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  • Drumsticks - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    It's surprising to see Intel's rise in marketshare. It's not like 6.8% from an absolute perspective is a lot, but as a rise from 3.7%, it's pretty impressive. Especially considering one of the main launches of recent times was the unimpressive 540. On the other hand, the SSD 600p NVMe drive looks pretty interesting.

    It'd be nice to see the other makers grab new marketshare to level out the advantage Samsung has. Competition is great for all!
  • ddriver - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    "the SSD 600p NVMe drive looks pretty interesting"

    Yeah, if you are into garbage :) Sure its cheap, but cheap as in cheap, not cheap as in affordable. Abysmal endurance, possible complete data loss on TBW "depletion" (did they clarify the behavior?), mediocre read performance, mediocre barely faster than SATA SSD write performance, and only until the SLC cache is not full, and when it fills (32gb for the 512gb model) write performance is abysmal even compared to SATA HDD.

    About time for intel to show something actually good in the storage department. So far they've been hyping optane without any availability or credible performance figures, and releasing what varies from cheap trough expensive all the way to outrageously overpriced garbage. WTF?
  • Drumsticks - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    Your other points granted, Intel raised the endurance limits of the higher capacity models to be more sensible today:

    http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-600p-endura...
  • Drumsticks - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    (Although I think your other points are a bit extreme; reviews are everything from positive to negative, not purely negative)
  • ddriver - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    Reviewers sweetmouthing a big rich corporation - unprecedented. Sure, they try to put emphasis on how cheap it is, but as I say "I am not rich enough to afford to buy cheap", cheap is a compromise and does not represent the best or even good value.

    The new endurance numbers certainly make it look a tad better, but it remains to be seen it they hold true. If I had to buy SSD now, I'd either go for a lower cost SATA, which wouldn't really make much difference, or a slightly higher cost 960 evo, which is marginally faster.
  • Lolimaster - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    Latest claims about optane is like 1/10 to 1/100 of 3D Xpoint reveal 1 year ago.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    To be fair, filling the SLC cache with write operations won't happen often in typical client usage scenarios. It's a good point that performance declines afterwards, but I can't think of many situations where I need a storage device to write that more than a few GB at a time. Yes, once in a great while I need to shuffle around a bunch of files, but that's usually when I'm offloading my cat's pictures and my music or movies to a backup device and even that's going to just be a read operation for the internal drive.
  • R7 - Thursday, October 6, 2016 - link

    What happens when the power goes out and the SSD is in the middle of offloading SLC cache to TLC NAND?

    My guess is complete data loss. With MLC you get what you see. With SLCC+TLC you never really know when it has done offloading cache and it's safe to turn off your PC. Plus popular Samsung 850 EVO models have much less cache - between 3GB to 9GB depending on capacity. Much easier to saturate than 32GB wich is borderline acceptable.
  • ddriver - Saturday, October 8, 2016 - link

    Possibly, although SLC itself is non-volatile, if the cache state is stored in volatile memory there will be no way to restore it when it is back on. And I doubt cache state data would be stored on persistent memory - it would be to slow and severely bottleneck iops. The best option would be to try and purge cache to SLC on power loss, if the circuitry runs out of juce before that its bad news.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    It's good to see SATA-based SSD sales numbers are rising more quickly than other interfaces. It's good incentive for manufacturers to continue producing larger capacity SATA devices. I'd rather not see the interface marginalized in favor of other form factors just yet.
  • Lolimaster - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    Unless you work editing video or moving large databases there's no point in getting faster than sata3 SSD's.

    Windows is barely optimized for the huge gaings in 4k performance, games even worse, that's why sometimes you get pretty much the same loading time in nvme/sata SSD and HDD's.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    The other big benefit, at least for laptops, is M.2's much smaller size. Especially for 13" and under laptops.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    Yeah, I certainly agree that losing the old 2.5 inch drive has its benefits, size being one of them. My own desire for SATA to stick around is because I have clunky old computers around that still use hard drives that I'd like to upgrade to SSDs eventually. :)
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    I've only got one Windows box left and it's got a 3.5 inch 1TB hard drive in it. I haven't really seen what an SSD can do to a Microsoft OS, but Linux seems to be able to do good things with the couple of SSDs I've fed them so far.
  • Klimax - Thursday, October 6, 2016 - link

    Not really correct. First, Windows can use SSDs quite well. In fact, there are lots of complaints that Microsoft moved to far and it is penalizing owners with regular HDDs.

    As got games, you are forgetting that all those assets needs to be processed. One again laws of diminishing returns strike again. And fi you wanted to cut down load times, better to have lots of RAM for file cache. Works wonders. (Just 16GB is enough for games)

    Remember: Computer is system, you cannot just focus on single element.
  • The Garden Variety - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    Looking forward to the inevitable post by the "SPINNY PLATTER HARD DRIVES ARE INHERENTLY SUPERIOR, HERE'S MY 10,000 WORD SINGLE PARAGRAPH ESSAY EXPLAINING WHY" crank that seems to pop in to threads like this. Written using a CRT monitor, of course.
  • ddriver - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    While SSD have proven to fail less often, they have proven more susceptible to silent data corruption. Definitely not the right choice for long term data storage. ZFS remedies UBER, but massacres performance.

    And the worst part - as flash process shrinks, endurance and data corruption will only get worse. I wish they'd simply reuse old fabs to churn out larger process node stacked nand, which is vastly superior, alas, they prefer to maximize the profit on silicon, even if it is just sand, with their older production lines saturated by other stuff.
  • jardows2 - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    With all the discussion of the increase in SSD shipments, the real breaking news got lost a bit - PC sales did not decline, and may be slightly up! Guess the PC isn't dead yet!
  • Lolimaster - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    What they don't tell you is that SSD's (specially TLC) performance goes to sh*t after you fill them over 50%, even worse at 75%.

    They should come with 25-30% extra nand as overprovisioning.
  • Impulses - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    Some of the earliest Anandtech SSD articles (still written by Anand himself at the time) made that very clear, although 50% sounds a bit extreme... I've always kept mine <80%, going back to the earliest X25-M G2.
  • ikjadoon - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    256GB SSDs are $60, but still $500 to $900 devices are stuck with ancient 500GB drives. Yuck.

    No other component is as noticeable. They just need to market them as "SUPER STORAGE DRIVES", so people realize that while it's a bit smaller, it's insanely faster.
  • Arbie - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link

    Another really superior article, thank you. A language nit if you're interested: it's "mulling over", not "mulling about".

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