TLC-NAND

[Hielo_loco]

Hi everyone!

I am looking to buy a new SSD after Christmas. I am currently looking at the Crucial MX200 500GB and the Samsung 850 EVO 500GB.

I was wondering if the TLC issues of the Samsungs have been finally put to rest... Is it safe to buy the EVO?

I currently have the 840 EVO 250GB and I feel burned with my purchase, and I don´t want to buy another lemon...

 

[SomeGuy133]

Hi everyone!

I am looking to buy a new SSD after Christmas. I am currently looking at the Crucial MX200 500GB and the Samsung 850 EVO 500GB.

I was wondering if the TLC issues of the Samsungs have been finally put to rest... Is it safe to buy the EVO?

I currently have the 840 EVO 250GB and I feel burned with my purchase, and I don´t want to buy another lemon...

i had the original TLC non EVO I know the feeling. You just missed a great sale on MX200s so yea. In my opinion I would prefer the MX200 over the EVO but I am biased and thats assuming they both are equal prices. But if you count price difference go with whatever is cheapest in my eyes and thats almost always the MX200. Like seriously....why get EVO if it costs more....

MX200
500GB was 140 but now 160
1TB was 264 but now 330

850 EVO
500GB was 140 but now 148 (wow they finally aren't selling this POS at a premium)
1TB was 325 but now 348


So getting EVO now saves you 12 bucks. They finally stopped over pricing it lol.

The only thing you need to look at is Mix loads and steady state and consistency. Make sure you don't need either of those and either one of those drives don't suck at them. Those are the 3 benchmarks that make or break an SSD and show the difference from a crap one and a good one. All other benchmarks are relatively meaningless at this point. If you work on your computer while AV/AM scans goes off then you want to make sure the drive excels at those benchmarks. I am on PC all the time and AV/AM goes off a lot when I am on the PC due to how long I am on it and they take forever to finish. So AV/AM can kill my PC in terms of performance even with good SSDs.

 

[Hielo_loco]

Thanks for the reply!

I generally use my PC for gaming, watching blurays and the occasional AV Editing and Photoshop pro-level editing. The real heavy lifting I do is with Unreal Engine 4, and slowly but surely I'm using it more frequently.

I'll follow your advice and check out those benchmarks... in any case 3D files, textures, etc, are nowhere near as large as video files, but they are many and they are mixed.

My dilemma came from hearing everyone rave about the 850 Evo, that 3D V-Nand negated the TLC problems, and because I saw reviews that the Crucial MX was a so so drive, but I guess maybe that's just for synthetic benchmarks for ultra heavy users.

It would suck to hear reviewers say one year from now... "oops we screwed up again with the evo"

 

[Beaflag VonRathburg]

Honestly, if you're looking to go from an 840 to 850 evo or similar you're not going to notice much of a difference at all. If you really need the speed for development or something similar moving to an NVME solution with a PCIE interface would be ideal. Especially since you're on a non native sata III platform.

 

[SomeGuy133]

Honestly, if you're looking to go from an 840 to 850 evo or similar you're not going to notice much of a difference at all. If you really need the speed for development or something similar moving to an NVME solution with a PCIE interface would be ideal. Especially since you're on a non native sata III platform.

it depends...the 840 for some users has serious issues with steady state and large usage. If light use is at issue then 850 wont make much a difference but if your trashing the drive it will be large due to the large issues the 840 has when it is under stress.

@Hielo What are your read/writes? I average 350GB reads and 120-150GB writes per day on my Sandisk Extreme Pro. Now that is a average so some days are nothing and some are probably 5x that but thats what I do on my Extreme Pro. Are you around that or below that? Also when I mentioned mix loads I am referring to 80% reads/ 20% writes or vice versa or whatever. SSDs eat shit with mix work loads.

Also consider what kind of loads and work you have. Get the trial of HD Sentinel and watch HD Sentinel and task manager while you work. When you work and load things do you see a program max 12-13% in task manager during loads? If that's the case then its a single thread issue and better SSD with have marginal impact but if you see loads using 40% CPU or 5% CPU then its multthreaded and maxing SSD or maxing SSD and still not hitting single thread limit and has room to be speed up and thats if it isn't even multithread. If it is multithreaded and only using 5% then you got tons of room to speed those loads.

Kaspersky is multithreaded and my 950 Pro scans way faster but MBAM is single threaded and pretty much a POS in that regards. They have been promising multthread scan for years.

Other things I have notice difference between Extreme Pro and the 950 PRO is encryption, which was expected. There are other aspects but I haven't got time yet to explore them.

There are very limited areas where faster SSD has impact but there are some. Snappieness is an area for NVMe but thats hard to gauge.

PS and similar programs have space to be speed up in certain tasks but limited in nature. As in if you actually use queues for auto editing, multi GB merged images, and so on. I dont have formal numbers but I will by January I hope to show people but those are some of the areas I see CPU not maxed and SSD is the limiting factor but by how much I don't know.

Just watch taskmanager and disk activity to see is your at single thread max or total CPU max and see if there is reason to even bother. If your in no hurry just wait and get something really cool like XPoint

EDIT: also for mix work loads it is really hard to tell if you are using them and if its an issue. I haven't been able to confirm it is an issue for me but with my usage habits I have a strong suspicion it is.

 

[Trimlock]

TLC NAND is fine, the flash in the 840 hit degradation issues due to an incomplete process (19), so for the 850 they moved it back to the much more mature 40. Samsung has TLC drives that weren't affected like the 840 evo was.

 

[westrock2000]

TLC NAND is fine, the flash in the 840 hit degradation issues due to an incomplete process (19nm), so for the 850 they moved it back to the much more mature 40nm. Samsung has TLC drives that weren't affected like the 840 evo was.

Added clarity on numbers

 

[Hielo_loco]

Thanks for the responses guys!

@SomeGuy133 Wow hahaha all that information is a bit overwhelming to me, which probably means that I really wouldn´t notice the difference between the two drives. Indeed, my MB only supports SATA II, but I very rarely ever do huge transfers all at once.

However, with the Samsung 840 Evo I did feel the slowdown after a while, when opening some programs, and I´ve had to use the Advanced Optimizer in Magician twice.... so basically if TLC was the culprit then I didn´t want anything to do with it again.

The doubt about the Crucial MX was because I saw some reviews that it wasn´t a top of the line drive, but I guess in my case it wouldn´t matter.

In any case, if the problem was, like Trimlock and westrock said, with the fab process and not with TLC itself, I guess it would be pretty safe to just get the Samsung, and just have one software (Magician) instead of two.