HOLY SHIZZZZ!!!! - Micron 4.0TB 5100 ECO Series SATA 2.5" SSD $347

mda said:
How reliable is this site?
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Very. OWC is basically as close to first party for Apple users and buyers as you can get in a third party company. They’ve had a long history and are also the org that does a lot of disassembly of MAC hardware to discuss internals, upgrade ability or the lack there of.

They also develop a lot of peripherals and accessories for the Apple market. You’ll have zero problems with them.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Very. OWC is basically as close to first party for Apple users and buyers as you can get in a third party company. They’ve had a long history and are also the org that does a lot of disassembly of MAC hardware to discuss internals, upgrade ability or the lack there of.

They also develop a lot of peripherals and accessories for the Apple market. You’ll have zero problems with them.
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Seconded. I've bought several things from them over the years and have had zero issues. They are usually my first stop when I need a Mac related part, and pricing usually seems to be pretty good with them, to boot.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
They’ve had a long history and are also the org that does a lot of disassembly of MAC hardware to discuss internals, upgrade ability or the lack there of.
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Back when drives bigger than 4TB were just becoming a thing, you couldn't really buy the drives by themselves, they were only available in USB format. So OWC was shucking the drives to sell as bare drives (or adding them to customer configs). Anyways, they ended up with a bunch of USB 3 enclosures. So I bought a case of Toshiba enclosures in the boxes, like 24 of them for well under $100. I still rummage through them occasionally for when I need a 12V wall wart or need a USB 3 enclosure.
 
Perfect Steam drive. I'm tempted.

One other benefit is that it will be quiet. I recently put a 6TB WD Black back into my system. I had been running only SSDs for over a year. I couldn't believe how much noise the HD actually made. I thought it was broken until I dried 3 or 4 other units and realized that I had just long ago tuned out the sound of mechanical hard drives. Now that I wasn't used to it, it was blatantly obvious.
 
The Micron 5000 series drives are good shit. Dell uses them in their servers if you buy SATA SSDs and marks the price up by 10x for their "certified" drives. We use the 5200s in our servers quite a bit and they are great. The 5100 is just the previous version of it. No performance difference that I know of, the 5200 is just their newer, more dense, flash. Also Micron has a really good utility for managing/monitoring their drives, unlike some companies. It even can see the drives through a RAID controller, which many can't.
 
Ended up picking a few for work. Thanks for the info and for vouching for this site!

I'm running a production MySQL server on a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo.

Also picked up the 1TB 5100 Pro to replace it since it's over 80% full. The Evo will find a home in a client PC.
 
Great deal. Ordered one for my Ryzen build next week! This will be my Steam/Origin/Battle.net/Uplay/Epic Games drive
 
Saw 8tb 5200 model ssd on Amazon for $1100.

I think they're faster than the 5100.
 
DF-1 said:
Saw 8tb 5200 model ssd on Amazon for $1100.

I think they're faster than the 5100.
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According to Micron, they are the same speed, same controller, just newer, more dense, flash. Doesn't really matter as the SATA interface is more of a limit than the flash speed.
 
Sycraft said:
According to Micron, they are the same speed, same controller, just newer, more dense, flash. Doesn't really matter as the SATA interface is more of a limit than the flash speed.
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Their peak throughout might be the same, limited by the SATA interface but there are a lot of different ways read/writes can happen where SATA isn’t your limiting factor. I’ll bet when that’s the case, the 5200 will have an advantage. But at 4X the price is it really worth it.
 
DF-1 said:
Saw 8tb 5200 model ssd on Amazon for $1100.

I think they're faster than the 5100.
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I would happily move to arrays of these when the 8TB hits the price of the 4TB version of this thread..

Edit: Although by that time a single drive 16TB EasyStore spinner will be $150 US on sale..
 
drescherjm said:
I would happily move to arrays of these when the 8TB hits the price of the 4TB version of this thread..

Edit: Although by that time a single drive 16TB EasyStore spinner will be $150 US on sale..
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Maybe maybe not. A lot less margin in mechanical drives due to all the additional parts / moving parts. 16tb for $150? I never ever see this happening. You will see 8TB SSD's for $150 before this ever happens.

Also, have you ever heard of the CD-Rom, DVD-R, 5.25 Drive, 3 1/2, etc etc etc .... ------> Mechanical Hard-Drives in the next 5 years, this is almost guaranteed. Memory chips will get better, faster, cheaper killing off Mechanical drives.
 
So although I've picked these up already - I'd like to ask what the real world difference is between an SSD with lower random write IOPS compared to one that has higher IOPS.

The one with higher random write IOPS "should" write many smaller files faster?

I also find it odd that the 4TB ECO (18K IOPS) will have lower random write performance than the lower capacity ECOs (31K IOPS max). The 860 Evo supposedly goes as high as 100K IOPS.

Still very happy with the price. Thanks again OP
 
SixFootDuo said:
16tb for $150? I never ever see this happening.
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And the same could have been said for 200mb scsi drives under $1000, or 640k memory being enough, etc, etc.

I don't see hard drives fading out completely as the enterprise still uses them for bulk storage since the price difference is still 10:1. And this will take a lot of time to reverse in favor of ssds. There will be a market for cheaper hard drive based bulk storage for quite a while imo.
 
misterbobby said:
So would the Micron 5200 ECO be a good desktop SSD? I would really like to have a single 8 TB hard drive as I am already using over 5 GB on my EVO 4 TB and 2 TB drives.
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If you're willing to pay for it, sure. It's TLC 3D NAND, so it will likely slow under relatively large continuous writes (i.e., moving all of your stuff over the first time), but once the write cache is recovered it should be back to snappy. corrected next post
 
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IdiotInCharge said:
If you're willing to pay for it, sure. It's TLC 3D NAND, so it will likely slow under relatively large continuous writes (i.e., moving all of your stuff over the first time), but once the write cache is recovered it should be back to snappy.
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FYI, none of the Micron 5200 series utilize a SLC cache. These are enterprise grade drives and are designed to perform consistently from the first bit written until they are basically full. All data written to the drive is therefore folded and written to TLC natively.
 
mda said:
So although I've picked these up already - I'd like to ask what the real world difference is between an SSD with lower random write IOPS compared to one that has higher IOPS.

The one with higher random write IOPS "should" write many smaller files faster?

I also find it odd that the 4TB ECO (18K IOPS) will have lower random write performance than the lower capacity ECOs (31K IOPS max). The 860 Evo supposedly goes as high as 100K IOPS.

Still very happy with the price. Thanks again OP
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The problem with IOPs numbers is that there are multiple ways of measuring it, and no standard. One big issues with SSDs, particularly consumer SSDs, is the difference between what they can get brand new and what they'd get under heavy write load. Micron gives values for their SSDs at a "steady state" which means when they are full of data, being hit with writes. It is going to be lower than what a drive could get under ideal conditions. If you want to get numbers on the drive, Micron has documents explaining how to condition and test the drive for repeatable performance.
 
I don't see hard drives fading out completely as the enterprise still uses them for bulk storage since the price difference is still 10:1. And this will take a lot of time to reverse in favor of ssds. There will be a market for cheaper hard drive based bulk storage for quite a while imo.
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Using HAMR we will have 50TB enterprise hard drives sometime in the next 5 years. And these 50TB drives will likely cost less than $2000 US.
 
SamirD said:
And the same could have been said for 200mb scsi drives under $1000, or 640k memory being enough, etc, etc.

I don't see hard drives fading out completely as the enterprise still uses them for bulk storage since the price difference is still 10:1. And this will take a lot of time to reverse in favor of ssds. There will be a market for cheaper hard drive based bulk storage for quite a while imo.
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No, you're not considering how fast tech moves or several other metrics.

An good example would the electric car industry .... that road and journey is just starting. There is a lot to learn, discover, implement, etc. Prices, range, a lot will change ( obviously ) moving forward.

Mechanical drives are very clearly at the end of their life. I also read it takes 10x more raw materials to produce a mechanical drive.

I'm fairly certain we will not see 16TB mechanic drives for $150. Don't forget, inflation and the dollar is a moving target as well.

But, as always, I love being proved wrong.
 
SixFootDuo said:
No, you're not considering how fast tech moves or several other metrics.

An good example would the electric car industry .... that road and journey is just starting. There is a lot to learn, discover, implement, etc. Prices, range, a lot will change ( obviously ) moving forward.

Mechanical drives are very clearly at the end of their life. I also read it takes 10x more raw materials to produce a mechanical drive.

I'm fairly certain we will not see 16TB mechanic drives for $150. Don't forget, inflation and the dollar is a moving target as well.

But, as always, I love being proved wrong.
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I've seen the drivers in tech since the 1990s and saw the future pretty quickly when I bought INTC, CSCO, and MSFT back in 1995. ;)

The problem with technology moves is these days there is no continuance and on the business side of IT, you can't just rip everything out and start over all the time in business. I could see 16TB and 50TB drives replacing smaller capacity drives for bulk storage before I see SSDs replacing these, especially when there is no need for SSD io in those applications, and the costs for SSDs will stay higher even if the cost to manufacture is less simply because it is a superior product.

Did you know that many premium products cost the same to manufacture as their less versions? So why are they priced higher--typically because the finished product is superior enough to command that price and the market will bear it. I think this will also apply to SSDs--even if a 2tb ssd costs less to make than a comparable 2tb hd, because the ssd should cost more, it will. And there's no way companies are going to throw away that extra profitability if the market is going to bear it.
 
Limit 4, debating replacing my old 3tb spindle raidz2 with a raidz1 array. Should be able to saturate 10g easily lol.

Edit: in for 4, 12tb should be more than enough space to hold all media I've created over the last 20 years.
 
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Got the drive on Wednesday. Installed it yesterday. So far no issues. Note that if you are planning to use a SATA dock to move data, that most older SATA docks only handle drives up to 2TB, so like my old dock couldn't properly see this drive. DON'T PANIC.
 
Thanks for the heads up! It's up to $367 now, but I needed an SSD and this still works out great for my needs!
 
Hopefully this sale lasts a couple more days. My paycheck goes in the bank Thursday and I'd like to replace my pair of 850 Pros with a pair of these. Maybe even dump my 1TB WD Black for a trio.
 
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