• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

SSD upgrade/sidegrade?

A

Alti

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 30, 2010
Messages
108
I had no plans to upgrade my SSD until NVMe or similar became more affordable so I've been a bit out of the loop lately when it comes to SSD tech. In December of 2013 I ordered a 960gb Crucial M500 SSD and have been satisfied with it ever since.

But now an opportunity arose. I was told I can either install my current SSD now and keep the one that was ordered when it arrives. Or do as planned and install the PNY CS1311 when it arrives. Basically someone wants to get their PC quicker and doesn't really care about the SSD as the one I have is still much better than a hard drive.

Now I would assume over these years SSD tech has improved abit. Even if it seems that my old SSD was already close to maxing out SATA 3. On paper the specs on the newer SSD seem better. However I can't find any reviews for the 960gb version. There's also the fact that it's using TLC flash vs MLC. And I definitely haven't kept up with the news on that.

And that's why I decided it would be good to get some suggestions. So, what would you guys suggest for me?

Thanks.
 
The 960GB M500 is a pretty decent drive and I don't think you'd notice any difference in performance during actual use.

That said; I suppose the TLC vs. MLC might be the only factor and # hours of use if you're at all worried about the probability of failure.

Sounds like a wash to me. You make the guy happy to get his comp; or you have to do the legwork to side-grade your OS & programs. He gets the only benefit because the TLC is a downgrade in read/write longetivity; but your drive may be at the same amount of useful life left.

Have him throw in a Porterhouse or ribeye Steak dinner to sweeten the deal if you're going to do it.
 
I recently purchased the 960 Sandisk model, which is TLC also. It does use some MLC or something for short term writes, almost like a cache I guess. Either way, I cannot tell the difference in normal use from my older high performance drive. I don't have an NVME drive to test out yet though. Honestly, I think you should be fine with any of the consumer drives today from reputable companies.
 
M500 is a tad slow vs the new king of the hills of SATA but its still a solid drive (it was one of the best for its time) and no reason to upgrade unless you need the latest and greatest like NVMe. If your happy keep it and wait for 1TB NVMe.

Maxing out SATA is not really a thing parse in my book unless your looking at 550MBps limit. The money is in 4K IO and the 950PRO is ~3x faster or more with a few other pros compared to the M500.

Slapping a 950PRO SSD with a 550MBps cap would still rock a M500...thats the point I am making. For most people but not all the max sequential is not the issue.


BTW the only reason you would need to really upgrade is if you are notice wear related performance losses or you do like 6 things at once to the SSD for hours on end and you are running at steady state. The newer drives steady state blows away that M500 but by the sound of it. That is not an issue for you so just wait.
 
Last edited:
Not worried about failure. Been running 2 SSDs from 2009 in raid on a database server and they are doing fine still. I wasn't able to use them long on my PC due to the lack of trim/proper garbage collection. The stuttering became too much so I upgraded to a proper trim-enabled SSD. Surprisingly though they don't stutter at all for database purposes and have massively decreased access times compared to the hard drives used previously. So I'm sure the M500 will last a long time still.

I decided to keep my existing one. I'll be upgrading in the future anyway when the prices for ~1TB NVMe or similar drop some more. And the current SSD will go into my PS4 which doesn't even support SATA III.
 
Crucial seems to use CPU's that cant keep up with the tasks, Although in normal use this wont make any difference, it does in bench marks.. IE a blank drive will show faster performance than a full drive. Maybe they upgraded to faster CPU's now to fix this as the cost is rather small. The placs where SSD's make a difference would be random access and very small files. So opening a bunch of web pages all at once would show a performance hit with a HD. But loading the web program itself would not show any speed difference. TLC does make a difference when using a small drive. Their life is a third of MLC. So my crucial SSD instead of still having 80% life left after 4 years would show like 30% life left. But with a 1TB drive their life goes up exponentially, rather than just as a multiple. This is of course for my kind of usage.. Samsung has been using TLC for a while now and that alone shows just what good programming can do. While crucial uses like 3 cycles for every write, samsung has been able to reduce that to just over 1 by using various tricks and caches. Bad write amplification can kill drives fast. And this garbage collection routines if not done well can cause all kinds of sputtering and slow downs making your drive seem slow. Since the technology for NAND is the same for all of them, the difference in performance is how well its implemented and the controller used. Given a choice of older crucial stuff and the latest one from a decent company, I would opt for the recent drive. Even using parts that are less robust, I would think the software and hardware would be far more mature now to make performance and write cycles last far longer.. just a couple of years can make a huge difference in technology and the leap would be far greater in software.
 
If you could check how long the newer drive has been used with Crystal Disk Info, this might help you decide on which one is the better deal for you.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top