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  • Dr. Swag - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    Damn $110 for a 500gb ssd. We're almost at the $100 point... Too bad the controller doesn't have any dram.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    That is a really low price for the capacity. The lack of DRAM is going to have performance implications, but they'll still feel quicker than a hard drive so it may be tolerable to the person at the keyboard. It'd be nice if Anandtech could run one of these through the usual benchmarks someday.
  • close - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - link

    The Crucial MX500 frequently retails for well under $250 for the 1TB model and under $130 for the 500GB one. And the price has been going down constantly since January. So I'd say we are already in the "close to $100/500GB" territory for a while now.
  • bananaforscale - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    The specs say there's a DRAM buffer.
  • Death666Angel - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    And the specs for the controller say DRAM-less.
  • Glaring_Mistake - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    Ok, DRAMless controllers usually have a small cache of SDRAM (around 32MB I think).
    But otherwise with most SSDs using DRAM, you get 1MB of DRAM for every GB of capacity, so if the drive is 240-256GB then it has 256MB of DRAM and a drive with 480-512GB has 512MB and so on.
  • hojnikb - Sunday, April 1, 2018 - link

    Nope, XT models are completely without external RAM support. They do however have a little bit of SRAM internally, but thats about it.
  • Glaring_Mistake - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link

    Was not claiming that the XT-models are using anything other than the internal SRAM though.
    Meant to say that DRAMless drives have some small amount of internal SRAM (and Phison is the only one I know that mentions the amount of SRAM used which is where I got 32MB from).
    While drives not using DRAMless controllers tend to have 1MB of DRAM for every 1GB of capacity (the Corsair XTi series being an exception to that rule with twice the amount of DRAM).
  • ozzuneoj86 - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    ~500GB SSDs were often on sale for around $100 a couple years ago. The prices have gone up and are finally getting back to where they used to be.
  • Samus - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    I would have been shocked to see DRAM on what is seemingly the least expensive SSD on the market, even if DRAM adds only $4 to the BOM.

    At the end of the day Mushkin is at least being honest by marketing this as an HDD upgrade, not an upgrade from an existing SSD (unless you’re still rocking like an Intel X25-M) because even an 840 from 5 years ago is likely to trump this drive provided it doesn’t have bad NAND.
  • hojnikb - Sunday, April 1, 2018 - link

    It's not just about DRAM bom. DRAM also needs more complex pcb, more pins on the controller itself...
  • Samus - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link

    True, a lot of the cost savings of a DRAMless controller are carried over to the PCB, which almost always lack tracing and provisions for DRAM. The cost of a DRAM controller vs a DRAMless controller themselves are negligible, though. For example, the SM2263XT (DRAMless) Phison E8 (DRAMless) NVMe controllers are $14/ea and $16/ea respectively in 1000 unit quantities, and the SM2263 (DRAM supported) is $16 in 1000 unit quantities, all according to ADATA (Silicon Motion) and MyDigitalSSD (Phison) and interestingly the E8 sells for the same price as the E7.

    Considering a $2 price premium for the DRAM supported controller, it's safe to say the majority of the costs would be the DRAM itself, not so much the controller or the ~$1 in PCB screening costs.
  • ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    Up to 560 MB/s sequential write speed and up to 520 MB/s sequential write speed.
  • MDD1963 - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    Time for the SATA 4 spec of 1200 MB/sec...' way too many drives being bottlenecked by SATA3's old-school 6 Gb/sec....
  • ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    I was indicating the error

    write speed vs write speed
  • DanNeely - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    SATA itself is full of API/protocol level bottlenecks for high speed SSDs, which is why the NVME interface was created to run over PCIe for high speed SSDs.

    SATA3 is likely to remain the final SATA standard ever because other than the DRAM cache it's nowhere near being able to bottleneck an HDD and consumer HDDs will likely have faded away before the become fast enough to be a problem.
  • bug77 - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    NVMe itself is just a protocol, it doesn't care what physical connection it is being sent over. SATA drives could talk NVMe (instead of AHCI). But then we'd need more expensive hosts.
  • ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    A 3 second boot to Windows is fast enough, so all I really need is IDE over SATA 2

    AHCI is not for SSD's anyway

    Wait.....what?
    Now I'm off topic as well

    See what you did?
  • jabber - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    Yeah I don't care about the protocol just upgrade it to keep pace and keep using the SATA port connections that have served us well the past 15 years.

    Then we can dump all these new connections that are gaining popularity like continental drift.
  • Flunk - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    They tried that, they needed 3 different connectors for the PCI-E signal. It was called SATA Express and it was such a failure that no one ever made a drive that supported it, despite it being on basically every motherboard at the time.

    The last thing we need right now is a new connector, U.2 already exists and is electrically compatible with M.2. A new SATA version that requires new cables with more contacts would just muddy the water further and the multi-cable idea was already failed.
  • jabber - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    Yeah but that aint going to work unless we suddenly get boards/chips with 60+ lanes.
  • PixyMisa - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    We need to switch to USB3 for internal drives. Can get 20Gbit/sec with USB 3.2, can use PCIe alt-mode, don't need a separate power cable, and any internal drive is automatically an external drive.
  • ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    Who is "we" ?

    I don't use any internal drives
  • StevoLincolnite - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link

    SATA 4 of 1200 MB/s would actually be slower than Sata 3.2/Express that tops out at 1969 MB/s would it not?
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    If you feel bottlenecked by a sata3 drive, 1GB/s is not going to be enough either, NVME is the way to go. For non-prosumer usage 500MB/s is worthless as a performance metric.

    -Endurance
    -4k random performance
    -Warranty

    Are the things you should worry about. Latency will be low but not that grade on certain usages in cheapo drives vs things like MX500 or 860 EVO.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    You can have a Sata SSD, NVME 4GB/s SSD, Optane or Ramdisk and your game will barely load a tiny bit faster compared to the "slow" sata SSD.
  • CheapSushi - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    Would love if SFF-8643 or similar connectors became the norm. It's x4 PCIe lanes. But I'd like x1 lanes for drives. So instead of a bunch of SATA ports (even if SATA4), you have something like a SFF-8643, so you could do one x4 standard NVMe drive or two x2 NVMe drives or 4 x1 NVMe drives. Something super versatile. Have a row of 4, 5 or 6 of these on an enthusiast ATX board.
  • CheapSushi - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    FYI I'm talking about bulk storage. I think a lot of people here just look at is as "HAVE ONE DRIVE FOR EVERYTHING" but personally I still want lots of drives for bulk storage, which is where QLC NAND will come in.
  • ZeDestructor - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    There are 4 reasons why we won't be seeing SATA4 anytime soon:

    1. Power: in bps/W, PCIe is ahead of SATA
    2. Latency: NVMe over PCIe is lower latency than SATA AHCI. Maybe NVMe over SATA/SAS is faster, but nobody's bothered, and I don't see anybody bothering
    3. Scalability: SATA is limited to 1 lane. SAS brings it up to 2. Meanwhile, PCIe can do 1, 2, 4 8, 16, 24 and 32 (in theory it should be able to do any arbitrary number, but those are what I have seen actually implemented).
    4. Cost and/or flexibility: with PCIe, you need no intermediate controllers between PCIe and SATA/SAS. In the event you need more physical ports than lanes, you can either bifurcate the PCIe root, or put a PCIe switch in there, instead of being forced to lop off a PCIe x8 or x16 slot just to dangle 8 slow harddrives off (guess who's dual-CPU server has 3 HBAs to control 24 drives...).

    Conclusion: if you want a faster SSD, just buy one! Cause between NVMe and Optane, there's improvements in sequential speed, raw IOPS and low-QD IOPS.
  • ZeDestructor - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    Source for the power and latency: https://www.anandtech.com/print/7843/testing-sata-...
  • Samus - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    NVMe is essentially the “SATA 4” spec. SATA is dead because it will be a decade before consumer HDD’s exist that can transfer 500MB/sec. We are only now getting close to 300MB a second on enterprise SAS drives.

    And in a decade I doubt you will see magnetic storage on any consumer device, unless cassette tapes make a comeback like they are rumored too lol!
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    People don't really care about sequential speeds on their daily usages, you should care about sequential when you work moving huge chunks of data or at editing tools (where you would go NVME). Vendors need to forget about it.

    What makes an SSD or any other memory based storage FASTER than an HDD is random 4k QD1-QD2 performance and LATENCY.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    Not worth when the way superior Crucial MX500 is $130. Cheap out on components or performance is not the way to and it seems it doesn't work for SSD's like HDD.

    They need to multiply the amound of nand capacity per stack while this stack start costing less and less to near the same level of two stack for the same initial capacity, rinse and repeat after some time.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    What I wish is an MX500 4TB @$999

    Samsung 860 line of 2-4TB are just a scam.
  • sonicmerlin - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link

    Buy a micron 2 TB. Heck I used that eBay spring coupon code and got one for under $300
  • Valantar - Sunday, April 1, 2018 - link

    Does anyone have any experience using DRAMless SSDs for game storage on consoles? I'm looking for something to bring down loading times on my PS4, but I'm not willing to/can't afford to spend much on it. My Xbox One already has my old 840 Pro attached to it (after I was silly enough to splurge on a 960 Evo for the gaming PC), so the PS4 is the next one up.
  • Lolimaster - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link

    Just get a Crucial MX500, you pretty much save nothing will getting a really shitty SSD, way lower endurance in the long run.
  • piroroadkill - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link

    Nice, we're slowly getting there. I want a SATA 3 4TB SSD that's dirt cheap to hold all my games...
    Currently using 2× 2TB Seagate hybrid drives in RAID 0 for that purpose... so I can wait.
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  • Harry_Wild - Sunday, April 8, 2018 - link

    This is a good deal for anyone that has a HD. But for me; I alway usually buy SSD based on performance and reputation. That means usually Samsung and Intel only.
  • lorribot - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link

    So question is, 4 x250GB, 2 x 500GB or 1 x 1TB, which is faster? The cost is roughly the the same so what is teh performance like?
    Hardware raid or OS raid?
    If only someone had acces to the kit money and technical skills to answer the question.

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