5 ms·

A bit off-topic, but speaking of SSDs, how do you compare them when shopping around? I see different brands and models advertising similar features at different

A bit off-topic, but speaking of SSDs, how do you compare them when shopping around? I see different brands and models advertising similar features at different price points, and I know enough to look at the throughput, IOPS, but beyond that it's hard to tell how to evaluate differences. e.g. should consumers be weary of QLC? Do the models and brands matter a lot? Can you somewhat trust listed lifetimes? Are there other specs worth paying attention to? How should they be evaluated? Anyone have thoughts/links on comparing modern SSDs?

metalliqaz 6y ago
Honestly I just see what was well reviewed at tomshardware or anandtech. I let them filter out the crap for me.
- wtallis 6y ago
  One word of warning: we often get bored of reviewing the same drive several times, with a different vendor's sticker over the same turnkey solution built by the same ODM. So if you run across a decent price on a drive that hasn't been reviewed in-depth by someone you trust, it may be worth checking if it's basically equivalent to something that has been well reviewed. On Reddit, NewMaxx has been doing a great job of publicly aggregating information about SSDs: https://old.reddit.com/r/NewMaxx/comments/dhvrdm/ssd_guides_resources/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NewMaxx/comments/dhvrdm/ssd_guides_... This is especially important if you're not in North America because the brands that are available and affordable locally aren't always the same as what's good here in the US. (And on rare occasions, a product sold in multiple regions will have different internals depending on the region.)
wtallis 6y ago
The advertised performance specifications for consumer SSDs are mostly useless. They pick the metrics that produce the biggest numbers, without regard to whether those numbers have any relevance to real-world use. Those numbers are mostly useful for determining what class of controller and flash memory are used, in case the spec sheet doesn't list that information. Likewise for warranty period and write endurance ratings; those are more about signalling product segmentation than about actual expected lifetime. For consumer SSDs, there's no need to worry about write endurance or QLC NAND unless you know you have a very atypical usage pattern and have actually measured your workload by eg. tracking SMART indicators on your current drive(s) for several days. Brand matters very little unless you really care about the experience of getting a warranty replacement in the rare event that your drive fails before the warranty expires. I'm not aware of any solid information indicating that certain SSD brands have consistently lower premature failure rates. My anecdotal experience from reviewing SSDs for several years is that all the top-tier brands have at some point sent me review samples that were either DOA or died during testing that shouldn't have killed a drive. Outside the top tier brands belonging to the NAND flash memory manufacturers, everyone is buying NAND on the open market from the same 2-3 manufacturers and buying SSD controller solutions from the same 2-5 vendors. There are literally dozens of retail models all using the same combination of Phison E12 controller and Toshiba/Kioxia 3D NAND, and the differences between these are almost entirely cosmetic. All the PCIe 4.0 consumer SSDs that have been released so far are functionally identical.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  This is great info, thank you! Regarding SMART indicators, do you know if they're generally reliable? I seem to recall there have been drives (at least HDD, not sure about SSD) that didn't report correct numbers. In fact, I just checked and my current SSD doesn't report SMART data at all. Have they gotten better over the years?
  - wtallis 6y ago
    I don't make a habit out of doing sanity checks on the SMART reporting of drives I test. My tests log that data, but I haven't written anything to parse that into useful information. I can't recall noticing obviously wrong or entirely missing SMART data in any drive I've recently tested. I'm curious what your SSD is and just how old it is, if it isn't giving you any SMART information. (Maybe you need to run `smartctl -s on` before it'll show you the stats it has probably been tracking all along?)
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      Ah I see. It's a PM981, from late 2017. Interestingly, the GSmartControl GUI says it doesn't support SMART. But now that I try smartctl -a, I see a bit of information, though not much. The only things regarding failures seem to be "Media and Data Integrity Errors" and "Error Information Log Entries" (which I'm not really sure how to interpret in terms of what's too high and what's too low). Other stuff is just temperature and other statistics. Not sure if I'm supposed to be seeing more, but I feel like hard disks used to report more than this!
      - wtallis 6y ago
        NVMe SSDs report a somewhat different set of indicators than SATA drives. If you want to estimate your own personal write endurance requirements, then you want to keep track of the line that looks like: Data Units Written: 67,509,873 [34.5 TB] Figure out how much that goes up in a typical day/week/month, and you'll know roughly how much you endurance you need. When your SSD is old and you want to monitor it for signs of impending failure, keep an eye on the lines: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% [...] Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 (Quoted stats taken from the 512GB PM981 I borrowed to test. It was barely used at the time.)

metalliqaz 6y ago

Honestly I just see what was well reviewed at tomshardware or anandtech. I let them filter out the crap for me.

wtallis 6y ago
One word of warning: we often get bored of reviewing the same drive several times, with a different vendor's sticker over the same turnkey solution built by the same ODM. So if you run across a decent price on a drive that hasn't been reviewed in-depth by someone you trust, it may be worth checking if it's basically equivalent to something that has been well reviewed. On Reddit, NewMaxx has been doing a great job of publicly aggregating information about SSDs: https://old.reddit.com/r/NewMaxx/comments/dhvrdm/ssd_guides_resources/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NewMaxx/comments/dhvrdm/ssd_guides_... This is especially important if you're not in North America because the brands that are available and affordable locally aren't always the same as what's good here in the US. (And on rare occasions, a product sold in multiple regions will have different internals depending on the region.)

wtallis 6y ago

The advertised performance specifications for consumer SSDs are mostly useless. They pick the metrics that produce the biggest numbers, without regard to whether those numbers have any relevance to real-world use. Those numbers are mostly useful for determining what class of controller and flash memory are used, in case the spec sheet doesn't list that information. Likewise for warranty period and write endurance ratings; those are more about signalling product segmentation than about actual expected lifetime. For consumer SSDs, there's no need to worry about write endurance or QLC NAND unless you know you have a very atypical usage pattern and have actually measured your workload by eg. tracking SMART indicators on your current drive(s) for several days. Brand matters very little unless you really care about the experience of getting a warranty replacement in the rare event that your drive fails before the warranty expires. I'm not aware of any solid information indicating that certain SSD brands have consistently lower premature failure rates. My anecdotal experience from reviewing SSDs for several years is that all the top-tier brands have at some point sent me review samples that were either DOA or died during testing that shouldn't have killed a drive. Outside the top tier brands belonging to the NAND flash memory manufacturers, everyone is buying NAND on the open market from the same 2-3 manufacturers and buying SSD controller solutions from the same 2-5 vendors. There are literally dozens of retail models all using the same combination of Phison E12 controller and Toshiba/Kioxia 3D NAND, and the differences between these are almost entirely cosmetic. All the PCIe 4.0 consumer SSDs that have been released so far are functionally identical.

mehrdadn 6y ago
This is great info, thank you! Regarding SMART indicators, do you know if they're generally reliable? I seem to recall there have been drives (at least HDD, not sure about SSD) that didn't report correct numbers. In fact, I just checked and my current SSD doesn't report SMART data at all. Have they gotten better over the years?
- wtallis 6y ago
  I don't make a habit out of doing sanity checks on the SMART reporting of drives I test. My tests log that data, but I haven't written anything to parse that into useful information. I can't recall noticing obviously wrong or entirely missing SMART data in any drive I've recently tested. I'm curious what your SSD is and just how old it is, if it isn't giving you any SMART information. (Maybe you need to run `smartctl -s on` before it'll show you the stats it has probably been tracking all along?)
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    Ah I see. It's a PM981, from late 2017. Interestingly, the GSmartControl GUI says it doesn't support SMART. But now that I try smartctl -a, I see a bit of information, though not much. The only things regarding failures seem to be "Media and Data Integrity Errors" and "Error Information Log Entries" (which I'm not really sure how to interpret in terms of what's too high and what's too low). Other stuff is just temperature and other statistics. Not sure if I'm supposed to be seeing more, but I feel like hard disks used to report more than this!
    - wtallis 6y ago
      NVMe SSDs report a somewhat different set of indicators than SATA drives. If you want to estimate your own personal write endurance requirements, then you want to keep track of the line that looks like: Data Units Written: 67,509,873 [34.5 TB] Figure out how much that goes up in a typical day/week/month, and you'll know roughly how much you endurance you need. When your SSD is old and you want to monitor it for signs of impending failure, keep an eye on the lines: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% [...] Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 (Quoted stats taken from the 512GB PM981 I borrowed to test. It was barely used at the time.)