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Thread: Solid State (Drive) porn!

  1. #1
    SUMMONER
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    Lightbulb Solid State (Drive) porn!

    The Register has an article talking about up and coming SSDs/ways of connecting them/future SSDs to your computer, because our existing SATA ones are just boring - or are they?¿

    link to the article

    As you can see, the new Intel 750 drives are theoretically way way faster than the top of the line Samsung 850 Pro prosumer drives (up to 5x faster sequential read speed according to the ATTO benchmark suite).



    And what you can see in the next chart is that this will do bugger all for 95% of us, who do not commonly work with files that are Gigabytes in size. meeeeehhh....



    It is not important which SSD you buy, so long as you buy a branded one, with a good warranty and a reputation for being reliable.

    I couldn't be more disappointed. Did I mention that I just received my shiny new Samsung 850 Pro 256GB drive? Bargain at £104.99, or not, when you compare it to the price of a 240GB Sandisk Plus SSD for £59.99 or a 500GB Crucial BX100 for £123.
    Last edited by SUMMONER; 11-07-2015 at 03:58 PM.

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    This thread is more graphic than the title suggests.

    Too many of us are drawn in by specs and promises of high speed results without always understanding things like what the specs really mean. I bought my current SSD on brand reputation and price, I didn't even think about specs until I got it and I still don't know what my read and write speeds are, but I do know that my typical start times are now less than 20 seconds, my previous SSD was around 30 seconds and my old HDD was a shade under 2 and a half minutes typical.
    Last edited by KeyboardDemon; 11-07-2015 at 02:55 AM.

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    Cached 4k writes ? They seem very high.
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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    Yeah if you look at things like load time for games and applications, there tends to be very little difference between a basic SATA SSD and very expensive PCIe drives.
    http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/I...1.2_TB/12.html

    Also it seems there are still some issues with booting from NVMe drives, e.g. this Intel 750 boots considerably slower than the SATA drives tested. Most places say that's to do with the firmware rather than an inherent issue with either the drive or the specification though so it's likely to improve.
    http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/I..._1.2_TB/7.html

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    was going to go for PCIE version in the near future - but maybe not now

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    Quote Originally Posted by watercooled View Post
    Yeah if you look at things like load time for games and applications, there tends to be very little difference between a basic SATA SSD and very expensive PCIe drives.
    http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/I...1.2_TB/12.html

    Also it seems there are still some issues with booting from NVMe drives, e.g. this Intel 750 boots considerably slower than the SATA drives tested. Most places say that's to do with the firmware rather than an inherent issue with either the drive or the specification though so it's likely to improve.
    http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/I..._1.2_TB/7.html

    Is that including M.2 SSDs also? Surely there is a big leap in performance going from SATA to M.2?

  7. #7
    SUMMONER
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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    With the exception of the Intel 750 and the Samsung 850 all drives in the charts are M.2 drives.

    Yes, the new drives are faster, but not to the point that most people will care.

    I watched a nice video on Linus Tech Tips demonstrating the diminishing returns of adding cooling fans to your PC. Once you have the basics (an exhaust and "may be" an intake fan), the cost to benefit ratio started dropping rapidly down to almost nothing, unless you did something extreme with your computer.

    So, should you buy a SSD? Yes, yes, yes, yes....! Should you buy a PCIe SSD? Sure, it's awesome tech. However please understand that for 3x the money (in the case of the Intel 750) you will not get 3x the speed, or even 2x, unless you work with very large files.

    I used to short stroke a 1TB Samsung F1 hard drive to 200GB, to make it more responsive. Doing so forced the hard drive to only read/write the outer most tracks of the disk, which brought down the seek time to < 9ms and maintained the highest possible read speeds (the further in you go on the disk, the slower the read speeds).
    All modern consumer SSDs are basically a short stroked HDD on steroids. They maintain (hopefully) the same high read/write speeds throughout the usable disk space and give you seek times of < 1ms (typical hard drive is < 14ms).

    Which is why I said that it is not important which SSD you buy, so long as you buy a branded one, with a good warranty and a reputation for being reliable.
    Last edited by SUMMONER; 15-11-2015 at 10:16 PM.

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    Quote Originally Posted by SUMMONER View Post
    With the exception of the Intel 750 and the Samsung 850 all drives in the charts are M.2 drives.

    Yes, the new drives are faster, but not to the point that most people will care.

    I watched a nice video on Linus Tech Tips demonstrating the diminishing returns of adding cooling fans to your PC. Once you have the basics (an exhaust and "may be" an intake fan), the cost to benefit ratio started dropping rapidly down to almost nothing, unless you did something extreme with your computer.

    So, should you buy a SSD? Yes, yes, yes, yes....! Should you buy a PCIe SSD? Sure, it's awesome tech. However please understand that for 3x the money (in the case of the Intel 750) you will not get 3x the speed, or 2x, unless you work with very large files.

    I used to short stroke a 1TB Samsung F1 hard drive to 200GB, to make it more responsive. Doing so forced the hard drive to only read/write the outer most tracks of the disk, which brought down the seek time to < 9ms and maintained the highest possible read speeds (the further in you go on the disk, the slower the read speeds).
    All modern consumer SSDs are basically a short stroked HDD on steroids. They maintain (hopefully) the same high read/write speeds throughout the usable disk space and give you seek times of < 1ms (typical hard drive is < 14ms).

    Which is why I said that it is not important which SSD you buy, so long as you buy a branded one, with a good warranty and a reputation for being reliable.
    I have heard of the "short stroke" trick before, although I did not know that there was a term for it.

    Thanks for clarifying. Still getting used to all this new fangled tech!

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    I'm waiting for the PCIe drives to come down in price

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    People really need to stop listening to the spec war.
    Any current, decent quality ssd will improve your pc experience massively.
    Can you notice a difference in boot time between 10 and 9.9 seconds? I doubt it.

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    Quote Originally Posted by kammak743 View Post
    People really need to stop listening to the spec war.
    Any current, decent quality ssd will improve your pc experience massively.
    Can you notice a difference in boot time between 10 and 9.9 seconds? I doubt it.
    You are right, if I would be picking big SSD I would only make sure it is reliable do not break after a month or a year, but except that my mine consideration would be money less=better.
    Is it that much difference between Samsung 840 and 850?

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    Quote Originally Posted by username2 View Post
    Is it that much difference between Samsung 840 and 850?
    From what I can see, no. But then all those drives in the benchmark comparison appear to be limited to around 500 MB/sec.... at least the 840/850 evos which I looked up the specs on.

    What is missing there (IMO) are drives like the Samsung SM951 which can read/write at around 2000/1500, so the performance should be around 4x/3x better, and the benchmarks I've seen seem to agree with this. Not sure what this translates to in the real world, but I suspect the performance increase you see will depend on what you're doing with the PC. I use my PC for editing large batches of photos as well as encoding timelapses and suspect that I would see more performance increase that someone who is using their PC for gaming. I just got an SM951 which I have yet to install in my new build, but I won't be able to compare performance to older SSDs since this will be the first that I have used.

    As for boot times, my guess is that there would be significantly more than 0.1 second difference in boot times if you compare the older SSDs to an SM951, but that's only a guess from someone that has a lot less experience than most here from what I can see.

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    Re: Solid State (Drive) porn!

    I cannot wait for 1 TB SSD to go below $300! My 2 SSD totaling 480 GB of space cannot cut it anymore....

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