16 ms·
Benchmarking Cheap SSDs for Fun, No Profit
- squarefoot 4y agoHow old are those cheap SSDs? When using older (as in production date, not usage) ones I'd be way more concerned about their reliability than speed, especially when sustained writing is involved.
- louwrentius 4y agoI bought them brand new. I don't know when they were produced.
- beckingz 4y agoCheap SSDs slow down when they run out of the faster cache memory!
- Idiot_in_Vain 4y agoAnd so do the expensive SSDs. Usually writing the first 30% of the available space goes through fast pseudo SLC mode and then the speed falls down drastically. The most in depth SSD reviews I've seen are on this YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/@prossd https://www.youtube.com/@prossd They are in Russian, but subtitles are available.
- IE6 4y agoLTT just did a video on this, looking at the latest gen PCIe drives and found similar results https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnMMtbVP0ps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnMMtbVP0ps
- voxadam 4y agoArchive: https://archive.is/c4yUc https://archive.is/c4yUc
- bluedino 4y agoThe 'expensive' SSD used for comparison is a 6-7 year old Crucial MX500 Oddly enough this test doesn't even get 300MB/s writes for the Crucial drive, where other benchmarks are 400MB/s or above for the same drive https://www.anandtech.com/show/12165/the-crucial-mx500-1tb-ssd-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/12165/the-crucial-mx500-1tb-s...
- zebracanevra 4y agoYes, a lot of SSD vendors scam their customers by releasing the first batch with a lot of SLC, reviews are released, and then months or years later silently swap it out with inferior flash.
- 404mm 4y agoCan confirm. I still use MD500’s
- martinald 4y agoInteresting. I've had terrible luck with 'cheaper' SSDs where I thought performance wasn't important. I got a crucial USB3.2 drive for backups for my mac mini, which I stupidly thought would be good given the bandwidth of 3.2, but it can barely manage 100MB/sec of writes sustained, which is close to an old hard drive. Managed to repeat the mistake again on black friday with a cheap SATA drive that cannot write anywhere close to the SATA speeds. I even checked the specs on this but real world performance isn't anywhere close. Probably using different chips with the same model number? And to top it off I just got a 256GB M2 Macbook air for travelling which has horribly crippled IO perf compared to the other models, which I didn't realise until after I bought it. It's all tolerable really, given I have some good NVMe drives in my main workstation, but I cannot understand how those do 2000MB/sec no problem, but cheaper drives struggle with 100MB/sec. NVMe drives have plunged in price over the last couple of months so maybe getting them with a USB enclosure/SATA convertor is a better way to assure higher quality.
- nicolaslem 4y agoDon't confuse the interface for the drive itself. In most consumer tech the interface is way beefier than it needs to because of marketing. You can see that right now with PCIe gen 5 drives which could just as well be gen 4 except that no one would be talking about them if they were.
- martinald 4y agoYes, the problem is it's hard to tell what the underlying drive is. I read reviews of one SATA drive, but it seems they swapped out the actual chips but kept the same model number, as all the reviews said it could saturate it, but mine can't, despite having the same model number.
- gibspaulding 4y agoFor that matter, how many drives are actually capable of maxing out SATA's 6Gbps? There are architectural reasons for moving away from SATA I know, but the raw bandwidth is there.
- dralley 4y ago> One of the funnier conclusions to draw is that it's beter to use a hard drive than to use cheap SSDs if you need to ingest a lot of data. Even the Crucial 1TB SSD could not keep up with the HDD.
- phamilton 4y agoKey information: this is for sequential writes. HDDs are actually pretty good at sequential writes. Random writes show a much much bigger gap.
- userbinator 4y agoThat Kingston looks to be quite good value, although I personally would stay away from anything using TLC flash and worse.
- InvaderFizz 4y agoI'm unaware of any SSD made in 2023 that doesn't use TLC or worse.
- Laaas 4y ago"worse" is subjective.
- leonidasv 4y agoEven Samsung "Pro" flagship consumer SSDs are using TLCs nowadays. I want to believe they found a way to make TLCs suck less. At least, they can sustain the throughput on benchmarks, but I'm yet to find some benchmark on durability (vs past MLC iterations).
- daneel_w 4y agoIn my opinion they all have quite good GiB-per-dollar value these days for what they really are: a medium that's crazy fast to read from, but crazy slow to write to.
- 4y ago
- PaulHoule 4y agoI remember writing a comment on anandtech years ago where I accused SSD makers of being in a race to make an SSD that performs worse than HDD and this blog post vindicates me.
- Idiot_in_Vain 4y agoYou were wrong. Windows 11 is unusable when installed on a fast 7200 RPM hard drive and works perfectly well on a super budget SSD. Budget SSDs are an order of magnitude faster than an HDD when it comes to small random reads and writes (which is what a storage medium does most of the time on an average PC/laptop).
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoIf you have an extremely specific use case of ingesting large amounts of purely sequential data, then you can find situations where a fast HDD performs better than the cheapest SSDs you can find. But that’s about it. The random I/O of even a cheap SSD will be far superior to the limited IO of a fast mechanical hard drive for typical workloads.
- daneel_w 4y agoSuch are the woes of modern TLC/QLC flash memory.
- louwrentius 4y agoI'm not so sure it's an issue of TLC/QLC memory at all. It's that to make cheap drives, costs must be cut and this can be the outcome: bad write performance.
- daneel_w 4y agoWith a TLC-configured controller each write is actually three consecutive program/erase operations on the affected NAND cell. With QLC it's four such operations. All MLC schemes - DLC, TLC and QLC - are cost-cutting measures, and the technique inherently incurs a performance and endurance toll.
- louwrentius 4y agoI know and understand this. However there are plenty of well-performing TLC drives at higher price points, so it doesn’t seem specific to TLC memory, there are other factors at play I think.
- daneel_w 4y agoLarger drives are faster because in order to provide more storage they have to use multiple NAND chips, which the controller interfaces with in parallel. Older DLC SSDs of 250-500 GB could often sustain e.g. 550 MB/sec write speed (SATA-III bus maximum) indefinitely, but most 120 GB models from the past few years use a single NAND chip, and as of late this is also the case with most 250 GB models. The idea that the cheaper drives are slower because of some unspecified generic cost-cutting is a fallacy. They're primarily slower because of iterative MLC exploitation and because NAND-cells-per-chip is growing.
- louwrentius 4y ago
- ploek 4y agoWhen pointing out that HDDs can outperform these SSDs, 'sequential' is the key word. I regularly pull remote backups with syncoid (i.e. `zfs send | zfs receive`) and over time that fragmented the receiving side considerably. In the end `zpool list` showed over 80% capacity and 40% fragmentation. The hard drives were seeking constantly and the syncoid task would take over eight hours to complete. I replaced the disks with SSDs and now the task completes within 20 minutes.
- pixl97 4y agoThe moment you as IO seek on hard drives they just suck, as you experienced. In 'almost' every user based usage scenario a SSD is going to perform better than an HDD. About the only time an HDD is better is when you're writing out large singular data files. But even then you have to be cautious, as if the drive is shared with other read/write operations you can find the performance again drops off a cliff.
- gibspaulding 4y agoBack in the day, a common suggestion for speeding up your PC was to defragment your hdd. I didn't start using Linux until right around the SSD transition, so I've never done it there, but for setups like this are there not still tools to do something similar? I'm sure you got other benefits out of swapping to SSD's, but your comment just got me thinking.
- dsr_ 4y agoThere's no point in defragging an SSD unless the low-level controller is doing it; the controller is always presenting a false picture of the mapping between data addresses and physical location of pages. There's no good ZFS defragging tool, although the initial send to a new pool will accomplish that. This is just a thing for COW-style filesystems.
- Dylan16807 4y ago> This is just a thing for COW-style filesystems. It doesn't have to be. ZFS in particular has an architecture that's very hostile to ever moving things. BTRFS has a design that's amenable to defragmentation, but the builtin option doesn't work with snapshots and the external programs I've tried are partial and finnicky.
- utexaspunk 4y agoNo read performance? Other than being solid state, that's the real advantage of SSDs, especially non-sequential ones. I typically use an SSD for the OS and applications, and then use a regular hard drive for the actual content that I work with which needs better write performance. It may take (very) slightly longer to install the applications to the SSD, but they start up faster.
- jeffbee 4y agoIt seems to me extremely unlikely that an HDD has anywhere near the sustained write performance of a proper SSD. E.g. a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB will write at ~2GB/s indefinitely (well, until you wear it out, which at that rate will only take about 2 days). That's the aggregate speed of a whole box full of HDDs.
- louwrentius 4y agoSorry, the point of my article is that cheap SSDs have terrible write performance. Read performance may be fine, but write performance does matter and people often don't know how bad it can be. And then they wonder why copying some files is so slow.
- dumbfounder 4y ago"Disclaimer I'm not sponsored in any way. All mentioned products have been bought with my own money." Funny that the author felt the need to disclaim that they are not taking money from anyone to write the article. How dare they!
- return_to_monke 4y agohow else would one know they aren't sponsored by Big HDD?
- jeffbee 4y agoThese are low absolute prices but normalized for size they are pretty bad. I.e. a WD Black SN850X 1TB is $95 retail. That's double the space per dollar and orders of magnitude better performance depending on how you look at it.
- louwrentius 4y agoI'm going to bet that if consumers would not go for the lowest prices and pay a little bit more, sustained write speeds will likely be 'fine' as in, at least on par with an HDD or far beyond.
- Neil44 4y agoThe thing with the HDD beating SSD's is that this is pure sequential writes, no seeking involved, which is quite rare in real life. If this was random smaller writes the HDD would be awful.
- eatbitseveryday 4y agoI would say, show me the data (and with a file system on top). Log-structured file systems don’t overwrite data, so the randomness of writes becomes moot, as it converts writes to become all sequential.
- wtallis 4y agoI wouldn't expect using a log-structured filesystem to help much, because the SSD is already running its own log-structured filesystem internally. A log-structured filesystem doesn't magically turn a random write workload into sequential writes; it incurs more or less the same overhead that the SSD's FTL does doing read-modify-write cycles causing write amplification.
- Neil44 4y agoFragmentation? Cluster sizes?
- louwrentius 4y agoMaybe it's rare for you to ingest large files or a large dataset, but I'm going to bet it's not as uncommon, especially if you work with photography, virtual machine images, (raw) video files and so on. None of the cheap SSDs are fit for purpose in my opinion for any of this.
- allenrb 4y agoThis is a subject that gets a lot of reviewer attention and results in considerable gnashing of teeth. Yet for most users, how often do we generate many-gigabyte streams of sequential writes? It’s just not a usage pattern worthy of infinite optimization. As others have pointed out already, it’s the reads that matter. In particular, end users care about low queue depth, kind-of-random read throughout. And here, the cheapest SSD thrashes the best spinning disks. Imho it’s a little bit like complaining that long, sequential writes to DRAM are slower than reads from L1$. It’s true, it just doesn’t matter for most of us.
- sandworm101 4y ago>> many-gigabyte streams of sequential writes? More often than many would expect. Downloading/installing games can do it. No doubt many complaints to Valve about slow servers are likely the fault of slow consumer SSDs not able to keep pace with modern download speeds. And people with the smaller/slower SSDs are more likely to be installing/removing games more often. It's a strange strange world where local storage might bottleneck a residential internet connection.
- jeroenhd 4y agoI've run into this when I first got access to gigabit internet. I was still storing all of my games on good old SATA hard drives. I set up a 4 gigabyte RAM disk for downloads and such so my hard drives weren't slowing me down. Eventually I got myself some nice and fast SSDs, but even now I run some games of hard drives because of the still significant cost of replacing terabytes of storage capacity.
- hddherman 4y agoI can attest that getting one of those cheapo SSD-s for a gaming PC and then downloading games on Steam over a good connection (500 Mbit/s) can overwhelm the SSD and cause the whole system to be unusably slow, with similar multi-second latency numbers being shown in Task Manager on Windows 10. It’s a relatively common situation among the gaming community, I’d say.
- phamilton 4y agoI'd love to see what flash chips the cheap drives are using. I expect at least some of them to be Micron chips, which is the same chips used in the Crucial drive. I would be very amused if one of them was using Spectec, which is the brand Micron uses for their lowest binned chips.
- r1ch 4y agoI wish manufacturers exposed a way to manually provision the drive as all SLC / MLC / TLC, a small SLC cache drive would be great for several use cases.
- jeffbee 4y agoLife would be better if you could just buy this stuff on sticks and the operating system would figure out what to do with it.
- userbinator 4y agoI'd gladly pay the same price for a 40GB SLC SSD over a 120TB TLC one, but the former is going to have an endurance >100x more, and that's apparently why there's seemingly no cheap SLC SSDs available. The capacity increase with more bits per cell is multiplicative, but endurance and retention get exponentially worse. Manufacturers would rather go the planned obsolescence route even at the same prices. (SLC also needs far less fancy ECC and wear leveling algorithms, to the point that early SSDs with only SLC didn't have anything but 1-bit ECC and no wear leveling; I still have a 64MB USB drive with a full binary capacity and it would theoretically be capable of 6.4TBW before wearing out.)
- haunter 4y agoThis is the point where I would pay a bit more for the DRAM cache.
- wtallis 4y agoI think the DRAM issue is mostly a red herring. For a 120GB SSD, the SRAM on the controller will be able to hold a significant fraction of the logical to physical address mapping table. The bigger problem is that these tiny drives only have one or two NAND dies, so any operation that causes a block erase will tie up a quarter of the capacity for hundreds of milliseconds.
- louwrentius 4y agoThe control drive, the Crucial MX500 1TB does have DRAM but I'm not sure it helps much.
- wtallis 4y agoA DRAM cache generally doesn't matter for sequential transfers. A DRAM cache will most noticeably help with random reads over the whole drive (random reads from a small range of the drive can be handled well with just a few MB of SRAM on the controller).
- nfriedly 4y agoA lot of newer cheap NMVe SSDs don't have DRAM, but instead they use the HMB (Host Memory Buffer) feature, which essentially allows it to use a small amount of your system RAM (maybe 64mb). None of this applies to SATA SSDs, which is probably why it was omitted from the article, but it's a good thing to keep in mind if you're shopping for one for yourself. (These days I would only consider a SATA SSD for a system that did not support NVMe. Otherwise low end NVMe is significantly better.)
- deno 4y agoYou can get cheap NVMe drives for around the same price with a controller supporting HMB (Host Memory Buffer) which to a large degree neutralizes the disadvantage of having no expensive DRAM on board. If you need some small form factors like 2242 or 2230 you pretty much don’t have any DRAM options anyway.
- Joel_Mckay 4y agoPractically speaking, some are more concerned with reliability over ludicrous file write-speed. For example, the Intel m.2 consumer drive are considered relatively slow, but run relatively cool without a heat-sink. Notably thermal issues are still very common for laptops/tablets, and Flash premature aging tends to be temperature dependent as well. Very surprised Intel transferred the ssd line to Solidigm. Also, some Linux users bloat their io buffer size to several GiB, set the eviction priority to 1 (rarely flushes dirty cache back to storage), and use F2FS for /home . This limits ssd wear, trim is auto run once a week, and hardware storage drivers can still regularly flush the drives internal high-speed SLC area as needed. Even the cheapest Sandisk and Samsung SATA drives from 6 years ago are still working just fine on the old hosts with this setup, and we expected them to EOL 4 years ago. Tip: always sort by lowest negative ssd product reviews first. =)
- jimis 4y ago> bloat their io buffer size to several GiB, set the eviction priority to 1 How do you tweak these? I'm aware of dirty_writeback_centisecs and the likes, but you are most likely referring to something different.
- mattpallissard 4y agoNo, you're thinking along the right lines. These things are kernel tune ables. If you thumb through the sysfs kernel docs you can find loads of options on this sort of thing.
- the8472 4y agoYOLO mountflags for ext4 that minimize synchronous writes: data=writeback,journal_async_commit,lazytime,nobarrier,commit=99999 Good for caches, scratch space, build dirs and anything that can be rebuilt from other data but it'll get corrupted during any non-graceful shutdown. overlayfs offers an even more aggressive mount option "volatile" which ignores all O_SYNC or fsyncs, but no other filesystem exposes that tradeoff.
- 4y ago
- leonidasv 4y ago>One of the funnier conclusions to draw is that it's beter to use a hard drive than to use cheap SSDs if you need to ingest a lot of data. Even the Crucial 1TB SSD could not keep up with the HDD Sure, but a cheap SSD is still (supposedly) faster than an HDD when it comes to random writes/reads, which is a big deal for running applications and OSes. I miss a random benchmark to put things like this in perspective.
- 404mm 4y agoSomething’s up with the benchmarks. MX500 should perform significantly better than it has. I’m using several of MX500 and get sustained write close to 390MB/s and read around 440MB/s. My purchase decision was derived from direct comparison with Samsung 870 Evo, where Curcial was nearly as good while costing much less. I cannot speak for the other drives.
- louwrentius 4y agoMaybe you're right, I'm open to suggestions. But I ran the benchmarks multiple times. Regarding the MX500, I actually used the drive and made a backup with DD beforehand. Afterwards I wrote the backup back on the drive (entire drive write) with DD and sustained write performance fluctuated between 40MB/130 MB/s if I recall correctly. https://louwrentius.com/static/images/cheapssd06.png https://louwrentius.com/static/images/cheapssd06.png
- 404mm 4y agoJust curious, when you ran dd, did you also increase the block size? I usually do bs=1M My real world experience with MX500 is pretty well aligned with: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-870-Evo-250GB-vs-Crucial-MX500-250GB/4094vs3951 https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-870-Evo-250GB-... I wonder how your other drives score on those tests.
- louwrentius 4y agoYes, just as the fio test I used bs=1M. Some people report that Crucial uses different hardware under the same MX 500 brand, maybe that explains things. How old is your drive?
- 404mm 4y agoThey are all from 2020-2022
- 4y ago
- thrdbndndn 4y agoI'm more interested in the patterns some of the drives show. Like the one with huge spike periodically (orange), or the the one goes up and down like crazy for the whole time (red). Any clue what causes these?
- withinboredom 4y agoProbably related to how cache flushes are implemented. Some may lock the whole cache during a flush, some may implement a ring buffer, etc.
- rasz 4y ago>possible to buy a 1TB solid-state drive for less than €60 Thats fancy brand name ones! Chinese noname (unless you consider "blue" a brand :P) can be had for 1TB <$30 and 2TB <$40 with free shipping. No doubt using Chinese manufactured NAND flash, I have to wonder about write endurance and reliability. https://www.ebay.com/itm/385414212830 https://www.ebay.com/itm/385414212830 https://www.ebay.com/itm/165934839845 https://www.ebay.com/itm/165934839845 https://www.ebay.com/itm/394522781098 https://www.ebay.com/itm/394522781098
- wtallis 4y ago> No doubt using Chinese manufactured NAND flash, I have to wonder about write endurance and reliability. I wouldn't count on it; there's only one Chinese NAND manufacturer (YMTC) and they are still a relatively new and low-volume market participant. Most cheap drives use NAND made by one of the other major manufacturers, but it's the leftovers that had initial defect rates too high for the better brands/models to use.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> The hard drive shows better write throughput and latency as compared to most of the tested SSDs. Yes, except for the initial few minutes where the cheap SSDs tend to be faster (except for the Kingston & Crucial SSDs) but how much does that matter? I love the idea of this article, but it lost me here. “Except for the initial few minutes” is a weird thing to dismiss, since the majority of desktop operations will be done in less than a few minutes. Most are in the span of seconds. The only time someone will typically go past a few minutes of sustained writes is during very large file copy operations. It’s weird to put an emphasis on this relative edge case while downplaying the importance of burst performance. Anyone who has switched from even a fast hard drive to a cheap SSD can see the difference an SSD makes. It’s true that my NAS can sustain higher throughput for longer than a cheap SSD, but it’s much slower at doing directory listings and scanning random files than even the cheap SSDs.
- glofish 4y agoIn a realistic use cases (unlike the ones in the test) the hard drives are accessed very often. For anything by very light use, I would expect the drives to be written just about at all times.
- louwrentius 4y agoIt's quite clearly phrased in the article: Although cheap SSDs do perform fine regarding reads, sustained write performance can be really atrocious. Notice the sustained write performance. So you consider copying large files a fringe / or edge case, but personally, I'm not so sure. Especially for people who buy cheap 1TB or 2TB+ SSDs, they may be unpleasantly surprised when they copy some media files or start downloading a game from steam. Don't forget that it will take quite a while - due to the slow flash - to empy the SLC cache before you can benefit from it again. > Anyone who has switched from even a fast hard drive to a cheap SSD can see the difference an SSD makes. This article is not about the merrits of SSDs, that's a done deal, a good SSD beats an HDD by every conceivable metric. My point is that people should watch out for cheap SSDs, as their sustained write performance is so slow.
- wtallis 4y ago
- jackmott42 4y agoIf you use "how long does my computer take to boot" or "How long does it take my game to load". A cheap SSD, like really cheap with non NAND cache and slow peak speeds, performs withing a couple of % of the most expensive ones. Outside of a few specialty use cases there is really no need to go beyond the "expensive enough to not be garbage" category.
- vlovich123 4y agoI wonder if there’s a meaningful difference between SATA and NVME anyway in terms of latency and command queue buffer. In particular, it doesn’t feel like seconds of latency comes from the storage tech vs saturating the speed of submitting I/O requests.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoI remember learning about the "Slow TLC backed by fast SLC" a few years ago when I got a new SSD and was cloning the old one. It went super fast at first, hitting the ~550 MB/s limit of the SATA6 bus, for about the first 16 GB. Then it dropped to about 50 MB/s, slower than a hard drive. For my use case (gaming), it would never matter, but it still made me scowl a bit.
- rasz 4y agoI have an old 32GB ADATA SP300 SSD. Its a 200/40 MB/s read/write bottom of the barrel SSD, was $20 in 2014 and perfect for a router where it lived 2 years. It finally broke after one more year in retro gaming Windows XP setup with no Trim support. Now writing first 2GB goes at full ~40MB/s but then it drops to .. 2KB/s :D No amount of trimming, zeroing, safe erasing is able to recover it :(. All Smart stats are perfect, including life left.
- kderbe 4y agoThe 8TB 7200 RPM Toshiba drive has decent sustained write performance. But if the author had tested a cheaper hard disk, such as a 8TB Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Seagate drive, they'd have seen sustained writes even worse than the cheapest SSDs.
- louwrentius 4y agoOne of these days I should write an article on how the invention and sale of SMR drives is hate crime and a violation of the Geneva convention.
- RedShift1 4y agoWhat software did you use to make the charts?
- louwrentius 4y agoIt's linked in the article, but the name is fio-plot https://github.com/louwrentius/fio-plot https://github.com/louwrentius/fio-plot
- bayindirh 4y agoThis article shows that cheap SSDs are basically cheap USB sticks with a SATA connector attached. Any run of the mill, entry level USB flash drive behaves the same way. Fast until caches fill, then limping while trying to write this data to the proper flash back end (at 10MB/sec in most cases). If you pay the price, your USB drive will be a proper SSD with a USB to SATA controller, SMART and everything (Sandisk's Extreme Pro drives, for example).