Small SLC SSD boot drive

[80251]

Buying SLC outside of enterprise channels is now very difficult and buying just one, low-capacity SLC enterprise drive as private individual is not going to be cost-effective, nor worth your time. If you're looking to use it solely as an OS swapfile location, look out for an old Intel Optane M.2 accelerator on ebay or something; They came in 16GB and 32GB capacities and have huge IOPS and endurance.

If you want higher-capacity performance and endurance, you should still be able to find MLC NAND - the 970 Pro is what I normally use for write-caches in rackmount storage that gets hammered for terabytes a day, petabyte(s) a year. The downside is that they're getting harder to buy and 512GB is the smallest size they make.

The Samsung 970 Pro seems to have kept its value well and seem to sell for higher prices than the 980 Pro at least when I was researching 1 TiB M.2 SSD's a month ago.

 

[ThrashZone]

The Samsung 970 Pro seems to have kept its value well and seem to sell for higher prices than the 980 Pro at least when I was researching 1 TiB M.2 SSD's a month ago.

Hi,
980's had shit firmware off the bat just now working better.

 

[Wooden Law - Black]

The Samsung 970 Pro seems to have kept its value well and seem to sell for higher prices than the 980 Pro at least when I was researching 1 TiB M.2 SSD's a month ago.

Yeah, it's normal, MLC is more expensive than TLC.

 

[Chrispy_]

The Samsung 970 Pro seems to have kept its value well and seem to sell for higher prices than the 980 Pro at least when I was researching 1 TiB M.2 SSD's a month ago.

Yeah, it's normal, MLC is more expensive than TLC.

This is it.
MLC NAND is always going to cost 50% more than TLC NAND when comparing similar capacity drives.
50% premium is a small price to pay for double the raw NAND performance and quadruple the endurance though. If that is specifically what you're looking for, the old 970Pro is a bargain.

It already has way less rated writes and they are really low for long term use. It's essentially a disposable technology.

Endurance and reliability are different things; Don't confuse them - that's all I'm saying.

BullMuffins! I have replaced more failing/failed QLC based drives in the last two years than any other type of drive combined in the same period, regardless of the age of the drive.

I can't argue against empirical data if you have any decent sample size. My only guess is sample bias, in that there are almost no "good, high-quality" QLC drives because the technology is only really used in consumer drives in the lowest-cost, most-corners-cut market segment. Even OEMs have moved away from using QLC in laptops because the cost savings aren't worth the performance sacrifices. So, your sample of QLC drives are all bottom-tier products, whilst your TLC sample will likely include both bottom-tier products but also many more higher-quality, OEM-validated, and higher-performing, general-purpose drives.

QLC is used plenty in enterprise solutions but specifically for storage solutions where the QLC is part of tiered storage where that particular tier gets fewer writes and is changed infrequently.

 

[The red spirit]

Endurance and reliability are different things; Don't confuse them - that's all I'm saying.

It's more like they are predictably unreliable. Anyway, TLC is the minimum that anyone should get.

 

[Wooden Law - Black]

Endurance and reliability are different things; Don't confuse them - that's all I'm saying.

True, "endurance" means P/E cycles, "reliability" means data retention.

My only guess is sample bias, in that there are almost no "good, high-quality" QLC drives because the technology is only really used in consumer drives in the lowest-cost, most-corners-cut market segment.

I guess this is due to the fact that only Intel is able to produce good QLC, even Samsung struggled with it.

It's more like they are predictably unreliable. Anyway, TLC is the minimum that anyone should get.

I think I will never understand all this hate towards QLC flash in general.

I mean, if a random user ask you a SSD with low budget (lower than $90 for 1TB, for example - I don't know the exact prices of the SSDs where you live but in my country you have to spend at least $100 for a decent NVMe TLC drive) and he would use it as secondary drive to store something like games (which do more reads than writes), why should TLC be the minimum? Why shouldn't you suggest a good QLC drive like an Intel 670p?

 

[lexluthermiester]

I can't argue against empirical data if you have any decent sample size.

I do, but it's part of my business records, which I'm not going to disclose publicly. So you all would have to have some faith in my word on the matter, which I know some of you will not.

Endurance and reliability are different things; Don't confuse them - that's all I'm saying.

True, "endurance" means P/E cycles, "reliability" means data retention.

Endurance and Reliability are synonyms. Just throwing it out there..

 

[jallenlabs]

Optane has great durability and performance. Smallest I would go would be a Optane 4801 100GB stick. I have 4 280gb models in my workstation and love em. In some scenarios they are much faster than the fastest nand and sometimes not so much. I like them because they last forever in my use case and I noticed a performance increase when looking through large libraries of photographs.

Optane Ssd Dc P4801x Series - Newegg.com

Buy Optane Ssd Dc P4801x Series with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

 

[80251]

Optane has great durability and performance. Smallest I would go would be a Optane 4801 100GB stick. I have 4 280gb models in my workstation and love em. In some scenarios they are much faster than the fastest nand and sometimes not so much. I like them because they last forever in my use case and I noticed a performance increase when looking through large libraries of photographs.

Optane Ssd Dc P4801x Series - Newegg.com

Buy Optane Ssd Dc P4801x Series with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

Do you think the larger, much, much, much more expensive data center optane SSD's are worth purchasing? Are they rated for more TBWs than the Samsung SSDs?

 

[Wooden Law - Black]

Do you think the larger, much, much, much more expensive data center optane SSD's are worth purchasing? Are they rated for more TBWs than the Samsung SSDs?

Intel Optane SSDs use 3D XPoint as flash, not SLC, MLC, TLC or QLC and this type of flash is decades ahead than "normal" NAND as endurance and performance.

 

[dgianstefani]

The 800p is the best boot drive under $500 you can buy, only beaten by the 905p. 118gb is more than enough for OS and programs, just use a secondary game and media drive, and it's cheap at $100.

 

[Aquinus]

If you're really worried about write endurance, then just don't use the entire disk. Partition something like 80% of the drive and leave 20% free. That'll let the SSD controller do all the wear leveling it needs in an effective way. Any modern SSD should do fine under the described workloads and even without overprovisioning though. As always though, try to not fill an SSD.

 

[Shrek]

I recall a trick whereby one formats a hard drive to a smaller space so the heads did not have to move so far.

 

[eidairaman1]

I recall a trick whereby one formats a hard drive to a smaller space so the heads did not have to move so far.

It's called Partitioning which wastes space on a HDD also SSDs, better to have a separate drive for paging, even though I never had a problem paging on my SSD, I just set it to 4 GibiBytes (4096 KibiBytes).

 

[lexluthermiester]

I recall a trick whereby one formats a hard drive to a smaller space so the heads did not have to move so far.

That still works and is very effective at optimizing HDD performance.

which wastes space on a HDD also SSDs

How?

 

[Athlonite]

any of the first 3 in your list with a high TBW although the smaller you go the less TBW's you are going to get so basically I'd not go below a 1TB NVMe SSD as for actual survivability of a drive well you bet's ya money and you takes ya risks just like with any electronic device it could last upto 60 years but then again it may only last 6 months who knows

and if your not worried about out n out speed demons then just stick to Gen 3 x4 SSD's and make sure they stay relatively cool 50~65c when being written to otherwise anything with Micron or Samsung nand should do the job you want reliably for the foreseeable future

 

[eidairaman1]

That still works and is very effective at optimizing HDD performance.


How?

Because it occupies space when those boundries are set, they are written to, to prevent any data being written in that spot.

 

[jallenlabs]

Do you think the larger, much, much, much more expensive data center optane SSD's are worth purchasing? Are they rated for more TBWs than the Samsung SSDs?

10.9 PBW on the 100GB model Optane. My "consumer" Optane 900ps are 5.11 PBW. Comparable Samung 980Pro? 150TB.

 

[80251]

@jallenlabs
That is amazing. Maybe I should save my nickels and dimes and buy one of the bigger optane DC SSD's rather than waste my money on the riff-raff!

 

[The red spirit]

I mean, if a random user ask you a SSD with low budget (lower than $90 for 1TB, for example - I don't know the exact prices of the SSDs where you live but in my country you have to spend at least $100 for a decent NVMe TLC drive) and he would use it as secondary drive to store something like games (which do more reads than writes), why should TLC be the minimum? Why shouldn't you suggest a good QLC drive like an Intel 670p?

Because QLC drives have sequential speed basically the same or slightly worse than hard drive and you only save 5-10 dollars tops by not going TLC, which is easily 2 times as fast. Also endurance of QLC drive is really subpar, basically half of TLC. Not sure about you, but my TLC SSD, which I have for 2-3 years already already lost 13% of its life. And I tried to not abuse it, meaning no torrenting on it. You might think that's excessive as I won't keep system running for decades. Fine, but I'm not really convinced that using up all wear allowance is a good idea, since it is calculated to be fine for 80% of all drives made and your drive might be in that unfortunate 20%. Also the drive I use does have DRAM cache, if it didn't, it should wear out significantly faster. And now think about QLC drives. They are at least 2 times worse (It might be 4 times, because it might be squared) in performance and endurance. And on top of that, QLC is still not proven technology to be good for long term storage due to all SSDs having to be able to keep data intact unpowered for some time, QLC might further reduce tolerance for that. And if you are so desperate for storage, might as well just get hard drive at that point. No worries about endurance, a bit worse performance, but times more space. QLC as it is today, doesn't have a proper reason to exist, PLC is even worse and in any case should be avoided. Also if you need to make hard drive a bit faster, you can just compress data on it and thus you might save to time.

 

[AleXXX666]

Unless you are chia mining, endurance is not going to get an issue for 99.9% of desktop users. Consider a Samsung "pro" drive if you want maximum reliability.

endurance IS an issue if you have one of cheapest ssd, no diff is it sata or nvme. they just BSOD or won't detect in bios after more than 6 months of "light" usage. so this is common myth "get a cheapest one" - it works only if you have very old pc/laptop to replace died hdd or make it a little faster. for normal daily machine get some decent $70+ ssd. WD, Corsair, Samsung (but not the latest and cheapest), Kingston only DC series.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Because it occupies space when those boundries are set, they are written to, to prevent any data being written in that spot.

Trivial amounts of space. A few MB at most, hardly anything to complain or worry about.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

I'm using a 256GB silicon power Gen3 x4 NVME, pretty fast, too

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silicon-Power-256GB-Gen3x4-Internal/dp/B07P8KXX4B

 

[Wooden Law - Black]

Because QLC drives have sequential speed basically the same or slightly worse than hard drive and you only save 5-10 dollars tops by not going TLC, which is easily 2 times as fast. Also endurance of QLC drive is really subpar, basically half of TLC. Not sure about you, but my TLC SSD, which I have for 2-3 years already already lost 13% of its life. And I tried to not abuse it, meaning no torrenting on it. You might think that's excessive as I won't keep system running for decades. Fine, but I'm not really convinced that using up all wear allowance is a good idea, since it is calculated to be fine for 80% of all drives made and your drive might be in that unfortunate 20%. Also the drive I use does have DRAM cache, if it didn't, it should wear out significantly faster. And now think about QLC drives. They are at least 2 times worse (It might be 4 times, because it might be squared) in performance and endurance. And on top of that, QLC is still not proven technology to be good for long term storage due to all SSDs having to be able to keep data intact unpowered for some time, QLC might further reduce tolerance for that. And if you are so desperate for storage, might as well just get hard drive at that point. No worries about endurance, a bit worse performance, but times more space. QLC as it is today, doesn't have a proper reason to exist, PLC is even worse and in any case should be avoided. Also if you need to make hard drive a bit faster, you can just compress data on it and thus you might save to time.

I agree, but I said the user would use the drive as secondary, not for OS.

 

[The red spirit]

I agree, but I said the user would use the drive as secondary, not for OS.

Then hard drive is just much better perf/dollar device for that. What you shell out for 1TB QLC e-waste, can buy you 3-4TB hard drive.