Old SSDs that are good

ochadd

[H]ard|Gawd
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May 9, 2008
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My wife's old 840 evo 120 GB is full. I was thinking of going with a used Intel MLC SSD off Ebay. They just seem to be immortal. Something like a S3500 or S3700 in the 480GB to 1TB range. Any reason not to go old enterprise stuff for a computer that' surfs the web and stores pictures? Any other bootable heavy duty enterprise SSDs worth looking at?

I've had too many cheap TLC drives fail and degrade on me.
 
NAND is NAND pretty much, so might as well go with a consumer MLC drive like the Crucial MX100 256GB, which I have going 5 years in my main computer.

But if you're really paranoid about longevity then going for SLC might be a better option, increasing the size also helps (write amplification) but only so much. SLC->MLC->TLC incurs a rapidly decreasing endurance rating, for example the average MLC NAND (the chips themselves) is rated at only 5% that of SLC (100,000 to 5,000, TLC is ~1,000 erasures per block).

Also in case you didn't know, the 840 EVO is a TLC drive.
 
I've had too many cheap TLC drives fail and degrade on me.

My advice is to buy a Samsung, Crucial or Sandisk / WDC TLC drive 5XX GB or larger and avoid the cheaper alternatives.
 
The old Kingston A300's are rock solid. People moaned about them but they are tanks!

The best SATA drive I ever had performance wise (and I had Samsung etc.) was the Sandisk Extreme Pro. I had a 250GB one that just kept going and going. After many years was still 100% when the Samsung I bought a few months later had dropped to 98%.

It was still 100% when I passed it on in a build to a buddy a few weeks ago. Tough old drive.
 
But if you're really paranoid about longevity then going for SLC might be a better option, increasing the size also helps (write amplification) but only so much. SLC->MLC->TLC incurs a rapidly decreasing endurance rating, for example the average MLC NAND (the chips themselves) is rated at only 5% that of SLC (100,000 to 5,000, TLC is ~1,000 erasures per block).

While that is true on technical level, usually the jump between bits per cell is accompanied by capacity increase.
Old SLC drives (X25-E) had only sub-64GB capacity. MLC bellow 64GB was rare and not optimal from speed perspective. I don't think i ever seen TLC bellow 120GB. QLC SSDs start from 240GB. So while sure, you are losing lifetime write cycle counts, you are not really losing lifetime written capacity.

To most computer users, pretty much every SSD is immortal from cell lifetime perspective. Intel 660p, a QLC SSD is rated at lifetime of 100 TB written. Well, i am doing a lot of coding, lots of clean builds, writing lot of files to drive - and my 970 Evo after 3130 hours sits at 10266 GB written. So even on that 660p i would be just at 10% of it's lifetime write limit. That means i usually write around 3.3GB/hour of use. At that rate, even that 660p would last 30303 hours of use, which would be 1262 days of 24/7 use.
In comparison, an 250GB 860 Evo (TLC0 has a warranty for 150 TBW, 500GB for 300TB, 1TB for 600TBW.
The smallest Samsung QLC is 1TB 860 QVO, and that has 360TBW.

Simply put, there is no way to kill an SSD from write cycle exhaustion in normal use cases within 3-5 year warranty, and for most users, even a QLC SSD will last a decade or more. By that time, the capacity or form factor will be mostly irrelevant.
 
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