Unfortunate after so many years of complete domination samsung is not even trying anymore. It will be TLC all over in order to squeeze out every cent worth of profit from that advantage.
"...the PM981 has caught up to or surpassed the MLC-based 96x drives on many tests, setting new records not just for TLC-based drives but for client SSDs as a whole."
"...in order to squeeze out every cent worth of profit from that advantage."
That's called business. If rivals don't like it, they should make something better and bring it to market. I might not like how Samsung has managed its pricing, etc., but if I were them, then based on fiduciary duty to shareholders I would do exactly the same thing.
They are not, but it requires north of a simpleton's way of looking at it to see it. Because they could have kept MLC and offered a significant boost in performance thought the entire drive.
And the claim that using TLC it catches up on MLC drives is just nonsense. There is no engineering miracle here. There is simple caching at play, the drive doesn't touch TLC for the duration of AT's flimsy test suite. Once the drive runs out of cache performance quickly gets abysmal - about 750 mb/s once it gets to the point of using TLC directly. Not to mention the reduced endurance.
Granted most casual consumers won't be doing anything as data intensive, but many prosumers will, which means that current consumer grade drives are no longer adequate for prosumer applications, which wasn't the case with the previous generation, indicating that samsung is indeed taking a step back.
And things are not looking too well in the more affordable enterprise range neither, its lousy with TLC as well. Meaning that samsungs devolution now forces prosumers to shop for the much more expensive high-end enterprise storage solutions.
I don't mind TLC. What I mind is depriving the market of MLC. I didn't mind paying the MLC premium for the 960 PRO over the EVO. It was a good deal. I mind that they are taking that deal away from the market. And if you had 2 properly working brain cells you'd mind that too.
"There is simple caching at play, the drive doesn't touch TLC for the duration of AT's flimsy test suite."
What? Here is the destroyer benchmark's description... Total GB Read: 1583.02 GB Total GB Written: 875.62 GB Total IO Operations: 49.8 million Queue depth is 50% 1 depth.
Exactly. The products are better because time passes on and technology advances, not because they are actually struggling to make them better. Profit is their number one concern performance just happens to increase from time to time...
I doubt we'll see 1TB 3D XPoint in an m.2 form factor until at least the second generation of XPoint. Power consumption looks too high; you'd probably have to severely limit performance to get into m.2, or you'd need a massive unrealistic heatsink.
I don't like those m.2 drives. Can't we have high bandwidth connection for 2.5 inch drives? It will have less thermal issues for desktop configurations.
And Drazick, what do you mean by 2.5" drives? If you're referring to SATA, well then no, it's already at its limit of 550MB/sec, and producing something akin to SATA4 would be pointless when it's also hobbled by the old AHCI protocol.
Also, "don't like" is an emotional response; what's your evidence and argument that they're a bad product somehow? Have you used them?
By 2.5" drives I'm sure he means the same form factor as standard SATA 2.5" SSDs except using a newer, faster connection just like the U.2 connectors that Dan mentioned. We definitely hit the limit of what SATA 3 can deliver and it would be nice to have a new standard that can leverage PCIe NVMe SSDs in a form factor that allows us to use cables to put drives elsewhere in a case for better layouts and airflow. U.2 was supposed to be that connector but there are basically no drives that support the standard and very few boards with more than 1 U.2 port. There are a few adapters on the market that allow you to install an M.2 drive into a 2.5" enclosure with a U.2 connector on it but until motherboards have more than 1 U.2 port it won't be a real replacement for the ubiquity of SATA.
Actually there are m.2 to U.2 connectors readily available from most MB vendors, and 7mm U.2 datacenter drives are starting to become a thing. See Intel SSD DC P4501. I wouldn't be surprised if AIC disappears after too long. Limiting the power draw would be the major hurdle in creating such drives but it's not impossible. The EDSFF is going to pave the way for many high density compact form factors for NVMe moving forward.
One more thing which I think will be different when these drives are launched as retail devices is the driver support for Phoenix controller. While, it is always difficult to pinpoint the exact bottlenecks on such bleeding edge technology, I think a driver that is better optimized for Phoenix controller will definitely produce better results (ceteris paribus)
Also, there have been rumors of QLC-Nand. If that is true, that could be the differentiator between EVO and PRO series.
Good point given the way in which most products seem to be abe to tolerate far more writes than for which they're officially rated, in which case it's likely most users will want something newer long before a QLC product's endurance has been reached. If one is doing something that will drain the endurance a lot faster, then one should be using something more suitable anyway.
Sure, but QLC is just like TLC - once you force it on enough people and you say it's "good enough", then the higher-performing but costlier flash (like SLC/MLC) slowly is removed from the product portfolio. I'm not in favor of these race-to-the-bottom "advances", just to reduce the price a bit for hte consumer but more for the mfg. You may get a slight bump in capacity, but for me, the performance/endurance trade-off with a slight reduction in price isn't worth it.
Now, I suppose it doesn't matter anymore to me since I'll still be buying the 960 Pro until the Optane 900p reaches better pricing. But the slippery slope you encounter is that new product "advances" are usually better when comapred to to the "current" state of tech. If the current standard is QLC, then the new "improvement" might only be raising it to levels that SLC/MLC were at previously. So the possibility is that it may not be that much of an improvement.
For read heavy mass storage drives, slower writes is fine. SSDs are getting fast enough that the IO or CPU is the bottleneck. Higher read latency for small queues will hurt performance, but not by a whole lot.
The endurance is only an issue if you re-write your data a lot, like a paging file or a game drive that sees a lot of updates. A relatively static mass-media drive will probably be just fine.
Latency can (till some extent) be handled with a bigger dram buffer. Also, controllers are the key here and not the NAND type. Today, even TLC can perform better than MLC/SLC just 2-3 generations ago due to better controllers.
A couple of years ago and even last year, 500GB ssd was around $80. If the prices were sane, 64-layer 3D TLC would have been below $50 for sure. And 96-layer QLC can give real competition to the HDDs.
As for lower endurance, that can be handled by slightly higher provisioning and slower writes....well they would be okay for 95% of the mainstream users. Enthusiasts have optane and Z-NAND
@sleeplessclassics - "Today, even TLC can perform better than MLC/SLC just 2-3 generations ago due to better controllers."
Well, the MLC-based 950/960 Pro still is basically beating all of the newer TLC drives. Even in SATA, my Sandisk Extreme Pro still beats all of the TLC drives.
@romrunning, well you should have paid more attention in your high school English class.
I am comparing present-gen TLC NAND with SLC/MLC that is two generations old. Of course, current gen 950/960 Pro MLC NAND with Polaris controllers will beat TLC NAND with Polaris controllers.
I suggest you begin one of the simpler ones like Aesop's fables or maybe those illustrated children books will more your level. And while you are at it, try getting an IQ test as well
Lighten up a little, and act a little more objectively. Try clarifying the original statement or submitting more information to support your point without resorting to childish insults.
For example, I will submit that you would have had to define "generations" and product lines before you put out generic statements like "Today, even TLC can perform better than MLC/SLC just 2-3 generations ago due to better controllers.". It's also hard to compare since the interface can change (like from SATA to NVMe).
For my example, I will say again that my SATA Sandisk Extreme Pro will still beat newer TLC-based SATA drives from Sandisk. Also, I believe older Intel enterprise controllers (like a DC P3700) can still beat a terrible newer drive like the Intel 600p. There are even specialized drives from several "generations" of product lines ago that can beat some of the "newer" TLC-based drives in the same product line-up.
However, obviously this is changing with NVMe-based drives, although it would harder to find a mfg with two "generations" of controllers on NVMe drives. Plus, we're getting into different tech like 3d XPoint, so TLC likely won't be around anymore a number of years in the future.
I personally am looking forward to retail releases of Samsung's Z-NAND-based drives. It will be very interesting to see how they measure up performance-wise to Optane.
Sequential write numbers are off. 1TB drive has fooled you - it has HUGE write buffer. Like 50GB huge. You need to check write speed second by second and on a much larger span (100 GB?)
It feels like we haven't seen new high end drives from Samsung in a while (not that they're really heavily in need given the performance on tap already). It'll be nice to see another round of products coming out of them. Thanks for the review!
Side note: Would it be possible to, in future SSD reviews, add those buttons that change the graphs based on capacity for the different storage metrics? Perhaps a button for "All SSDs," "250GB," "500GB," "1TB+" or something. Performance can vary wildly across capacities, and it would be a nice way to sort through all of the 500GB class drives that you've reviewed for example. The only outlier would be Optane since it isn't quite as dominated by the amount of parallel dies you can add.
Good idea; it's bizarre how sometimes the 960 EVO looks terrible compared to the 1TB version, and sometimes the other way round. Steady state is particularly bad, it's why I stuck with hunting for 950 Pros instead, which also have their own boot ROM and thus work ok on older mbds.
200$ for 512GB i have intel 530 480GB which i bought on ebay for 80 euros 3 years ago and still working great so ssd prices are insane like memory+gpu+intel cpu-s prices together, dark times for PC desktop owners unless you have dosh :)
GN has commented on this quite a lot recently, it is indeed a sucky time to build a new PC. Hence why I make the most of used parts (or new ones via normal auction) until the need for something better really is paramount. Bagged another 840 Pro 256GB recently for a good price; pity old models like this are not included in newer product reviews, I bet they'd put newer products to shame. For a while the old Vector was retained in newer reviews, but then it vanished, probably because it just looked too good compared to the latest tech. The same likely applies to the Neutron GTX, Vertex4 and various other models, at least in the SATA world anyway. If one can though, it's better to go NVMe, the SM951 and SM961 are rather good.
The most important parameter is the sustained random read, when the user have to actually wait (buffered writes let you continue working right away and it is almost impossible to overflow write caches during normal desktop usage). And even SSDs continue to suck in this parameter. 60MB/s? Booo... Although testing on 4k random is too strict, NTFS runs are usually 16 clusters (64k).
Thank you, competing OEMs. Thanks to you, Samsung isn't even trying anymore. Just when I thought they'd introduce 64 layer SLC, they decide to go full TLC, because why try harder? Screw you too, Samsung.
Exactly my point. It's not so hard for them to go to 64 or 128 or even 256 layer SLC, with even an 8TB SSD. That should be in the range of $500-$600 to be competitive. Instead they choose to deliver a drive that simply doesn't massively improve on every single data point relative to the old generation. It might be good for 95% of consumers but they don't even think of us, professionals.
Just downloading a game nowadays takes 50-100GB of SSD writes. At this rate who know how long I'm going to be able to use this kind of SSD. Greedy people selling to sheeple. Wake up!
1TB 960 Pro looks like it's the shiznit. By far my choice... cost per dollar, and as they said, impunity to the negatives seen in other sizes and models. Where it's not the first, it's so close in the other positions as to require measurement to verify. As always, thank you anand -- you guys rock.
To be the devils advocate on TLC vs MLC, isn't it odd to second guess samsung?
AMD natively demonstrate that raid striping nvme (running them in parallel if u like?), results in ~seamless multiple of raw nvme ssd speeds.
Since current samsung drives individually ~max out the 4x pcie3practical bandwidth available to the m.2 port (~3500MB/s), the ceiling on nvme device speeds currently, is not set by nand, but by IO limitations.
Given multiples of speed can be achieved by raid means , the main issue is not nand chip performance (already dazzlingly fast vs recent storage options), but how to better satisfy insatiable demand using better production.
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tsk2k - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
It's all about that 3D-Xpoint nowadays.rsandru - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Speaking of which, can we have the Optane 900p data points back in?boeush - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Hmm, yeah - all about 1 TB 3D XPoint - how much would that cost, again, and what's the retail availability of the M2 form-factor?ddriver - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Unfortunate after so many years of complete domination samsung is not even trying anymore. It will be TLC all over in order to squeeze out every cent worth of profit from that advantage.Spunjji - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
"...the PM981 has caught up to or surpassed the MLC-based 96x drives on many tests, setting new records not just for TLC-based drives but for client SSDs as a whole."Right; they're clearly not trying at all. :|
mapesdhs - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
"...in order to squeeze out every cent worth of profit from that advantage."That's called business. If rivals don't like it, they should make something better and bring it to market. I might not like how Samsung has managed its pricing, etc., but if I were them, then based on fiduciary duty to shareholders I would do exactly the same thing.
ddriver - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
They are not, but it requires north of a simpleton's way of looking at it to see it. Because they could have kept MLC and offered a significant boost in performance thought the entire drive.And the claim that using TLC it catches up on MLC drives is just nonsense. There is no engineering miracle here. There is simple caching at play, the drive doesn't touch TLC for the duration of AT's flimsy test suite. Once the drive runs out of cache performance quickly gets abysmal - about 750 mb/s once it gets to the point of using TLC directly. Not to mention the reduced endurance.
Granted most casual consumers won't be doing anything as data intensive, but many prosumers will, which means that current consumer grade drives are no longer adequate for prosumer applications, which wasn't the case with the previous generation, indicating that samsung is indeed taking a step back.
And things are not looking too well in the more affordable enterprise range neither, its lousy with TLC as well. Meaning that samsungs devolution now forces prosumers to shop for the much more expensive high-end enterprise storage solutions.
I don't mind TLC. What I mind is depriving the market of MLC. I didn't mind paying the MLC premium for the 960 PRO over the EVO. It was a good deal. I mind that they are taking that deal away from the market. And if you had 2 properly working brain cells you'd mind that too.
MFinn3333 - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
"There is simple caching at play, the drive doesn't touch TLC for the duration of AT's flimsy test suite."What? Here is the destroyer benchmark's description...
Total GB Read: 1583.02 GB
Total GB Written: 875.62 GB
Total IO Operations: 49.8 million
Queue depth is 50% 1 depth.
What is your definition of flimsy?
mkaibear - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link
This is deedee, his definition of "flimsy" is "if there is any possible way in which I can be right, then I meant that".ddrіver - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Exactly. The products are better because time passes on and technology advances, not because they are actually struggling to make them better. Profit is their number one concern performance just happens to increase from time to time...skavi - Monday, December 4, 2017 - link
Lol, tech isn't wine. If people aren't working to improve it, it won't get better.skavi - Monday, December 4, 2017 - link
Lol, tech isn't wine. If people aren't working to improve it, it won't get better.WorldWithoutMadness - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link
that and ram oligopoly. Almost reminded me of intel before ryzen.Drumsticks - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
I doubt we'll see 1TB 3D XPoint in an m.2 form factor until at least the second generation of XPoint. Power consumption looks too high; you'd probably have to severely limit performance to get into m.2, or you'd need a massive unrealistic heatsink.UltraWide - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Yes, the people want to see 900p destroy these benchmarks!! :)romrunning - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
I would love to see the Optane 900p results included as well.peevee - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Me too.mczak - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
I miss the power draw numbers.Drazick - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
I don't like those m.2 drives. Can't we have high bandwidth connection for 2.5 inch drives? It will have less thermal issues for desktop configurations.DanNeely - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
That's the barely gained any traction outside of enterprise U.2 connection.mapesdhs - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
And Drazick, what do you mean by 2.5" drives? If you're referring to SATA, well then no, it's already at its limit of 550MB/sec, and producing something akin to SATA4 would be pointless when it's also hobbled by the old AHCI protocol.Also, "don't like" is an emotional response; what's your evidence and argument that they're a bad product somehow? Have you used them?
WithoutWeakness - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
By 2.5" drives I'm sure he means the same form factor as standard SATA 2.5" SSDs except using a newer, faster connection just like the U.2 connectors that Dan mentioned. We definitely hit the limit of what SATA 3 can deliver and it would be nice to have a new standard that can leverage PCIe NVMe SSDs in a form factor that allows us to use cables to put drives elsewhere in a case for better layouts and airflow. U.2 was supposed to be that connector but there are basically no drives that support the standard and very few boards with more than 1 U.2 port. There are a few adapters on the market that allow you to install an M.2 drive into a 2.5" enclosure with a U.2 connector on it but until motherboards have more than 1 U.2 port it won't be a real replacement for the ubiquity of SATA.msabercr - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link
Actually there are m.2 to U.2 connectors readily available from most MB vendors, and 7mm U.2 datacenter drives are starting to become a thing. See Intel SSD DC P4501. I wouldn't be surprised if AIC disappears after too long. Limiting the power draw would be the major hurdle in creating such drives but it's not impossible. The EDSFF is going to pave the way for many high density compact form factors for NVMe moving forward.sleeplessclassics - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
One more thing which I think will be different when these drives are launched as retail devices is the driver support for Phoenix controller. While, it is always difficult to pinpoint the exact bottlenecks on such bleeding edge technology, I think a driver that is better optimized for Phoenix controller will definitely produce better results (ceteris paribus)Also, there have been rumors of QLC-Nand. If that is true, that could be the differentiator between EVO and PRO series.
romrunning - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Yes - QLC... more latency, lower endurance, slower writes - what's not to like? :-SSpunjji - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Lower price..? Higher densities and increased production? That's what it's all about.If 3D QLC performs like 2D TLC then it'll do just fine for mass storage.
mapesdhs - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Good point given the way in which most products seem to be abe to tolerate far more writes than for which they're officially rated, in which case it's likely most users will want something newer long before a QLC product's endurance has been reached. If one is doing something that will drain the endurance a lot faster, then one should be using something more suitable anyway.romrunning - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Sure, but QLC is just like TLC - once you force it on enough people and you say it's "good enough", then the higher-performing but costlier flash (like SLC/MLC) slowly is removed from the product portfolio. I'm not in favor of these race-to-the-bottom "advances", just to reduce the price a bit for hte consumer but more for the mfg. You may get a slight bump in capacity, but for me, the performance/endurance trade-off with a slight reduction in price isn't worth it.Now, I suppose it doesn't matter anymore to me since I'll still be buying the 960 Pro until the Optane 900p reaches better pricing. But the slippery slope you encounter is that new product "advances" are usually better when comapred to to the "current" state of tech. If the current standard is QLC, then the new "improvement" might only be raising it to levels that SLC/MLC were at previously. So the possibility is that it may not be that much of an improvement.
bcronce - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
For read heavy mass storage drives, slower writes is fine. SSDs are getting fast enough that the IO or CPU is the bottleneck. Higher read latency for small queues will hurt performance, but not by a whole lot.The endurance is only an issue if you re-write your data a lot, like a paging file or a game drive that sees a lot of updates. A relatively static mass-media drive will probably be just fine.
sleeplessclassics - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Latency can (till some extent) be handled with a bigger dram buffer. Also, controllers are the key here and not the NAND type. Today, even TLC can perform better than MLC/SLC just 2-3 generations ago due to better controllers.A couple of years ago and even last year, 500GB ssd was around $80. If the prices were sane, 64-layer 3D TLC would have been below $50 for sure.
And 96-layer QLC can give real competition to the HDDs.
As for lower endurance, that can be handled by slightly higher provisioning and slower writes....well they would be okay for 95% of the mainstream users.
Enthusiasts have optane and Z-NAND
romrunning - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
@sleeplessclassics - "Today, even TLC can perform better than MLC/SLC just 2-3 generations ago due to better controllers."Well, the MLC-based 950/960 Pro still is basically beating all of the newer TLC drives. Even in SATA, my Sandisk Extreme Pro still beats all of the TLC drives.
sleeplessclassics - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link
@romrunning, well you should have paid more attention in your high school English class.I am comparing present-gen TLC NAND with SLC/MLC that is two generations old.
Of course, current gen 950/960 Pro MLC NAND with Polaris controllers will beat TLC NAND with Polaris controllers.
I suggest you begin one of the simpler ones like Aesop's fables or maybe those illustrated children books will more your level. And while you are at it, try getting an IQ test as well
romrunning - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link
You mad, bro?! ;)Lighten up a little, and act a little more objectively. Try clarifying the original statement or submitting more information to support your point without resorting to childish insults.
For example, I will submit that you would have had to define "generations" and product lines before you put out generic statements like "Today, even TLC can perform better than MLC/SLC just 2-3 generations ago due to better controllers.". It's also hard to compare since the interface can change (like from SATA to NVMe).
For my example, I will say again that my SATA Sandisk Extreme Pro will still beat newer TLC-based SATA drives from Sandisk. Also, I believe older Intel enterprise controllers (like a DC P3700) can still beat a terrible newer drive like the Intel 600p. There are even specialized drives from several "generations" of product lines ago that can beat some of the "newer" TLC-based drives in the same product line-up.
However, obviously this is changing with NVMe-based drives, although it would harder to find a mfg with two "generations" of controllers on NVMe drives. Plus, we're getting into different tech like 3d XPoint, so TLC likely won't be around anymore a number of years in the future.
I personally am looking forward to retail releases of Samsung's Z-NAND-based drives. It will be very interesting to see how they measure up performance-wise to Optane.
treecrab - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Sequential write numbers are off.1TB drive has fooled you - it has HUGE write buffer. Like 50GB huge. You need to check write speed second by second and on a much larger span (100 GB?)
mapesdhs - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Toms posted a review and pointed this out with their sustained tests.Drumsticks - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
It feels like we haven't seen new high end drives from Samsung in a while (not that they're really heavily in need given the performance on tap already). It'll be nice to see another round of products coming out of them. Thanks for the review!Side note: Would it be possible to, in future SSD reviews, add those buttons that change the graphs based on capacity for the different storage metrics? Perhaps a button for "All SSDs," "250GB," "500GB," "1TB+" or something. Performance can vary wildly across capacities, and it would be a nice way to sort through all of the 500GB class drives that you've reviewed for example. The only outlier would be Optane since it isn't quite as dominated by the amount of parallel dies you can add.
mapesdhs - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Good idea; it's bizarre how sometimes the 960 EVO looks terrible compared to the 1TB version, and sometimes the other way round. Steady state is particularly bad, it's why I stuck with hunting for 950 Pros instead, which also have their own boot ROM and thus work ok on older mbds.Kastriot - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
200$ for 512GB i have intel 530 480GB which i bought on ebay for 80 euros 3 years ago and still working great so ssd prices are insane like memory+gpu+intel cpu-s prices together, dark times for PC desktop owners unless you have dosh :)mapesdhs - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
GN has commented on this quite a lot recently, it is indeed a sucky time to build a new PC. Hence why I make the most of used parts (or new ones via normal auction) until the need for something better really is paramount. Bagged another 840 Pro 256GB recently for a good price; pity old models like this are not included in newer product reviews, I bet they'd put newer products to shame. For a while the old Vector was retained in newer reviews, but then it vanished, probably because it just looked too good compared to the latest tech. The same likely applies to the Neutron GTX, Vertex4 and various other models, at least in the SATA world anyway. If one can though, it's better to go NVMe, the SM951 and SM961 are rather good.bcronce - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
It looked mostly on par until the "mixed" results. Nice!peevee - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
The most important parameter is the sustained random read, when the user have to actually wait (buffered writes let you continue working right away and it is almost impossible to overflow write caches during normal desktop usage).And even SSDs continue to suck in this parameter. 60MB/s? Booo...
Although testing on 4k random is too strict, NTFS runs are usually 16 clusters (64k).
wyewye - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
This is why I stopped coming to Anandtech daily: you keep excluding top offers from Intel in your SSD benchmarks.Samsung shills!
ddriver - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
LOL, second funniest thing I heard this weekddrіver - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
The first one was actually a joke with a priest and a rabbi... Can't really remember the punchline now.lilmoe - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Thank you, competing OEMs. Thanks to you, Samsung isn't even trying anymore. Just when I thought they'd introduce 64 layer SLC, they decide to go full TLC, because why try harder? Screw you too, Samsung.ddrіver - Thursday, November 30, 2017 - link
Exactly my point. It's not so hard for them to go to 64 or 128 or even 256 layer SLC, with even an 8TB SSD. That should be in the range of $500-$600 to be competitive. Instead they choose to deliver a drive that simply doesn't massively improve on every single data point relative to the old generation. It might be good for 95% of consumers but they don't even think of us, professionals.Just downloading a game nowadays takes 50-100GB of SSD writes. At this rate who know how long I'm going to be able to use this kind of SSD. Greedy people selling to sheeple. Wake up!
zodiacfml - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link
Samsung, like Intel, has no competition taking their sweet time with each iteration.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, December 2, 2017 - link
In many cases Samsung costs more and has less endurance; the competition is better.melgross - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link
It’s good to see that manufacturers are so far in advance of where they already are:“Other M.2 PCIe SSD vendors have used that tactic and many have also released drives with more substantial heatspreaders or heatsinks in the future.”
trumanhw - Sunday, December 31, 2017 - link
1TB 960 Pro looks like it's the shiznit. By far my choice... cost per dollar, and as they said, impunity to the negatives seen in other sizes and models. Where it's not the first, it's so close in the other positions as to require measurement to verify. As always, thank you anand -- you guys rock.msroadkill612 - Sunday, December 31, 2017 - link
Not if you have lane rich TR/Epyc IMO. 2x 512GB 960 proS in raid 0 is 2x~ faster for similar moneymsroadkill612 - Monday, January 1, 2018 - link
It bears noting that each ssd is also a controller, and the samsung one seems very superior kit which may contribute to samsung's scary advantages.Each is a 5x ARM core processor.
msroadkill612 - Monday, January 1, 2018 - link
To be the devils advocate on TLC vs MLC, isn't it odd to second guess samsung?AMD natively demonstrate that raid striping nvme (running them in parallel if u like?), results in ~seamless multiple of raw nvme ssd speeds.
Since current samsung drives individually ~max out the 4x pcie3practical bandwidth available to the m.2 port (~3500MB/s), the ceiling on nvme device speeds currently, is not set by nand, but by IO limitations.
Given multiples of speed can be achieved by raid means , the main issue is not nand chip performance (already dazzlingly fast vs recent storage options), but how to better satisfy insatiable demand using better production.
Personally, I would defer to samsung on that.