - plastic connectors, a physical enclosure, assembly costs, and of course a larger, heavier package which takes up more space and weighs more for shipping costs.

M.2 drives are literally just one PCB with components thrown at it by a rapid pick&place robot. The only extra assembly step is applying the label.

 

[Hattu]

BTW I paid for my 512GB and the 2TB the same 300€, 3 years apart.

My first SSD was crucial m4-based drive, 128GB. I paid 213€ for it. My second sata SSD was MX500/2GB. Can't remember the year, but I paid ~272€.

If I remember correctly, it was years 2012 and 2019... Something like that.

 

[Chrispy_]

My first SSD was crucial m4-based drive, 128GB. I paid 213€ for it. My second sata SSD was MX500/2GB. Can't remember the year, but I paid ~272€.

If I remember correctly, it was years 2012 and 2019... Something like that.

I'm 100% certain I wasn't the first TPU member to buy an SSD, but I remember paying £360 for a 160GB Intel X25-M back in 2009. That didn't have TRIM support and it was only SATA2 (3Gbps).

Adjusting for inflation that's £515, which is £3300/TB - and this Samsung 870EVO 4TB is £43/TB.

As stupid as that pricing seems now, we were paying almost £300 for WD Velociraptors with the similar capacity and nowhere near the same performance; Everything is relative.

 

[MarsM4N]

Uhh, look at the Game Level Loading Times. The nail in the coffin for SATA drives.

Up to 7 seconds slower than the fastest drive isn't cutting it anymore.

 

[rrrrex]

Is it possible to test intel optane, it's very interesting how 4k 200+ MB/s speed affect on perfomance.

 

[Gucky]

Uhh, look at the Game Level Loading Times. The nail in the coffin for SATA drives.

Up to 7 seconds slower than the fastest drive isn't cutting it anymore.

Of course for the same price you should always go for M.2, but you are limited on the amount of M.2 slots and PCIe lanes on the board/CPU.
Sata SSDs only need PCIe 2.0 x1...or 1/4th of a PCIe 4.0 lane.
I have a SFF PC with 2xM.2 and 2xSATA SSDs and I don't have room for more...MAYBE one more SATA SSD fits in there.
My OS is on one old 512GB PCIe3.0 M.2 (in a 3.0 M.2 slot). The other M.2 is a PCIe4 NVME for games.
I also have a 2TB SATA SSD for games since not many games actually benefit from faster read speeds.
And despite having 5,5TB SSD storage it is always full since I rarely delete data...and my pile of shame stacks up...

 

[Chrispy_]

Uhh, look at the Game Level Loading Times. The nail in the coffin for SATA drives.

Up to 7 seconds slower than the fastest drive isn't cutting it anymore.

CPUs have become fast enough at decompression that we're starting to see the difference between Gen3 and Gen4 for level loading times. It's barely 2-3% between something Gen3 like the SN570 and the chart-topping Gen4 and Gen5 drives, but it's repeatable enough that we're beyond the margin of error.

In many cases though, Gen3 x2 is enough. I have an SN550 in an x2 chipset slot as a games library on one of my machines and it's not noticeably slower there than it was when it was running on the OS drive which is a Hynix PCIe Gen4 thing that happily reads at over 7GB/s. I'm sure if I timed it, we'd be talking 25 seconds instead of 23 seconds to load a complex AAA game level, but it's nowhere near as obviously slower as it is running off a USB 3.2 SSD at SATA-like speeds of 475MB/s or so. My recent eperience with that was Starfield which is a loading-screen fest, so the difference between Gen3 x2 (1800MB/s) and external (475MB/s) was night-and-day.

 

[csendesmark]

Good to see Samsung is releasing bigger SSD-s, but there is not even a hint of fast pSLC cache for this one

 

[W1zzard]

Good to see Samsung is releasing bigger SSD-s, but there is not even a hint of fast pSLC cache for this one

https://imgur.com/S4HGuwt

Exactly the definition of "a hint" I'd say

 

[csendesmark]

https://imgur.com/S4HGuwt

Exactly the definition of "a hint" I'd say

Oh well, I looked the pic and I identified that as a measurement error

Also, that cache speed is less than 20% faster....
But alright let's call it as a hint