Consumer SSD Showdown

[HardOCP News]

The crew at TechSpot have posted what they are calling the Ultimate Consumer SSD showdown. Hit the link to see fourteen consumer-grade drives duke it out.

SSD technology grew stale after saturating the SATA 6Gb/s bus, bringing mostly minor improvements and making up for it with price cuts. With new PCIe and M.2 drives presenting an alternative for users seeking maximum performance it's time for a roundup. We'll cover a total of fourteen consumer-grade SSDs that use either the SATA, PCI Express or M.2 interface.

 

[Flakes]

Good review, happy with my Samsung 850 choice for the laptop now would have liked to see a HDD as a data point for comparison.

 

[nightanole]

Why is the Kingston HyperX Savage tested as a turd, the numbers are like half of what the other review sites are getting.

 

[drescherjm]

Why is the Kingston HyperX Savage tested as a turd, the numbers are like half of what the other review sites are getting.

Is this one of those SSD that the internals were switched (to cheaper lower performing parts) after the original reviews?

 

[nightanole]

Is this one of those SSD that the internals were switched (to cheaper lower performing parts) after the original reviews?

Cant be its the new s10 chip. All the other review sites have it within +-10% of the 850 pro. The SSD just came out the end of april and you couldnt get it at newegg/amazon till the first week of may.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/1925-hyperx-savage-ssd-review-benchmark/Page-2

And user reviews from wild caught:

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compar...-vs-Kingston-HyperX-Savage-240GB/2977vsm26968

 

[Deleted member 126051]

Oh boy. Lots and lots and lots (and lots and lots) of synthetic benchmarks that really don't tell us jack-shit about real-world use cases.

Oh and one game install, an AV scan by the crappiest LEAST thorough AV product on the market (MSSE), One tiny backup, and a single zip file benchmark stated two ways.

WOO!

 

[defaultluser]

I didn't even click. It's Techspot, where they don''t know how to review anything. I'm not going to bother giving them the ad views.

They're worse than the crap that Tom's Hardware has become. At least Tom's used to be an excellent website, while TechSpot has never really tried all that hard.

 

[Advil]

Nor does it cover seriously important reasons to choose one SSD over another.

For one thing they should have separated all the PCIE SSD drives from the SATA based. They are different animals entirely in completely different price points.

Perhaps more important, the Crucial MX200, which I REALLY like, has features that I consider non-negotiable. It has power loss protection, unlike the BX and I have no idea about the other models listed. It's MLC so it lasts longer than TLC.

I will gladly run a slower SSD that has better data protection features and flash memory that has a better chance of lasting through many years of hard use.

 

[defaultluser]

Perhaps more important, the Crucial MX200, which I REALLY like, has features that I consider non-negotiable. It has power loss protection, unlike the BX

Incorrect! All the new drives from Crucial have power-loss protection

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9144/crucial-bx100-120gb-250gb-500gb-1tb-ssd-review

The BX100 does however have the same partial power loss protection that protects against lower page corruption during sudden power losses (I suggest you read the M600 review for the full details of Crucial's power loss implementation). The implementation itself is a bit different from the Marvell based drives (I don't have the details, but I suspect it has to do with the SM2246EN controller), but the design provides the same >200µs of holdup to ensure that ongoing upper page programs won't corrupt the data in the lower page.

Perhaps someone needs to read an actual review from an actual quality website

Now go buy the BX100 500GB. It's a fantastic drive with similar throughput, lower-price and lower-latency than the old Marvell controller. The only feature it lacks is encryption, which should only matter for enterprise users that the MX200 is aimed at. Crucial is the ultimate balance of features, size, performance and quality

If you must have Samsung, then go buy the expensive but impressive 850 Pro.

 

[Maxx]

Crucial is the ultimate balance of features, size, performance and quality

They have been for quite a while, I've always been impressed with their hardware. None of my many SSDs are Crucial but that's just a trick of fate.

 

[YeuEmMaiMai]

Oh boy. Lots and lots and lots (and lots and lots) of synthetic benchmarks that really don't tell us jack-shit about real-world use cases.

Oh and one game install, an AV scan by the crappiest LEAST thorough AV product on the market (MSSE), One tiny backup, and a single zip file benchmark stated two ways.

WOO!

lost all credibility right there...

 

[AlienTech]

Does anyone have the mx200? I saw that it uses SLC mode during write, halving the capacity and then rewriting that as MLC data. Just wondering if anyone has played with that and tried to get it to work only as a SLC drive.

 

[defaultluser]

Does anyone have the mx200? I saw that it uses SLC mode during write, halving the capacity and then rewriting that as MLC data. Just wondering if anyone has played with that and tried to get it to work only as a SLC drive.

I don't think you can configure the amount of SLC cache unless youu hacked the driver or something.

The cache doesn't have any positive effect when doing normal operations (even when you ignore the slowdown from filling the cache). Modern SSD controllers are just so good at working around the weaknesses of MLC that SLC just isn't the huge benefit is was a few year back.

See here:

http://anandtech.com/show/9258/crucial-mx200-250gb-500gb-1tb-ssd-review/11

And hell, we're almost to ther point where TLC is "good enough" in terms of performance.