3 ms·

> 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 ste

> 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. That would be an entirely different experiment. This one has highlighted the most important pitfall of using critically undersized SSDs, so its conclusions say next to nothing about multi-TB drives.

louwrentius 4y ago
I'm not so sure given that the Crucial MX500 1TB already performed at the edge of bad, although it could sustain a gigabit download.
- patshead 4y ago
  The Crucial MX500 is a rather old piece of hardware now. Tom's Hardware NVMe benchmarks include a "Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery" component. Whenever there's a good sale price on an NVMe, that is just about the only metric I hunt down now. Most of the worst drives they test will always beat a mechanical disk, but the worst drives Tom's Hardware ever tests are still decent drives. I grabbed one of the cheapest SATA SSDs last week to replacing a failing lvmcache drive. It is a NETAC 1 TB that might still be on sale on eBay for $34. I expected the worst, and I did want to test its sustained write performance, but I wasn't as nearly scientific as you! I just ran dd for a while and watched it stay between 420 and 470 megabytes per second for about 120 gigabytes straight before I stopped the test. The meanest I am to this cache is dropping 50 GB of video on two different days each month, so that was all the data I needed. Had I known that I would be reading your blog four days later I would have let the dd finish so I could take better notes! Thank you for taking the time to do the science for us!
  - wtallis 4y ago
    > The Crucial MX500 is a rather old piece of hardware now. Depends on when you bought it. Crucial/Micron decided to stop introducing new branding when they updated their SATA SSDs, but the hardware inside has changed several times to incorporate new generations of NAND flash memory, and probably at least one update to the SSD controller by now. None of that matters to the top-line specifications they advertise, but such changes can be relevant for more stressful, more thorough or less realistic benchmarks.

louwrentius 4y ago

I'm not so sure given that the Crucial MX500 1TB already performed at the edge of bad, although it could sustain a gigabit download.

patshead 4y ago
The Crucial MX500 is a rather old piece of hardware now. Tom's Hardware NVMe benchmarks include a "Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery" component. Whenever there's a good sale price on an NVMe, that is just about the only metric I hunt down now. Most of the worst drives they test will always beat a mechanical disk, but the worst drives Tom's Hardware ever tests are still decent drives. I grabbed one of the cheapest SATA SSDs last week to replacing a failing lvmcache drive. It is a NETAC 1 TB that might still be on sale on eBay for $34. I expected the worst, and I did want to test its sustained write performance, but I wasn't as nearly scientific as you! I just ran dd for a while and watched it stay between 420 and 470 megabytes per second for about 120 gigabytes straight before I stopped the test. The meanest I am to this cache is dropping 50 GB of video on two different days each month, so that was all the data I needed. Had I known that I would be reading your blog four days later I would have let the dd finish so I could take better notes! Thank you for taking the time to do the science for us!
- wtallis 4y ago
  > The Crucial MX500 is a rather old piece of hardware now. Depends on when you bought it. Crucial/Micron decided to stop introducing new branding when they updated their SATA SSDs, but the hardware inside has changed several times to incorporate new generations of NAND flash memory, and probably at least one update to the SSD controller by now. None of that matters to the top-line specifications they advertise, but such changes can be relevant for more stressful, more thorough or less realistic benchmarks.