I'm looking forward to the day I can read a SSD review and not come away thinking "...or just buy a Samsung".
Not that I begrudge them top spot, they've clearly put the work into it, but as consumers we'd be better served if at least /someone/ else were competing on, like, any metric.
Crucial used to be in the game back when Sata SSD's were king, then they just never released another MLC drive, nor any consumer nvme drives. So yeah, Samsung is definitely unchallenged now. Though that Toshiba xg5 kept up well in the destroyer benchmark.
Crucial is still in the game. They just can't compete with Samsung on performance. Nobody can.
But in my experience, Crucial/Micron drives are slightly more reliable that Samsung (obviously excusing the flawed 840\840 EVO) especially in regard to power loss scenarios. That's why you continue to see more Micron drives in enterprise and business PC's than any other brand (except perhaps Sandisk, in which case they are often the same Marvell controller so the differentiating factor comes down to firmware and in-flight data protection)
It's really hard to consider anything else when looking at "new" drives. Samsung and Crucial/Micron are really at the top. Sandisk is decent, but not cost competitive at the high end, and OCZ's has had some good drives for the price lately, but why gamble?
And if you are looking for cheap MLC drives, older Intel drives are still the best bet. I still have a soft spot for SSD320's and SSD710's if you can live with the 3Gbps interface they are bulletproof and incredibly cheap on fleabay.
"That's why you continue to see more Micron drives in enterprise and business PC's than any other brand (except perhaps Sandisk, in which case they are often the same Marvell controller so the differentiating factor comes down to firmware and in-flight data protection)"
Maybe it's the particular vendor, but the Dell and Cisco equipment I deal with in both the server and desktop space use mainly Samsung, with some Toshiba XG series on the client side.
Well at least I can be satisfied knowing I made a good investment buying my 1TB 960 EVO -- heck I think I paid around $400 - $450 or so for it -- cheaper than the 800GB version of this. It makes reviews boring but at the same time it sucks spending good money on something and then seeing something cheaper and faster released shortly after, although I do agree that we need to see some competition.
Yeah. Perfromance is one thing but price another and this drive is clearly overpriced. If you want me to use a pcie-card ssd you better deliver something special but this fails. What's missing is a strady-state bench. First the large spare area gets praised but then no steady-state data? IMHO that is usually the most important aspect of the review, the actual performance the drive will have not some "marketing" numbers.
The ATSB Heavy and Light tests include data from runs on a full drive, and The Destroyer writes more than enough data to put this drive into steady-state. Synthetic benchmarks of steady-state performance would not be more representative of real-world usage. Client drives do not get hammered with constant writes. I will eventually add some steady-state tests back into the test suite, but they will not be and never have been the most important aspect of a client drive review. They're useful to study how the drive handles garbage collection under pressure, but the impact that has on real-world performance is minimal.
did I miss something big, besides the card? This while a good review, is a very uninteresting product that just wastes space compared to a 4x m.2 slot.
You can put a card form factor drive in an older board without m.2 slots. Unfortunately the underlying Phision controller isn't much faster than older SATA models; making it another underwhelming product.
Even then you can buy a cheap PCI-E x4 to m.2 adapter for like $15. There's no reason for this card to exist at these capacities. If it was 2 or 4TB, maybe, but not 400/800GB
Yup, I have a 960 Pro 512GB on an Akasa card on an X79 board, does about 3.5GB/sec in CDM.
Pity the review didn't mention the cheaper SM951/SM961, and they really need to get a 960 Pro to round out the data, the one I bought wasn't that much more than the EVO and it's a far better product. I don't like the 960 EVO, it's slower than the 950 Pro most of the time.
> Skip to the graphs. > Another SSD that gets pwned by a 960 Evo, nevermind the Pro. > Write this comment, ignore the rest of the review and close the tab.
If I am not mistaken, 960 EVO 1 TB can perform quite differently to 500GB... so using the 1TB performance per dollar does not seem very fair to the 400 GB...
I do wish I had a sample of the 500GB 960 EVO, because performance does generally scale with capacity. But it's pretty safe to assume that at low queue depths and while the SLC cache isn't full, the 500GB 960 EVO will perform similarly enough to the 1TB that it still beats the Phison E7 drives.
Yes, according to Tom's and others, the 500 GB 960 EVO is still the drive to have in its size class - which is why I bought one. On the other hand the 256 GB 960 EVO doesn't stand up against the competition like the 500 and up drives do. So, when comparing these drives with an eye to actually purchasing one, its a great idea to find reviews of the actual size you are looking at and comparing against other like sized drives.
Trouble with the EVO is when its cache is full it can't take the heavy writes, and its random & steady state performance are not that great. They're good enough (I bought a 250GB for my brother), but the Pro is way better, and the 950 Pro is better aswell.
Unlike say, the Samsung SSD 960 series or the Intel SSD 750, which do have something to offer, especially when it comes to sequential performance, these drives really struggle to justify the premium.
Yeah it seems increasingly like Intel (SSD 750 dominates sustained writes on 4k) and Samsung (dominates most other benchmarks).
I mean, products like Optane are expensive, but at least they have some premium (ex: the good 4k performance).
Corsair expects to be paid higher for whatever it puts together no matter what. The same is true with Cooler Master and Logitech. For each single one of their products there is an equivalent product on the market that is higher in quality and performance and considerably lower in price.
I don't know about Cooler Master, but logitech sells plenty of cheap stuff and some products have very good prices for what they offer. The G502 was quite the revolution in perf/price and I find my G610 to have very good quality compared to Corsais Oferings.
With PCIe lane counts coming up, I hope to see Samsung and Intel start using them
With a full 16 lanes being used, benchmarking can finally change along with the SSD processors/firmware
Intel may take the lead with xpoint initially, but with the ability to run several simultaneous tests on an SSD max iop / mixed mode, copy/paste, 100GB uncompressed read speed, 100GB uncompressed write as well as torture tests as the onboard processors finally catch up to the lane counts, I think Samsung may yet have a few surprises for xpoint
No matter how many PCIe lanes your ThreadRipper CPU has available (assume that's what you are talking about since you say 16 core) the spec for NVMe is still x4
NVMe has nothing to say about PCIe lane counts. You're probably thinking about the M.2 connector, but that is hardly the only way to connect a PCIe SSD.
Hey look, another SSD that has no reason whatsoever to exist!
I don't understand why manufacturers don't, y'know, try to COMPETE with Samsung instead of re-re-releasing the same old, tired, slow controllers with slightly different but ultimately insignificant spins on them.
Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller. That means almost all of the other companies selling drives have to pick and choose between a handful of controllers made by Phison/etc. Until they recover from Samsung's blind siding them and design new higher performing architectures from the ground up none of them have anything in the same performance class. If what happened at the start of the market when Intel's controllers were unbeatable is any indication we should hopefully have competitive designs available in another year or so.
-- Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller.
well, isn't a controller an implementation of physics and math? which is to say, unless something new happens with NAND chips (not just node size or xLC), may haps we've reached the one-true-answer to the controller problem? may be there's just no more there, there.
I had originally planned to include the 400GB 750, but some of the results from it looked funny and I decided it wasn't worth postponing the review for several days to re-test the 750. That drive's a pain to test, because I have to run each test twice in order to record the power on both the 3.3V and 12V lines, and the performance has to match between the two runs for the results to be valid.
There are statistical methods available out there that even with noisy data (e.g. high standard deviations) that you can still use it to process data that might otherwise not make sense at first glance, on the surface.
Course, that would also mean that care would need to be taking so that the tests in and of itself are repeatable.
I only mention it because I would be VERY interested to see how this compared to the Intel 750 series.
The XG5 is an OEM drive. They're selling every single one they can manufacture to companies like Dell. We'll see a retail counterpart eventually, once their BiCS3 manufacturing volume ramps up.
They'll be back eventually. I'm currently keeping the testbed busy around the clock with all the new drives that have arrived recently, plus re-testing older drives on the new 2017 test suite. The steady-state performance consistency test was the least realistic benchmark on the old 2015 test suite, so its replacement in the 2017 suite is my lowest priority. Once the testbed has some idle time, I'll go back and run the steady-state performance consistency tests on everything.
In the meantime, the ATSB tests do have consistency scores in the form of 99th percentile latency, including broken down by reads and writes. I'm also considering adding some form of consistency score to the synthetic benchmarks that are already in this review.
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Exodite - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I'm looking forward to the day I can read a SSD review and not come away thinking "...or just buy a Samsung".Not that I begrudge them top spot, they've clearly put the work into it, but as consumers we'd be better served if at least /someone/ else were competing on, like, any metric.
Ej24 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Crucial used to be in the game back when Sata SSD's were king, then they just never released another MLC drive, nor any consumer nvme drives. So yeah, Samsung is definitely unchallenged now. Though that Toshiba xg5 kept up well in the destroyer benchmark.coolhardware - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Agreed. Samsung has been at the top for so long it is just boring.Kudos to Samsung though for making some fast and reliable SSDs at a reasonable price point.
Lolimaster - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I think we got more chances to see GloFo AMD branded SSD better than the 850 than waiting for the known competitors.Samus - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Crucial is still in the game. They just can't compete with Samsung on performance. Nobody can.But in my experience, Crucial/Micron drives are slightly more reliable that Samsung (obviously excusing the flawed 840\840 EVO) especially in regard to power loss scenarios. That's why you continue to see more Micron drives in enterprise and business PC's than any other brand (except perhaps Sandisk, in which case they are often the same Marvell controller so the differentiating factor comes down to firmware and in-flight data protection)
It's really hard to consider anything else when looking at "new" drives. Samsung and Crucial/Micron are really at the top. Sandisk is decent, but not cost competitive at the high end, and OCZ's has had some good drives for the price lately, but why gamble?
And if you are looking for cheap MLC drives, older Intel drives are still the best bet. I still have a soft spot for SSD320's and SSD710's if you can live with the 3Gbps interface they are bulletproof and incredibly cheap on fleabay.
DigitalFreak - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
"That's why you continue to see more Micron drives in enterprise and business PC's than any other brand (except perhaps Sandisk, in which case they are often the same Marvell controller so the differentiating factor comes down to firmware and in-flight data protection)"Maybe it's the particular vendor, but the Dell and Cisco equipment I deal with in both the server and desktop space use mainly Samsung, with some Toshiba XG series on the client side.
tipoo - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
It's maybe ironic the only one challenging them on SSD speed isn't selling SSDs outside their own systems, i.e the last custom Apple SSD controller.tipoo - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Actually I'd love to see that put through this suite.extide - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Well at least I can be satisfied knowing I made a good investment buying my 1TB 960 EVO -- heck I think I paid around $400 - $450 or so for it -- cheaper than the 800GB version of this. It makes reviews boring but at the same time it sucks spending good money on something and then seeing something cheaper and faster released shortly after, although I do agree that we need to see some competition.beginner99 - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Yeah. Perfromance is one thing but price another and this drive is clearly overpriced. If you want me to use a pcie-card ssd you better deliver something special but this fails.What's missing is a strady-state bench. First the large spare area gets praised but then no steady-state data? IMHO that is usually the most important aspect of the review, the actual performance the drive will have not some "marketing" numbers.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
The ATSB Heavy and Light tests include data from runs on a full drive, and The Destroyer writes more than enough data to put this drive into steady-state. Synthetic benchmarks of steady-state performance would not be more representative of real-world usage. Client drives do not get hammered with constant writes. I will eventually add some steady-state tests back into the test suite, but they will not be and never have been the most important aspect of a client drive review. They're useful to study how the drive handles garbage collection under pressure, but the impact that has on real-world performance is minimal.qlum - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
The only place I wouldn't go for samsung is when you want to use a cheap 120gb ssd. At that point the cheapest samsung drives are just too expensive.Vorl - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
did I miss something big, besides the card? This while a good review, is a very uninteresting product that just wastes space compared to a 4x m.2 slot.DanNeely - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
You can put a card form factor drive in an older board without m.2 slots. Unfortunately the underlying Phision controller isn't much faster than older SATA models; making it another underwhelming product.DigitalFreak - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Even then you can buy a cheap PCI-E x4 to m.2 adapter for like $15. There's no reason for this card to exist at these capacities. If it was 2 or 4TB, maybe, but not 400/800GBmapesdhs - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Yup, I have a 960 Pro 512GB on an Akasa card on an X79 board, does about 3.5GB/sec in CDM.Pity the review didn't mention the cheaper SM951/SM961, and they really need to get a 960 Pro to round out the data, the one I bought wasn't that much more than the EVO and it's a far better product. I don't like the 960 EVO, it's slower than the 950 Pro most of the time.
r3loaded - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
> Skip to the graphs.> Another SSD that gets pwned by a 960 Evo, nevermind the Pro.
> Write this comment, ignore the rest of the review and close the tab.
creed3020 - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
+1Unfortunately so, wish it wasn't......very disappointing Corsair.
timchen - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
If I am not mistaken, 960 EVO 1 TB can perform quite differently to 500GB... so using the 1TB performance per dollar does not seem very fair to the 400 GB...Billy Tallis - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I do wish I had a sample of the 500GB 960 EVO, because performance does generally scale with capacity. But it's pretty safe to assume that at low queue depths and while the SLC cache isn't full, the 500GB 960 EVO will perform similarly enough to the 1TB that it still beats the Phison E7 drives.shabby - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
According to toms review the 500gb one still does 2gb/s read/write at qd1, nothing touches it.Ratman6161 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Yes, according to Tom's and others, the 500 GB 960 EVO is still the drive to have in its size class - which is why I bought one. On the other hand the 256 GB 960 EVO doesn't stand up against the competition like the 500 and up drives do. So, when comparing these drives with an eye to actually purchasing one, its a great idea to find reviews of the actual size you are looking at and comparing against other like sized drives.mapesdhs - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Trouble with the EVO is when its cache is full it can't take the heavy writes, and its random & steady state performance are not that great. They're good enough (I bought a 250GB for my brother), but the Pro is way better, and the 950 Pro is better aswell.CrazyElf - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
This doesn't justify the premium over SATA SSDs.Unlike say, the Samsung SSD 960 series or the Intel SSD 750, which do have something to offer, especially when it comes to sequential performance, these drives really struggle to justify the premium.
Yeah it seems increasingly like Intel (SSD 750 dominates sustained writes on 4k) and Samsung (dominates most other benchmarks).
I mean, products like Optane are expensive, but at least they have some premium (ex: the good 4k performance).
versesuvius - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Corsair expects to be paid higher for whatever it puts together no matter what. The same is true with Cooler Master and Logitech. For each single one of their products there is an equivalent product on the market that is higher in quality and performance and considerably lower in price.valinor89 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I don't know about Cooler Master, but logitech sells plenty of cheap stuff and some products have very good prices for what they offer. The G502 was quite the revolution in perf/price and I find my G610 to have very good quality compared to Corsais Oferings.Bullwinkle J Moose - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
With PCIe lane counts coming up, I hope to see Samsung and Intel start using themWith a full 16 lanes being used, benchmarking can finally change along with the SSD processors/firmware
Intel may take the lead with xpoint initially, but with the ability to run several simultaneous tests on an SSD max iop / mixed mode, copy/paste, 100GB uncompressed read speed, 100GB uncompressed write as well as torture tests as the onboard processors finally catch up to the lane counts, I think Samsung may yet have a few surprises for xpoint
4 lanes ain't gonna cut it for my 16 core cpu
Get with the times!
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
No matter how many PCIe lanes your ThreadRipper CPU has available (assume that's what you are talking about since you say 16 core) the spec for NVMe is still x4Billy Tallis - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
NVMe has nothing to say about PCIe lane counts. You're probably thinking about the M.2 connector, but that is hardly the only way to connect a PCIe SSD.hlm - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Yes, it is when NVMe is used through U.2 and M.2 that you get four-lane PCIe. When used through SATA Express, NVMe is stuck with two-lane PCIe.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
There are numerous 8-lane enterprise SSDs already.hlm - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
e.g. HGST FlashMAX III and HGST Ultrastar SN260 products are eight-lane devices.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Hey look, another SSD that has no reason whatsoever to exist!I don't understand why manufacturers don't, y'know, try to COMPETE with Samsung instead of re-re-releasing the same old, tired, slow controllers with slightly different but ultimately insignificant spins on them.
DanNeely - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller. That means almost all of the other companies selling drives have to pick and choose between a handful of controllers made by Phison/etc. Until they recover from Samsung's blind siding them and design new higher performing architectures from the ground up none of them have anything in the same performance class. If what happened at the start of the market when Intel's controllers were unbeatable is any indication we should hopefully have competitive designs available in another year or so.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
-- Because unless you have a billion dollars to spend and a few years to wait, you can't create your own controller.well, isn't a controller an implementation of physics and math? which is to say, unless something new happens with NAND chips (not just node size or xLC), may haps we've reached the one-true-answer to the controller problem? may be there's just no more there, there.
Samus - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Wow. That was disappointing.RaistlinZ - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
Current Newegg Prices:1. 500GB Samsung 960 Pro = $299.99
2. 1TB Samsung 960 Pro = 600.82
The NX500 has no reason to exist. The price needs to be cut in half to make it even REMOTELY attractive.
alpha754293 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link
I'm surprised you didn't bother comparing it against the Intel 750 Series 400 GB PCIe NVMe SSD.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I had originally planned to include the 400GB 750, but some of the results from it looked funny and I decided it wasn't worth postponing the review for several days to re-test the 750. That drive's a pain to test, because I have to run each test twice in order to record the power on both the 3.3V and 12V lines, and the performance has to match between the two runs for the results to be valid.alpha754293 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Depending on how you want to tackle/handle it.There are statistical methods available out there that even with noisy data (e.g. high standard deviations) that you can still use it to process data that might otherwise not make sense at first glance, on the surface.
Course, that would also mean that care would need to be taking so that the tests in and of itself are repeatable.
I only mention it because I would be VERY interested to see how this compared to the Intel 750 series.
Thanks.
damianrobertjones - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Opens Amazon/ebay and types 'Toshiba XG5'. Nothing found. Oh well you've lost a possible sale Toshiba! Well done. (U.K.)mapesdhs - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Get a 960 Pro instead, far better buy. My 512GB was only 249 UKP new.Or if you want to save some pennies, look for an SM951, SM961 or the older 950 Pro.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
The XG5 is an OEM drive. They're selling every single one they can manufacture to companies like Dell. We'll see a retail counterpart eventually, once their BiCS3 manufacturing volume ramps up.wazoo42 - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
What happened to the performance consistency tests? Those were one of the primary reasons I went to Anand for SSD reviews.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
They'll be back eventually. I'm currently keeping the testbed busy around the clock with all the new drives that have arrived recently, plus re-testing older drives on the new 2017 test suite. The steady-state performance consistency test was the least realistic benchmark on the old 2015 test suite, so its replacement in the 2017 suite is my lowest priority. Once the testbed has some idle time, I'll go back and run the steady-state performance consistency tests on everything.In the meantime, the ATSB tests do have consistency scores in the form of 99th percentile latency, including broken down by reads and writes. I'm also considering adding some form of consistency score to the synthetic benchmarks that are already in this review.