SSD

I'm curious
What SSD would you choose, and Why ??

Samsung .... HP .... WD

 

This old Samsung 850 120GB was heavily used in a XP system (without trim) for about a year.

 

Me Too ... So far ...
I'm curious about the endurance ratings ....

Samsung 850 EVO 250GB = 75 TBW
Samsung 850 Pro 256GB = 150TBW

Samsung 860 EVO 250GB = 150TBW
Samsung 860 EVO Pro 250GB = 300TBW
HPS700 250GB = 295TBW
WD Blue 250GB = 500TBW

 

Agreed .... (All my HDDs are WD Blacks) ....
And the Free WD version of Acronis should work with the SSD.
I wonder if the WD SSD is really that much better that Samsung ???

 

For what it's worth, Samsung has their own chip fab plants so they produce their own flash memory used in their SSD drives. Micron also has their own chip fab plants as well as Intel.

I don't know much about the WD branded SSD drives and if they use their own chips are they use someone elses. I do know WD owns HGST which are the drives I see more of in the Enterprise space I work in.

For what it's worth, I use Samsung SSD drives in a couple of my personal PCs and I use Micron in a laptop and an external drive enclosure in a RAID 0 configuration.

For my servers, I have a mix of Micron 12Gb SAS and NVMe, Intel SATA and NVMe, and another brand that escapes me at the moment.

 

I have a client who used Samsung 850 SSDs thinking all SSDs are the same. They found out quickly that is not the case. The drives we're talking about here are fine for home use. But they don't perform well in Enterprise applications. The client found out what the proverbial write cliff is for SSDs. In addition, they were burning up the Samsung SSDs at an alarming rate. They did an eval of other SSDs and settled on Micron.

The advancement you're seeing from the 850 to the other drives listed is due to improvements in the flash memory chips with endurance.

 

For the fastest performance NVME is the way to go. Expensive though compared to ordinary SSDs.

 

Actually, the fastest storage out there is the latest tech utilizing the memory bus called 3D Xpoint. This is non volatile storage which plugs into a memory stick socket. Super expensive for the capacity versus cost but is really intended for the Enterprise/Server market.

 

Is that the same as Intel's Optane ?

 

Optane from what I've read is a derivation of 3D Xpoint. From what I've seen, the form factors for Optane are still in the current M.2/2.5 form factors. I didn't put much energy in studying Optane as the server brand I work with extensively did not support Optane at the time. Not sure if they do now since I've moved on to a new employer.

There's also an intermediate memory bus based storage technology which hasn't garnered much attention. It's more of a stepping stone to 3D Xpoint. It's more or less memory with a capacitor which keeps the memory chips powered to maintain the contents.

 

From what I've seen online Optane can used as a fast cache for often used files like parts of the OS or, with larger capacities, as a fast drive for the whole OS, at least for the consumer market. It's relatively expensive though so I doubt it will be in common home use any time soon.

 

That's correct. The test numbers I've seen have been pretty impressive.

I've watched the progression of storage technology over the years and have been briefed on the early introduction of these technologies because of the work I do. The evolution of storage is to get it closer and closer to the CPU as possible for faster and faster access.

Intel is angling for more of the I/O business with their Omnipath high speed network to compete against Infiniband. Because they're competing products, they don't play with each other. While Infiniband has evolved from "slower" speeds up to the current HDR 200 Gbps standard, Omnipath hit the ground running at 100 Gbps. I'm predicting future processors will have a integrated Omnipath I/O bus to allow this high speed low latency network a direct path to the processor. Where this comes into play are with flash only storage arrays that specialize in high speed, high I/O, and low latency. In the other thread in the networking subforum I responded to about Infiniband, I mentioned a manufacturer called DDN. They provide this type of storage for many HPC clusters.

It'll be interesting to see how 3D Xpoint evolves with Micron pushing this standard versus Intel looking to possibly do something different.