C'mon Crucial....make up your mind please

Well.....this is not confusing......



Or is it?

site's down for maintenance. maybe they are fixin it

edit: speeling and d/l page clearly says 64bit only, they did not fix the page you posted. shoot 'em and email if you feel like it.

nah not installing it

purple_monster said:

nah not installing it

Click to expand...

ok and?!

Try and see?

I've not been impressed by Crucial's software the 2-3 times I've used it over the past few years. It usually doesn't detect one drive or another.

Ranulfo said:

Try and see?

I've not been impressed by Crucial's software the 2-3 times I've used it over the past few years. It usually doesn't detect one drive or another.

Click to expand...

I've found the Storage Executive software to be very useful. The primary benefit to me was it provided the ability to apply a firmware update to my 1TB P1 drive which enabled me to effectively use the drive to manage large files. Before the firmware update was applied, the P1 would throttle down to a transfer speed around 50 MB/sec after about 30 seconds of continuous use. Post-firmware, the drive is able to maintain around 500 MB/sec. Further, the Storage Executive enabled me to over-provision my drive easily and to create a PC RAM-resident cache for the drive -- what Crucial calls "Momentum Cache". Collectively, these actions have significantly improved the performance of my P1.

The Storage Executive also is able to see the Samsung SSD that is on my drive and to get basic information (like temperature and SMART information) for that drive. I do use my Samsung software as the primary tool for managing the Samsung drive. BTW, the Samsung tool returns a lot less information from the Crucial drive, than Storage Executive returns from the Samsung drive.

I trust their Ram but afraid to buy their SSDs I only own Samsungs.

More on Momentum Cache here. It's basically the same as Samsung's RAPID mode, which in my opinion is a gimmick. Anybody who understands caching knows this so I won't get into it, you can look if up desired.

If you want really good SMART monitoring, you want Hard Disk Sentinel. I use it for dozens of drives.

Overprovisioning is also a gimmick these days for consumer drives - it used to be effective, but modern controllers are very efficient with TRIM and garbage collection. Simply leaving some space free is usually suitable as dynamic overprovisioning because of the amount of idle/downtime with consumer workloads.

Firmware updates? Yeah, now that is nice to have, but usually unnecessary. As for the P1, it's important to understand how its SLC caching works:

1. The first tier is SLC which is a static + dynamic hybrid, 12GB + up to 128GB respectively on the 1TB SKU. While dynamic shifts between QLC and SLC, the static is in reserved space for the lifetime of the device and thus has far higher endurance.
2. The second tier on most drives is direct-to-NAND, e.g. straight to TLC or QLC. The P1 doesn't engage in this mode. There are reasons for this I'll get into briefly below.
3. The third tier is folding which is up to 1/2 the speed of the native flash. This is the compression of SLC blocks into TLC blocks - it has a performance penalty and is slow in general. For the P1, 80 MB/s vs. up to 2000 MB/s in SLC mode.

So folding here means all incoming data must go through the SLC cache first. Why would you do this? To improve endurance - folding writes out sequentially. Additionally when the drive is 75%+ filled it has only static SLC left, but as mentioned this is reserved space - 48GiB of QLC is required for 12GiB of SLC. So you have less OP which can increase write amplification (NAND wear). The dynamic cache can also increase wear because you'll be writing/erasing TLC blocks effectively twice. So folding keeps the wear to a minimum. This is a simplification of course.

So let's say the P1 is 50% full. By default it will have 76GB of SLC, write at 2000 MB/s (SLC) and fold at 80 MB/s (QLC). So if you're writing at 500 MB/s it will take over 2.5 minutes to exhaust the cache, but since the SLC isn't being saturated and the P1 is aggressive with writes you're actually freeing up 80 MB/s in the background, so the cache is effectively 12GB larger. But in terms of write performance this isn't a whole lot better than just writing at near maximum speed, it just appears that way thanks to deceptive caching, which actually is worse if anything.

The Over Provisioning and Momentum Cache options aren't available on my recently purchased MX500 drive. Apparently they only apply to older Crucial SSD's ?

These drives got very good reviews by the way. They are touted as "closing in on Samsung EVO drives"

My experience has been 50/50. One wrecked my nice AB350M Motherboard that I still considered new (my opinion and I'm not gonna change it). The other has been working like it should for over a week now.

But I think Samsung still has the Top Dog SSD for average builds.

Barometer said:

The Over Provisioning and Momentum Cache options aren't available on my recently purchased MX500 drive. Apparently they only apply to older Crucial SSD's ?

These drives got very good reviews by the way. They are touted as "closing in on Samsung EVO drives"

My experience has been 50/50. One wrecked my nice AB350M Motherboard that I still considered new (my opinion and I'm not gonna change it). The other has been working like it should for over a week now.

But I think Samsung still has the Top Dog SSD for average builds.

Click to expand...

Thought you had it on the P1? The P1 is newer than the MX500. Not really sure but it's not a huge factor.

Yes, the MX500 is listed in the same category in my SSD guides, check here if you missed them. The 860 EVO has a more powerful controller which can help in some edge cases but is also less power efficient.

FYI, there are several drives that share the MX500's hardware. The Lexar NS200 for example, which has a shorter warranty and larger SLC cache. The Team Vulcan SSD does as well. Check my spreadsheet for precise hardware configurations.

Also, your "C'mon Crucial, make up your minds!" make me laugh by thinking of this video. (warning: profanity)