Is that MX500 1TB review?

Ah, the wrong SSD got tagged wowzers. Apologies, fixing.

wow! I just checked over geizhals.eu for the prices of 480GB+ SSD's and I wasn't aware that they had fallen so much! I mean, 480GB ssd's for €60-80 and 960-1TB for around €150ish? Not bad! I wouldn't mind an extra 960-1TB tbh at that price! :P

Thanks for the review Hilbert. Anyone know of a review of long term storage on SSD's ? (Edit : I know TR or TPU or someone did a wear test, where they just wrote a lot, but i'm talking about persistant storage, maybe 2-6 months between boots, etc...) I mean, a lot of people tend to write once, and then read many, as in most files on the disk are just going to be read, and never re-written. I'm pretty sure Samsung does some internal copying, for wear levelling i think, and that helps retain the data, but what about other manufacturers ? I'm looking into getting a relatively cheap, large, SSD for just storing all the Steam Games, and obviously, they are mostly going to be read often, rather than written...and would like the data to be there, and uncorrupted.

Evildead666:

just storing all the Steam Games, and obviously, they are mostly going to be read often, rather than written...and would like the data to be there, and uncorrupted.

While interesting as a thesis - Why would you assume that data would get corrupted over time? There is no proof of that. Back in the day with the (I think it was) Samsung 840 there was an issue that performance degraded if you left the SSD off power for say 2-3 months. But that was a one-time thing. There is just no reason to assume your data gets corrupted, and I do assume you will power up the SSD every once in a while right?

Hmmm not bad, could be good for PS4 Pro with this price 🙂

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

But that was a one-time thing. There is just no reason to assume your data gets corrupted, and I do assume you will power up the SSD every once in a while right?

I remember reading somewhere that it's not that uncommon. There was an article that commented about how long the information was stored depending on what temperature it was written and then stored, and the conclusion was something around hot writes and cold storage kept the nand memory's information longer. This was regarding SSD memory in general, not specific to the 840.

Thank for the review Hilbert. I ended up getting an MX500 because there was no 1TB version of this, do you know why? I wanted a Samsung 970 Pro MLC M2 drive for my boot for reliability and speed and a 1TB 6GB SATA drive for games etc. Always been happy with Micron/Crucial stuff but would have preferred to offset the high cost of the 970Pro with the BX rather than MX.

Andy Watson:

Thank for the review Hilbert. I ended up getting an MX500 because there was no 1TB version of this, do you know why? I wanted a Samsung 970 Pro MLC M2 drive for my boot for reliability and speed and a 1TB 6GB SATA drive for games etc. Always been happy with Micron/Crucial stuff but would have preferred to offset the high cost of the 970Pro with the BX rather than MX.

I think this is aimed at entry level to replace the boot drive on laptops, PC and consoles. I've been using an MX100 254GB for ages as my boot drive and I never had an issue with space. But as you run in to speed limitations copying large files, I don't think you'd want to run into that as your archive drive.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

While interesting as a thesis - Why would you assume that data would get corrupted over time? There is no proof of that. Back in the day with the (I think it was) Samsung 840 there was an issue that performance degraded if you left the SSD off power for say 2-3 months. But that was a one-time thing. There is just no reason to assume your data gets corrupted, and I do assume you will power up the SSD every once in a while right?

That was what I was thinking of, whether the Samsung 840 problem still exists with today's SSD's. I know that the newer samsung drives actively copy their data around the drive periodically, I was just wondering if all of the SSD's are immune now, or if there are still some "cheap" brands, that could be subject to this problem. It can happen that i don't boot up some PC's for six months or more....and my Gaming PC is going that route at the moment. Its been off for at least a month now. I think one of the drives in it is a Samsung 840 Evo actually.......:) the other is an 850 Pro i think....

So you're that one-in-a-million person who doesn't turn on their PC for "six months or more" and complains that the SSD -might- corrupt games which can be downloaded anytime anyway in 5 minutes or less.

wavetrex:

So you're that one-in-a-million person who doesn't turn on their PC for "six months or more" and complains that the SSD -might- corrupt games which can be downloaded anytime anyway in 5 minutes or less.

Not all of us have the luxury of fast internet. The only game I could download in 5 minutes or less is solitaire or maybe Chip's Challenge. Though I agree, not booting up a pc for 6+ months is definitely not the norm.

Great review Hilbert , thank you for the in depth dive into SSDs. Prices on SSD are really good at this point in time , i am eagerly awaiting until we get at least 3TB SSDs for storage then i will face out and sell my old 3TB HDDs and replace all with SSDs , no more slow HDDs 🙂

It seems that I was wrong on my previous comment. Unpowered data retention in SSDs is only a problem on drives that have already passed their endurance rating: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention

I just bought another Samsung 860 EVO, 1TB. 16¢/GB

However, here we can confirm the SSD is lacking a DRAM buffer, after writing 85% of the 38GB file, the performance drops pretty dramatically towards 85 MB/sec. And here we have uncovered the Achilles heel of TLC when not cached with DRAM.

SSDs don't use the DRAM for cache its used for PAGE Table only (SSDs are not HDDs writes go directly to the NAND), what your seeing here is SSD slow down because it burned the SLC out (witch seem to be 24GB on the BX500 480GB, but i believe its dynamic SLC cache size based on how much data is saved on the SSD, more data saved smaller the SLC cache) and was writing directly to TLC after 24GB https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/crucial-bx500-480-gb-ssd-review,6.html https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/crucial-bx500-480-gb-ssd-review,8.html it did not show in your other tests are they was taking samples across the SSD space (they dont test all space maxabout 1GB), main thing that will be higher with DRAM less SSDs is Read and Write latencies that can be higher then a HDD at times as more data is on the SSD , the page table has to be managed in the SSD controller itself and read and write the page table from NAND witch is a lot slower then doing it from DRAM

wavetrex:

So you're that one-in-a-million person who doesn't turn on their PC for "six months or more" and complains that the SSD -might- corrupt games which can be downloaded anytime anyway in 5 minutes or less.

as long as you have the up to date firmware on your 840 evo (this fix was passed onto the released 850 and higher products that use TLC) the drive when powered on will perform a idle background scan to find and move the blocks of data in the NAND that are no longer at the correct charge level (so they don't have to use aggressive read retry and ECC to read the data) not seen this issue in other TLC based SSDs but i believe it was more samsung had set the block data move to low a setting and causing aggressive ECC read retry (now it does a block move if charge level is to low or if it had to read the block of data to many times when accessing the data) https://www.anandtech.com/show/9158/new-samsung-ssd-840-evo-read-performance-fix-coming-later-this-month 5-10 minutes later the drive had automatically restored itself to full speed, this was after a firmware update but in your case of having system off for 6 months a similar thing may happen (but i believe the issue is that the drive is on for 3 months but data has not changed), takes a way longer than 6 months to cause data loss unfortunately the 840 none EVO never got the update to fix this issue (have press the ADV optimise button manually in samsung magician )