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  • StrangerGuy - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Yet another new SSD article on AT that ends up showing how it gets destroyed by Samsung in overall specs/price.
  • franz899 - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Actually the Crucial BX100 is a better choice looking at the scores.
  • medi03 - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Nope, not to note it isn't even present on many screens and MX200 is a different product.
  • SmokingCrop - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    The BX series is better bang for the buck, you won't notice the speed difference with the popular samsung drives.
  • salimbest83 - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link

    im shopping for new 240GB+ ssd. looks like BX100 is the way to go rite?
  • Billie Boyd - Friday, November 27, 2015 - link

    I rather go with AMD Radeon R7 series. Its one of the highly rated high drives in the market (see http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-hard-dri... for example)
  • emn13 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    Assuming this is a low-end drive i.e. cheaper than the 850 pro, it looks like it outperforms the 850 evo mSata pretty much across the board, getting close to crucial's BX100.
  • FriendlyUser - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    As an owner of 2x840 EVO and 2xPlextor, I can tell you the Samsung's bug was a major disappointment. Read performance after months simply sucks and I had to patch the firmware 2-3 times and regularly "manually" freshen the data with the samsung tool. I have way more confidence in the Plextor firmware. Never again Samsung.
  • AnnonymousCoward - Friday, October 16, 2015 - link

    ...yet another SSD article on AT that focuses on the pointlessness of non-real world benchmarks. Readers will leave this article without having a clue what boot time differences to expect between drives, or any other metric. I've been saying this for years. HardOCP finally caught on. http://tinyurl.com/pvyzmau
  • dj_aris - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    What is the purpose of reviewing SATA SSD drives? Anyone in the market for a drive should either buy a spinning HDD for storage or a PCIe for speed.
  • mczak - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    I beg to differ. For 90% of all use cases, the performance difference of a pcie drive to a sata one will be minimal if not unnoticeable whereas the pcie one is a lot more expensive (for now - I don't see a technical reason for this, really). Whereas everybody probably agrees the performance difference from sata ssd to sata HD is definitely noticeable.
    Albeit this drive indeed doesn't really offer anything interesting. There's nothing wrong with that but that means it has to nearly exclusively compete based on price, which it currently does not.
  • svan1971 - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    simply not true, having used an sm951 for 3 months now the performance increase over the 850 is absolutely noticeable from bootup to shutdown and everything in between.
  • geniekid - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    http://techreport.com/review/28446/samsung-sm951-p...

    According to techreport boot times are noticeably faster and general loading times are not.
  • JimmiG - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    We're still just talking about a few seconds difference. Most people won't notice the difference between a boot time of 37 seconds and 33 seconds. What people will notice is the difference between *any* SSD and any regular HDD.

    Most consumers should just get the cheapest SSD at the highest capacity they can afford. The performance difference isn't enough to justify going with e.g. a higher-performance 250GB SSD over a slightly slower 500GB drive (which allows you to store more of your data on the SSD instead of your much slower HDD).
  • mapesdhs - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link

    Irony is, right now the 850 EVO is also one of the best value SSDs available. Atm I wouldn't choose anything else for mainstream use.
  • emn13 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    Even if this were true (which really depends on your workload - for common workloads it really isn't), that doesn't mean it'd be a good idea to pick between the extremely expensive PCIe solutions and the extremely slow HDD solutions - old fashioned SATA still commands the sweet spot.

    Perhaps not for much longer, of course :-).
  • Clauzii - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Also, try hotswapping a PCIe-card :)
  • Billy Tallis - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    M.2 doesn't support hotplug, but it's been part of PCIe forever and is supported by both the normal full size expansion card form factor and the U.2 connector. The problem is that consumer-class systems often don't bother to fully implement support for the feature, though obviously they support it on some level for the sake of ExpressCard and Thunderbolt.
  • Ramalth - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link

    Not taking in consideration that you cannot add or replace (most) laptops HDD with PCI-Express versions, so you have to use a SATA drive forcefully ...
  • devione - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    What's the point of having bicycles when there are cars?

    What's the point of having cars when there are airplanes?
  • Vepsa - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Because not everyone needs or can afford a PCIe SSD. Or they have a computer that can't boot from one. I'd love two 250GB SSDs for my home server, but they have to be SATA or SAS because all its PCIe slots are full.
  • Mr Perfect - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Yes, SATA it's still quite relevant. It's not exciting, but we can all use them.
  • hyno111 - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    There are currently no consumer PCIe SSD for laptops. SM951s are for OEM and may have trouble finding warranty. 950 pro is not out yet.
    Not to mention prices..
  • close - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    So it's integrated GPU if you want power savings and Titan X SLI if you want performance. Nothing in between?

    There are shades of gray (maybe less than 50 are distinguishable though). Where do I fit a PCIe SSD? Unless it's a PCIe card then it's out. Also the price is a downer as while it may bring huge performance benefits, they don't justify the price for most users.

    And don't forget that *any* computer out there will hugely benefit from even a cheap SSD while upgrading from that cheap SSD to an expensive one upgrading will bring less impressive improvements.
  • xenol - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    The practical performance for many operations on secondary memory do not make anything beyond a SATA based SSD worthwhile. Go look up anecdotal reviews of RAM Drives, and you'll find many operations, despite RAM Drives offering orders of magnitude better performance, offer at best 10% better performance. Is it worth spending nearly twice as much on a PCIe drive than it is to get an SSD with double the capacity for what amounts to a 10% performance increase? No.

    Also, most storage operations that happen during regular use of a PC are very tiny. Most of them are <128KB in size. At that point, bandwidth is insignificant, but latency is what matters. And that's where SSDs really shine over HDDs.
  • Impulses - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    It's all relative, there's plenty of common content creation scenarios where a PCI-E SSD makes a big big difference... Whether it's worth it or not is pretty subjective.

    Enthusiasts used to pay for stuff lime Raptor where the difference was relatively minor by comparison... Small (256GB) SM951 for me right now for the OS/apps, 2x1TB 850 EVOs for most else, why make it either/or? (on a desktop anyway)
  • xenol - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    If you're on an unlimited budget, then sure, go spend money on the bestest thing possible.

    But if you're on a limited budget, sacrificing a few things here and there because they don't add much to the pie are the decisions you have to make. If you're a gamer, PCIe SSDs are worthless. Go spend the difference on a better video card. If you're a content creator, it still depends on the content being created. The only time I can ever see a high speed SSD as necessary is if you're dumping a ton of data from somewhere. Otherwise, just throw more RAM at the problem. Besides that, the CPU is probably still the biggest bottleneck in those scenarios (a year or two ago, someone mentioned that Intel's Ivy Bridge E was the only part he could find that could do a 1:1 BD-ROM rip and encode, which means for a 2 hour video and assuming the entire 25GB was used, the CPU was pumping out ~120MB/s... You can easily sustain that on a hard drive)
  • StrangerGuy - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    Define "enthusiasts". Long ago during Raptor days there were also a huge mass of so-called "enthusiasts" who recommended against Raptors because they were a big stinking waste of money compared to regular 7200 rpm drives. Enthusiasts aren't people who will mindlessly throw good money for some ultra niche hardware they don't need despite what you want us believe.
  • name99 - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Oh don't be narrow-minded.
    In just the last month I have
    (a) replaced the HD in a friend's old MacBook Pro with an SSD (to speed up the machine)

    (b) had the HD in my 3-yr old iMac fail (not exactly fail, but enough SMART warnings that it's time to stop gambling on it staying alive), so I switched to booting off a 1TB SSD stuck in a USB-3 enclosure.

    Both of these were perfect use cases for a SATA SSD...
  • Coup27 - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    What on earth are you smoking? (dj_aris)
  • eek2121 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    PCIE SSDs? Can you find me one with 500 gb storage for $169? The market isn't there yet. PCIE SSDs are in the minority and the price premium is still too high. The performance difference is minimal, especially for casual users.
  • Denithor - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    How's $173? Amazon has the Crucial MX200 500GB drive at this price point. And if you had asked yesterday, it was on sale for $140.

    http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX200-500GB-Internal...
  • coolhardware - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    I believe he was referring to any type of PCIe SSDs such as http://amzn.to/1Naj0E2 (Intel 400GB) or a M.2 drive, not a SATA drive as per your link (Crucial 500GB).
  • Luke212 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    You mean in your circumstances. Most laptops dont support M.2 PCIe. So we are stuck buying M.2 Sata or 2.5" Sata.
  • SmokingCrop - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    HDD is too slow for OS/programs and PCIe is too expensive.
    SATA SSD's is the sweet spot in between.
  • usernametaken76 - Thursday, October 15, 2015 - link

    Some people have older systems and would like to freshen them without replacing the thing, you know? Not everyone can utilize PCIe storage (laptops for instance) and not everyone wants the drawbacks of spinning HDD storage. That's the nice thing about choice, dj_aris doesn't get to make the choice for everyone.
  • Denithor - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    And today only (10/12) the Crucial BX100 250GB drive is on sale at Amazon for $64. So this could make the whole question of best value for price moot, if you move quickly.

    :)
  • coolhardware - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    Ordered one myself! Currently Amazon's #1 selling SSD. http://amzn.to/1VPK7vk The 500GB drives are a nice price too.

    Just imagine, in a few years we should be able to get 2TB and 4TB+ for a fairly low price. That will be AWESOME.
  • nmm - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    I guess I can understand the compulsion to build a better SATA SSD if you're not already the market leader in SATA SSD's. It's much cheaper than plunging into uncharted territory. I do find it a little puzzling that there isn't more movement in the M.2/U.2 market. Seems like it would get tiresome constantly bumping up against the limits of the protocol for years on end.
  • Gigaplex - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    If these lower end SSD manufacturers targeted a faster protocol using tech that can't fully utilise SATA3, it's likely to be an uncompetitive product.
  • eddieobscurant - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    when is the samsung 950 pro review coming up?
  • Billy Tallis - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Soon.

    I wanted to start with a more straightforward and predictable review to make sure I had the test rig set up correctly. The 950 Pro review calls for some deeper investigation than this one, since it's the first real mainstream consumer NVMe drive and there are custom drivers and stuff like that to investigate.
  • coolhardware - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    Sweet action, looking forward to it! :-)
  • Coup27 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link

    Billy when you do the review for the 950 Pro would you be able to do a couple of paragraphs recapping over SATA Express, PCI Express, M.2, U.2 and anything else related to it? I've half kept up to date but I don't think they've done a great job of keeping it clear either.
  • Xichekolas - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link

    Mind having a section on Linux support/compatibility/etc in the 950 review? When you say "custom drivers and stuff like that to investigate" it makes me dread the buy-new-product-wait-a-month-for-kernel-support routine.
  • Billy Tallis - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link

    As I understand it, the custom drivers for NVMe is a thing everybody is doing to get around the limitations of Microsoft's driver, like not being able to send administrative commands to the drive (including the equivalent of secure erase). At least some of the features of Samsung's SSD Magician software will probably require their NVMe driver. I have yet to encounter a custom NVMe driver for Linux, only vendor-specific management tools.

    Anyways, the 950 Pro review's section on compatibility will be as thorough as I have time and resources for. I've done some work to equip our testbed to measure PCIe power consumption for the first time, which means I really should re-test the SM951 and XP941 for comparison's sake.
  • Cliff34 - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Thanks for the review. But it seems like these days if the SSDs cannot differentiate themselves either in price (cheaper the better), speed (faster the better) and reliability (the longer the better), there's very little incentive to buy a SSD that's somewhere in the middle.

    If you want value, get the BX100 (or one that's on sale) or if you want speed, get the Samsung 850 Pro or the Sandisk Extreme Pro.
  • zodiacfml - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Even Intel/Micron isn't sure if they can compete with Samsung.
  • MagickChicken - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link

    So am I right in thinking that this generation of consumer-grade SATA SSDs operates roughly 50% better than my current SSD, the Vertex 3?
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-...

    Seems like there'd be a higher increase in performance over four years considering how new the market was in 2011, though I'm certainly not going to knock the 50-60% drop in $/GB. Or is there a more significant change in the benchmarks that I'm not picking up on?
  • Billy Tallis - Sunday, October 18, 2015 - link

    Some of the benchmark metrics are simply hitting SATA limits on bandwidth and latency. Others are constrained by the limited parallelism of interactive I/O, so the fundamental performance limits of NAND flash are showing through.

    Also keep in mind that pretty much all NAND production advances have been used to drive down cost, not to improve performance or reliability. We could be making SLC that's cheaper than the MLC used in early SATA SSDs, but the market prefers increased capacity and that's why we have TLC drives now and complicated slow error correction methods to keep them mostly working.
  • lprates - Thursday, October 15, 2015 - link

    It doesn't add nothing new to the market

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