Boot drive. If I'm spending that much money on an SSD, I'm booting from it and it damn well better be durable. Now perhaps I should clarify, when I said "configured to run exclusively in SLC or MLC mode" it is understood that this will come at the expense of reduced capacity and I'm ok with that. Otherwise there is no way I'm using QLC for a boot drive.
We're not talking about a RocketQ as it is not the subject of this article.
That is a matter of opinion, one I do not agree with either on a personal level or as a professional. I expect technology to continue working well passed it's warranty period, by a factor of at least 3. QLC does not meet that requirement. Not even close.
Also an opinion with no merit to back it up. I know many who have experienced high levels of wear on SSDs. Those are TLC based drives.
No, that's exactly the point. QLC does not and physically can not meet the durability demands required from a drive expected to be a boot drive.
If the above drive in this article is QLC it is not suitable for use as a bootable OS drive. It is suitable ONLY as mass storage drive that experiences infrequent incidental writes. The fact that it has only a 3 year warranty is not a reassuring sign..
You're entirely missing the point here. I'm using the Rocket Q as an example as it's likely an identical design to this drive - Phison E12S controller, QLC using 64 1Tb dice, etc. It's likely a Phison reference design.
Two key points:
1: With this kind of capacity (at least with Sabrent's approach to SLC caching),
performance is more than fine for any consumer usage. Unless you also think a 970 Evo Plus is too slow? That is a key difference between 1TB QLC drives and these 8TB ones. I sincerely doubt Sabrent has done anything particularly innovative with their drive, and thus expect competitors with similar designs to perform similarly. The sheer amount of flash makes drives this large inherently faster.
2: Again, with the rated write endurance of drives like these, 3x the warranty period should be perfectly fine. This Mushkin drive is rated for the same 1800TBW as the Sabrent, meaning you could write more than 500GB/day for nine years before reaching the limit of the drive. Of course, the 4TB is "only" 250GB/day. What a shame - who doesn't download 3-4 AAA games every single day? Or spend every minute of every day of their life rendering video? If you know of a consumer workload besides that causing >250GB/day of writes, every single day, then please share? (The Sabrent has a 5-year warranty, meaning >300GB/day for 15 years for the 8TB, or >150TB/day for the 4TB - though I'd be shocked if any m.2 SSD could last 15 years of daily use without something besides the flash failing.)
Of course there are some people who cause massive wear on their SSDs. And as I said above: those people clearly aren't the target market for a product like this, and should be looking at enterprise products, as their workloads clearly border on enterprise levels of wear. If you think it's too much to ask that people actually buy equipment suited for their needs, well, that's your problem. As you clearly like to say, that's an opinion with no merit to back it up. Who says extreme edge case power users should get to decide which products are viable for the majority of users? Who says products for the average user should be designed around the needs of edge cases? You're not doing anything but spouting massively entitled opinions yourself. It's of course unfortunate that people with these extreme workloads are also likely to be most interested in high capacity SSDs and to some extent also to have the money to afford a drive like this, but again: it's not meant for them. And that's fine. If you have a problem with that, well, that's your opinion.
As of now, the AnandTech review of the Rocket Q is the closest thing we have to actual data on the viability of a drive like this, and unlike previous, lower capacity QLC offerings, performance looks pretty good, and combined with massive SLC caching and write endurance ratings
far beyond what can be expected for even most power users this looks perfectly suitable for a game drive or flash-only NAS. I still wouldn't touch a 1TB QLC drive due to the massive latency spikes and general sluggishness of those drives, but one of these? I wouldn't spend $1300 on one, but I sure wouldn't mind owning one.
