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  • shabby - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Go home qlc ssd manufacturers, you're drunk!
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    The market doesn't care what we want. It's driven by the manufacturers. That's the way most of tech is because of duopoly, triopoly power and the high cost of owning fabs. They get to dictate to us which is not the way consumerist capitalism is supposed to work.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    There is also consumer ignorance. Go to a site that pushes product, like slickdeals, and you won't find the type of NAND listed in the listing for their SSD "deals". Everything is just an "SSD". Manufacturers are counting on consumer ignorance.
  • Zim - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Not true. Every one of those deals has people saying no to QLC. People still buy it because it's cheap.
  • SirDragonClaw - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Not true. 99.9% of people wouldn't even know what QLC means.
  • ahtoh - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    Not true. I'd say 50% at least. People who buy SSDs (or parts in general) are more educated and probably know what they're doing.
  • s.yu - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    "Parts"
    Ah that actually makes it sound pretty sophisticated :)
  • at_clucks - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    50% of people know what QLC means? Is that a joke? 50% of ATers don't understand what that means. Most consumers who even heard of the term think it's just another type of LC, the more LCs the better right? No, almost no consumer knows what that means, it's a tech spec, they may know it's not the best out there but that's it But if the price is good they won't care.

    Product listings are marketing fluff and BS sprinkled with plenty of concepts no regular user will even understand because they sound fancy (like TWD and ECC), they will list stuff that the average consumer can understand and relate to - capacity, speed (lots of megabytes per second, thousands of them, eye catchy), and maybe the interface because they have to (again, in an eye catching way like "SATA 6.0 Gb/s"). Even if there is a Q in the product model almost nobody cares about that.

    Search for QVO on Amazon and you'll see stuff like "RELIABLE AND SUSTAINABLE: The capacity of the 8TB 870 QVO increases reliability up to 2,880 TBW using a refined ECC algorithm for stable performance".
  • DigitalFreak - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Market these "Q"LC drives to Trump supporters and watch them fly off the shelves.
  • peevee - Wednesday, December 9, 2020 - link

    Oh, you gamer kidding are so smart and sophisticated, you even know the sacred secret of what QLC means! Do you know what 2+2 is? Then you deserve the Fields medal!

    We, engineers with decades of experience engineering this world, who thought that exactly 0 consumer applications and not more than 1% of enterprise applications require sustained write speeds over 300MB/s, bow before you!

    Don't forget to ask for extra tip next time you serve me coffee.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    "50% of people know what QLC means? Is that a joke? 50% of ATers don't understand what that means"

    Care to back up your staement with evidence? AT is mostly perused by techie people who understand the difference between SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC.
  • at_clucks - Wednesday, December 9, 2020 - link

    @TheinsanegamerN, yeah, you're swimming in the evidence. Check out the comment section carefully and you'll see how well the average ATer understands this. Some may know something about "bits per cell, whatever that means", some may know it's less reliable because "it wears out faster whatever that means", so they know the marketing concepts but not what lies underneath them. Most will blindly assume SLC > MLC > TLC > QLC not why or how, not what the cell is, how it works, how many levels of charge it can have, how it's read or how it's written, how they're organized, not the impact of the implementation, controller, firmware, OS, not why exactly wear is a thing, not why writes wear the cell but reads aren't an issue, not what planar/2D vs. 3D means, etc. Being a "techie" today means you *buy* a lot of tech and gloss over some articles with bar charts of which product is faster. That's it.

    If you want me to give "evidence" of every statement I make prepare to provide answers that have enough references in the footnote to look like a PhD thesis.

    In the meantime it's all but guaranteed that a regular consumer has no clue what QLC means or that the product name is a reference to QLC. They see an SSD that fits their computer, has a certain capacity, and costs a certain price. Maybe the manufacturer on the label alleviates their concerns.

    Knowing QLC has less endurance than SLC ("wears out") or that this is slower than that doesn't mean you understand the tech more than knowing some cars drive faster than others or have lower safety ratings makes you a piston head or mechanic.
  • ripbeefbone - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link

    you're way too online
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    In large part because product pushers like slickdeals don't list the type of NAND in the listing title.

    This is the opposite of how manufacturers wanted to use LED to push TV sales so LED was always listed in product listings.

    People become aware of what manufacturers want them to become aware of. That's why we have so many marketing programs generating graduates all over the world.
  • Samus - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    Fortunately we know, and we know to stay away from this crap at this price. An 8TB 870 EVO is "worth" $600 to me and that's all I'm willing to pay for a drive that should logically cost much less than 8x1TB SSD's, not the SAME EXACT PRICE at 8x1TB SSD's (the 870 QVO 1TB regularly sells for $80-$90, and is currently $90 at Best Buy.

    Using Samsung's metric to scale, an 8TB hard drive should cost $400. The controller, DRAM and overall package are the same between drives. The only difference is platters\NAND.
  • Oxford Guy - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link

    We knowing is irrelevant because consumer ignorance working in manufacturers’ favor is about the bulk of consumer demand not a small number of people who make extra effort to learn specs manufacturers don’t want us to know about and therefore choose to not push.
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    "Every one of those deals has people saying no to QLC."

    Apples and oranges. The listing titles don't list the type of NAND.
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    There is also the trick of them calling TLC and QLC "MLC". Technically, it is multi-layer NAND so they can get away with it, even though it is completely shady.
  • shabby - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    First company to do that will be stoned to death.
  • Samus - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Do you really think the 860 EVO is MLC like it is advertised as? No, “3-bit” VNAND or more commonly known as TLC. Samsung has been calling TLC [MLC] for years and has it been stoned to death yet.
  • Oxford Guy - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link

    Samsung doing it isn’t shocking. It’s Samsung after all.
  • Palorim12 - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link

    idk if you remember when they did the change from TLC to 3-bit MLC, but I member. It was after all that stuff went down with the 840 EVO. Despite all TLC having this issue across all brands, Samsung was the first to push TLC, so when the slow down issue creeped up, Samsung got the brunt of the complaints, and ppl to this day will use that as a reason as why Samsung "sucks", despite the fact that the issue started creeping up on sandisk and other TLC drives that had entered the market much later after Samsung did. And by the time Samsung figured out the problem and fixed it, all the other manufacturers copied the fix and then really started pushing their own TLC products.

    And TBH, TLC products since then have been pretty good. I recommend 850 EVOs, and now 860 EVOs to all my friends who want to switch to SSDs but are worried about the price. I've only recommended 2-bit MLC drives to ppl who I know will hit the drive had with writes with the type of work they do.
  • at_clucks - Wednesday, December 9, 2020 - link

    @shabby, other companies have done worse if you ask me, like switching from MLC to TLC mid way through a product's run. Good luck with identifying the exact type of NAND based on decoding a SN without having the decoder ring, especially when the product is still in the store's warehouse.
  • phoenix_rizzen - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Switching to a number would really simplify things.

    1LC
    2LC
    3LC
    4LC
    ...

    But since when has logic been part of marketing?
  • Billy Tallis - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link

    I've already pretty much decided that if we ever get real products that store 5 bits per cell, I won't use any abbreviations that don't include the numeral 5. Stuff like 3bpc, 4bpc, 5bpc would make a lot more sense than current industry conventions.
  • redzo - Tuesday, December 22, 2020 - link

    This. It's been a long time since my last post at anand.

    Consumers have no idea of what they are purchasing. They are basically sheep.

    QVO is nice if it is priced right. It should be priced way less.

    I just purchased a 3d nand TLC 1TB for less than an intel/crucial/samsung qvo equivalent. This is not right. Manufacturers of NAND flash and product manufacturers are taking advantage of misinformed consumers.

    More so. Most products are missing important specs like controller model, dramless or not, or even NAND type. This is just ridiculous.
  • dontlistentome - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    If you want MLC or TLC then buy it - they cost more because they cost more to make. I've just bought a 2TB SSD for the old man - paid the 15% or so extra for TLC over QLC.
    There's no conspiracy here or evil manufacturers. They do R&D then offer a product and see if consumers buy it. Almost all consumers, even those that claim not to be are driven pricipally by price, hence QLC being populat when the buyer looks at the ticket.
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    Economy of scale makes your comment fail.
  • DigitalFreak - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    +1 for your mad rhyming skills.
  • Kangal - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link

    Lmao.
    But for real, I thought we would have hit 8TB Sata-SSDs like last year for around USD $650. Instead I'm seeing these still yet to launch proper, and priced around $1,000. It's definitely true the market isn't dominated as much by the consumers, as it is dominated by the actual suppliers.
  • shelbystripes - Thursday, December 10, 2020 - link

    Dude, you don't seem to understand how "consumerist capitalism" DOES work. QLC will still be more than good enough for most consumers, or at least, that's what manufacturers are banking on. They still need to sell the hardware, and they're competing in a world where MLC and TLC SSDs still widely exist.

    The only way to get there will be lower cost... and there will be plenty of consumers who respond to high-capacity QLC SSDs at lower costs than "scale" alone can achieve for MLC or TLC drives, and who won't care about the drop in MTBF because QLC SSDs still have more total writes than they'll ever need. QLC SSDs aren't going to be for everyone, but if TLC (even 3D TLC) is such cheap technology that "scale" is all you need to hit 8TB SSDs with it, why isn't anyone making sub-$1K 8TB 3D TLC drives and competing with these? Shouldn't they be?

    You just don't know what you're talking about, yet you have the arrogance of someone prepared to speak for everybody uniformly.
  • boozed - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    The Sabrent appears to perform quite well in real world tests, regardless of its synthetic/theoretical performance. Is this a bad thing?
  • Hixbot - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    MLC/TLC is still available at extra cost. Meanwhile QLC is pushing HDDs out of the market.
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    "MLC/TLC is still available at extra cost."

    Economy of scale. QLC is an attack on TLC and MLC.
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    Also the article says:

    "QLC NAND offers just a 33% increase in theoretical storage density, but in practice most QLC NAND is manufactured as 1024Gbit dies while TLC NAND is manufactured as 256Gbit and 512Gbit dies."

    Which means manufacturers are trying to kneecap TLC to push QLC.
  • Spunjji - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Or it means that manufacturing TLC at those capacities per die would result in a bloated die size with decreased yields, increased costs, and too-few dies per drive to reach competitive speeds at the most common capacities.

    The problem with having a conclusion and looking for evidence to support it is that you can come up with all sorts of silly reasons for things that are perfectly explicable by other means.
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, December 10, 2020 - link

    Speculative
  • shelbystripes - Thursday, December 10, 2020 - link

    It's ironic that you respond to someone calling out your unsubstantiated speculation as "speculative". If you're opposed to speculation, you should retract your statements assuming that manufacturers are out to "kneecap" MLC/TLC like they have some secret agenda against higher-reliability parts...
  • Spunjji - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Do you have any evidence that would support that claim? Say, TLC costs rising even as QLC rolls out, in a way that doesn't reflect the usual industry supply/demand fluctations?
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, December 10, 2020 - link

    Yes. The die sizes offered with TLC are 50% smaller at best. That magnifies the 30% density increase of QLC automatically. Maybe this reply will stick. Here’s to hoping.
  • Great_Scott - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    QLC remains terrible and the price delta between the worst and good drives remains $5.

    The most interesting part of this review is how insanely good the performance of the DRAMless Mushkin drive is.
  • ksec - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    I really wish a segment of market move towards high capacity and low speed like QVO This is going to be useful for like NAS, where the speed is limited to 1Gbps or 2.5Gbps Ethernet.

    The cheapest SSD I saw for 2TB was a one off deal from Sandisk at $159. I wonder when we could see that being the norm if not even lower.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    I wish QLC wouldn't be pushed on us because it ruins the economy of scale for 3D TLC. 3D TLC drives could have been offered in better capacities but QLC is attractive to manufacturers for margin. Too bad for us that it has so many drawbacks.
  • SirMaster - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    People said the same thing when they moved from SLC to MLC, and again from MLC to TLC.
  • emn13 - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    There is an issue of decreasing returns, however.

    SLC -> MLC allowed for 2x capacity (minus some overhead) I don't remember anybody gnashing their teeth to much at that.
    MLC -> TLC allowed for 1.5x capacity (minus some overhead). That's not a bad deal, but it's not as impressive anymore.
    TLC -> QLC allows for 1.33x capacity (minor some overhead). That's starting to get pretty slim pickings.

    Would you rather have a 4TB QLC drive, or a 3TB TLC drive? that's the trade-off - and I wish sites would benchmark drives at higher fill rates, so it'd be easier to see more real-world performance.
  • at_clucks - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link

    @SirMaster, "People said the same thing when they moved from SLC to MLC, and again from MLC to TLC."

    You know you're allowed to change your mind and say no, right? Especially since some transitions can be acceptable, and others less so.

    The biggest thing you're missing is that the theoretical difference between TLC and QLC is bigger than the difference between SLC and TLC. Where SLC hasto discriminate between 2 levels of charge, TLC has to discriminate between 8, and QLC between 16.

    Doesn't this sound like a "you were ok with me kissing you so you definitely want the D"? When TheinsanegamerN insists ATers are "techies" and they "understand technology" I'll have this comment to refer him to.
  • magreen - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Why is that useful for NAS? A hard drive will saturate that network interface.
  • RealBeast - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Yup, my eight drive RAID 6 runs about 750MB/sec for large sequential transters over SFP+ to my backup array. No need for SSDs and I certainly couldn't afford them -- the 14TB enterprise SAS drives I got were only $250 each in the early summer.
  • nagi603 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Not if it's a 10G link
  • leexgx - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    If you have enough drives in RAID6 you can come close to saturate a 10gb link (read post above 750MB/s with 8 hdds in RAID6)
  • Kevin G - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    At 1 Gbit easily sure, but 2.5 Gbit is taking off in the consumer space and 10 Gbit has been here for awhile but at a price premium. There is also NIC bonding which can increase throughput further if the NAS has multiple active users.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    A single seagate ironwolf can push over 200MB/s read speeds. 2.5 Gbit will still bottleneck even the most basic raid 5 arrays.
  • heffeque - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    I want a silent NAS.
    Also SSD last longer than HDD.
    I'm hoping for a Synology DS620Slim but with AMD Zen inside (like the DS1621+), and I'll fill it up with 4TB QVO drives on SHD1 with BTRFS.
  • david87600 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Re: SSD lasts longer than HDD:

    Not necessarily. Especially with high volumes of writes. We've had more problems with our SSDs dying than our HDDs. We have several servers but the main application runs on an HDD. We replace our servers every four years but the old servers go into use as backup servers or as client machines. Some of those have been running their HDDs for 15 years now. None of our SSDs have lasted more than 2 years under load.
  • heffeque - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    The Synology DS620Slim is not even near an enterprise server. Trust me, the SSDs won't die from high volume writes on a home user.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Completely different use case. Home users fall under more of the WORM style of usage, they are not writing large data sets constantly.

    I also have no clue what you are doing to your poor SSDs. We have our SQL databases serving thousands of users reading and writing daily on SSDs for 3 years now without a single failure. Of course we have enterprise SSDs instead of consumer, so that makes a huge difference.
  • Deicidium369 - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    I have far more dead HDDs than dead SSDs. The 1st SSD I bought was an OCZ midrange, 120GB - that drives has been used continuously for several years - about a year ago, wiped it and checked it - only a few worn cells. On the other hand - I had had terrible luck with anything over 8TB mechanical - out of the close to 300 14TB Seagates - over 10% failure rate - about half of those died during the 48 hour burn in - and the rest soon after.

    The Intel Optane U.2 we used in the Flash array have had no issues at all over the 3 year period - we had one that developed a power connector failure - but no issues with the actual media.

    as with most things tech YMMV
  • GeoffreyA - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    Just a question. Between Seagate and WD, who would you say is worse when it comes to failures? Or are they about the same?
  • Deicidium369 - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    I have not used WD in some time - so I can't comment I tend to use Backblaze failure rates - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-driv...
  • GeoffreyA - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Thanks
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    I have three OCZ 240 GB Vertex 2 drives. They're all bricked. Two of them were replacements for bricked drives. One of them bricked within 24 hours of being used. They bricked in four different machines.

    Pure garbage. OCZ pulled a bait and switch, where it substituted 64-bit NAND for the 32-bit the drives were reviewed/tested with and rated for on the box. The horrendously bad Sandforce controller choked on 64-bit NAND and OCZ never stabilized it with its plethora of firmware spew. The company also didn't include the 240 GB model in its later exchange program even though it was the most expensive in the lineup. Sandforce was more interested in protecting the secrets of its garbage design than protecting users from data loss so the drives would brick as soon as the tiniest problem was encountered and no tool was ever released to the public to retrieve the data. It was designed to make that impossible for anyone who wasn't in spycraft/forensics or working for a costly drive recovery service. I think there was even an announced partnership between OCZ and a drive recovery company for Sandforce drives which isn't at all suspicious.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    The Sandforce controller also was apparently incompatible with the TRIM command but customers were never warned about that. So, TRIM didn't cause performance to rebound as it should.
  • UltraWide - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    AMEN for silence. I have a 6 x 8TB NAS and even with 5,400rpm hdds it's quite loud.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    I really want to like the slim, and would love one that I could load up with 2TB SATA SSDS in raid, but they've drug their feet on a 10G version. 1G or even 2.5G is totally pointless for SSD NASes.
  • bsd228 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    sequential transfer speed isn't all that matters.

    two mirrored SSDs on a 10G connection can get you better read performance than any SATA ssd locally. But it can be shared across all of the home network.
  • david87600 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    My thoughts exactly. SSD rarely makes sense for NAS.
  • Hulk - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    What do we know about the long term data retention of these QLC storage devices?
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    16 voltage states to deal with for QLC. 8 voltage states for TLC. 4 for 2-layer MLC. 2 for SLC.

    More voltage states = bad. The only good thing about QLC is density. Everything else is worse.
  • Spunjji - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    It's not entirely. More voltage states is more difficult to read, for sure, but they've also begun implementing more robust ECC systems with each new variant of NAND to counteract that.

    I'd trust one of these QLC drives more than I'd trust my old 120GB 840 drive in that regard.
  • Oxford Guy - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link

    Apples and oranges. More robust things to try to work around shortcomings are not the shortcomings not existing.
  • heffeque - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    No worries on a NAS: BTRFS will take care of that in the background.
  • Billy Tallis - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Not sure if that's a joke about BTRFS RAID5/6 ensuring you lose your data.

    A BTRFS scrub isn't automatic; you need a cron job or similar to automate periodic scrubbing. But assuming you do that and stay away from the more dangerous/less tested RAID modes, you shouldn't have to worry about silent data loss. I've been using BTRFS RAID1 with various SSDs as my primary NAS ever since I amassed enough 1 and 2TB models, and it's worked well so far. ZFS would also work reasonably well, but it is less convenient when you're using a pile of mismatched drives.

    Getting back to the question of data retention of QLC itself: the write endurance rating of a drive is supposed to be chosen so that at the end of the rated write endurance the NAND is still healthy enough to provide 1 year unpowered data retention. (For client/consumer drives; for enterprise drives the standard is just 3 months, so they can afford to wear out the NAND a bit further, and that's part of why enterprise drives have higher TBW ratings.)
  • heffeque - Wednesday, December 9, 2020 - link

    BTRFS background self-healing is automatic in Synology as of DSM 6.1 and above.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Long term cold storage of any flash memory is terrible. QLC wont be any better then TLC in this regard.
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    How could it possibly be better (than 3D TLC)?

    It can only be worse unless the TLC is really shoddy quality. This is because it has 16 voltage states rather than 8.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Hence why I said it wont be any better, because it cant be. That leaves the door open for it to be worse.

    Reeding iz hard.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    But your comment obviously wasn't clear enough, was it?

    QLC is worse than TLC. Next time write that since that's the clear truth, not that QLC and TLC are somehow equivalent.
  • joesiv - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    I love the idea of 8TB SSD drives, it's the perfect size for a local data drive, I could finally be rid of my spinning rust! Just need the price to drop a bit, maybe next year!

    Thank you for the review. Though I wish reviews of SSD's would be more clear to consumers what endurance really means to the end user. "DWPD" and TB/D, are mentioned, noone seems to highlight the fact that, it's not end user's writes that matter in these specifications, it's "writes to nand", which can be totally different from user/OS writes. It is reliant on the firmware, and some firmwares do some wonky things for data collection, speed, or even have bugs, which drastically drop the endurance of a drive.

    Of course I would love an exhaustive endrance test in the review, at the bare minimum, if anandtech could check the smart data after the benchmark is done, and verify two things, it would give you some useful information.

    Check:
    - nand writes (average block erases is usually available)
    - OS writes (sometimes is not easily available), but since you run a standardized bench suite, perhaps you have an idea of how many GB's you typically run through your drives anyways.

    You might need to do a bit of math on the block erase count, to get it back to GBs, and you might need to contact the manufacturer for SMART data attribute documentation, but if they don't have good smart data attributes, or documentation available, perhaps it's something to highlight in the review.

    But then you could weed out, and present to the consumer drives that have firmwares have outrageously inefficient nand write patterns.

    My company has had several failures, and because of that, have had to test in this way potential drives for our products, and have had to outright skip drives that's specs were great, but the firmwares were doing very inefficient drive writes, limiting their endurance.

    anyways, feedback, and fingers crossed!

    Keep up the good work, and thanks for the quality content!
  • heffeque - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Well... 2 TB per day every day seems like a lot of writes. Not sure it'll be a problem for normal use.
  • joesiv - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    well firmware bugs can cause writes to be magnified 10x, 100x higher than what is expected. I've seen it. So, you're 2TB's, would just be 20GB's... Of course we hope that firmwares don't have such bugs, but how would we know unless someone looked at the numbers?
  • heffeque - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    "Of course we hope that firmwares don't have such bugs, but how would we know unless someone looked at the numbers?"
    Well on a traditional HDD you also have to hope that they put Helium in it and not Mustard gas by mistake. It "can" happen, but how would we know if nobody opens every single HDD drive?

    In a serious note, if a drive has such a serious firmware bug, rest assured that someone will notice, that it will go public quite fast and that it will end up getting fixed (like it has in the past).
  • Spunjji - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Thanks for responding to that "how do you know unless you look" post appropriately. That kind of woolly thinking really gets my goat.
  • joesiv - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Well, I for one would rather not be the one that discovers the bug, and lose my data.

    I didn't experience this one, but it's an example of a firmware bug:
    https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-25-hpe-ssd-bricke...

    Where I work, I'm involved in SSD evaluation. A drive we used in the field had a nasty firmware bug, that took out dozens of our SSD's after a couple years of operation (that was well within their specs), The manufacturer fixed it in a firmware update, but not until a year + after release, so we shipped hundreds of product.

    Knowing that, I evaluate them now. But for my personal use, where my needs are different, I'd love it if at least a very simple check was done in the reviews. It's not that hard, review the SSD, then check to see if the writes to NAND is reasonable given the workload you gave it. It's right there in the smart data, it'll be in block sizes, so you might have to multiply it by the block size, but it'll tell you a lot.

    Just by doing something similar, we were able to vet a drive that was writing 100x more to NAND than it should have been, essentially it was using up it's life expectancy 1% per day! Working with the manufacturer, they eventually decided we should just move to another product, they weren't much into firmware fixes.

    Anyways, someone should keep the manufactuers honest, why not start with the reviews?

    Also, no offence, but what is the "wolly thinking" are you talking about? I'm just trying to protect my investment and data.
  • heffeque - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link

    As if HDD didn't have their share of problems, both firmware and HW (especially the HW). I've seen loads of HDD die in the first 48 hours, then a huge percentage of them no later than a year afterwards.

    My experience is that SDD last A LOT longer and are A LOT more reliable than HDD.
    While HDD had been braking every 1-3 years (and changing them was a high cost due to the remote location, and the high wages of Scandinavian countries), when we changed to SSD we had literally ZERO replacements to perform since then so... can't say that the experience with hundreds of SSD not failing vs hundreds of HDD that barely last a few years goes in favor of HDD in any kind of measure.

    In the end, paying to send to those countries a slightly more expensive device (the SSD) has payed for itself several-fold in just a couple of years.
  • MDD1963 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    I've only averaged .8 TB per *month* over 3.5 years....
  • joesiv - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Out of curiousity, how did you come to this number?

    Just be aware that SMART data will track different things. You're probably right, but SMART data is manufactuer and model dependant, and sometimes they'll use the attributes differently. You really have to look up the smart documentation for your drive, to be sure they are calculating and using the attributes the way your smart data utility is labeling them as. Some manfacturers also don't track writes to NAND.

    I would look at:
    "writes to nand" or "lifetime writes to flash" - which for some kingston drives is attribute 233
    "SSD Life Left" - which for some ADATA drives is 232 (ADATA), and Micron/Crucial might be is 202), this is actually usually calculated based on average block erase count against the rated block erase counts the NAND is rated for (3000ish for MLC, much less for 3d nand)

    A lot of maufactuers haven't included the actual NAND writes in their SMART data, so it'd be hard to get to, and should be called out for it (Delkin, Crucial).

    "Total host writes" is what the OS wrote, and what most viewers assume is what manufactuers are stating when they're talking about drive writes per day or TB a day. That's the amount of data that is fed to the SSD, not what is actually written to NAND.

    Also realize that wear leveling routines can eat up SSD life as well. I'm not sure how SLC mode that newer firmwars have affects life expectancy/nand writes actually.
  • stanleyipkiss - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Honestly, if the prices of these QLC high-capacity drives would drop a bit, I would be all over them -- especially for NAS use. I just want to move away from spinning mechanical drives but when I can get a 18 TB drive at the same price of a 4-8 TB SSD, I will choose the larger drive.

    Just make them cheaper.

    Also: I would love HIGHER capacity, and I WOULD pay for it... Micron had some drives and I'm sure some mainstream drives could be made available -- if you can squeeze 8TB onto M.2 then you could certainly put 16TB on a 2.5 inch drive.
  • DigitalFreak - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Ask and ye shall receive.

    https://www.pcgamer.com/sabrent-is-close-to-launch...
  • Xex360 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    The prices don't make any sense, you can get multiple drives for the same capacity but less money and more performance and reliability, and should cost more because they use more material.
  • inighthawki - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    At least for the sabrent drive, M.2 slots can be at a premium, so it makes perfect sense for a single drive to cost more than two smaller ones. On many systems being able to hook up that many drives would require a PCIe expansion card, and if you're not just bifurcating an existing 8x or 16x lane you would need a PCIe switch which is going to cost you hundreds of dollars at minimum.
  • Silver5urfer - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    $900+Tax for this garbage QLC ? Utter shame. SSDs are most useful for gaming, better have 2x 860 PRO 4TBs even if it's expensive as it's going to be last one with MLC technology. And Movies, are fine with the HDD drives.

    High Capacity drives are mostly for the 4K, Movies and Anime etc content or maybe photos. Any NAS grade drive for the archiving purpose is much much better only issue is noise and size, best is to get the mechanical drives for high capacity.

    So this means consumers will get the shitty QLC technology for high capacity HDD, probably we will get Six Level Bullshit next time to even push more TBs. What a load of garbage.
  • Silver5urfer - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    1800 Sabrent QLC NVMe, 2880 Samsung QLC SATA

    Vs

    860 PRO 4TB 4800. That's all I need to know, 2x the storage and latest manufacturing processes and almost like 2 years after the 860Pro products and we have 1/4 for NVMe and 1/2 for SATA with 2x Storage, if 860PRO had 8TB it would be probably 8000+TBW endurance.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    "latest manufacturing processes"

    With NAND that can be a bad thing, unless you're a manufacturer, that is.
  • Spunjji - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    ...and it would cost nearly twice as much money (assuming they could actually make the components fit in that 2.5" shell). You pay your money and take your choice.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    QLC offers 30% more density than TLC.
  • Beaver M. - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    I completely agree on the price. Its a joke. Far too close to TLC drives, in fact very comparable.

    But for games you will want NVMe drives from now on, because of DirectStorage.
  • Deicidium369 - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Which is not even available yet - but yeah RTX IO/MS DirectStorage will require an NVMe drive - I have a couple 980 Pro, but waiting on the new Phison based drives with 7GB/s R&W.
  • Beaver M. - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Yeah well, you dont buy SSDs to replace them just a few months later.
    Its stupid to not plan ahead when putting together a PC, especially nowadays when most PC components can easily be good enough for 5+ years.
  • Deicidium369 - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    I build for 2 years - my current i9900K / 3090 (replacing the dual 2080TIs was one of the rare upgrades) is already over 2 years old - the 3090 is recent of course. When Rocket Lake drops - I will build the replacement for my current system - and by then the new Phisons will be available. I seem to remember it being released this month - but could be wrong.
  • Silver5urfer - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    I don't really know how DirectStorage is going to impact performance. It will just enable higher and faster load times, It's already very fast on a PC due to dedicated VRAM and DRAM on top. I don't believe this RTX IO or whatever are going to have a massive impact. I have lots of TBs of backlog of old games which I love to play rather than new politically driven garbage with MTX and other crap and GaaS. Nothing much to lose tbh I will rather buy an 860 PRO x2 and install all the games on it and enjoy and get a WD RED / GOLD or Seagate Exos for the 4K and Movies etc.
  • Beaver M. - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Just imagine it as 4K random on steroids.
    Games load MUCH faster and with less or even no stuttering.
    Its been proven already. If you want to miss out on this, thats your choice.
  • Deicidium369 - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    Proven already is a bit premature. Transferring compressed data to the GPU which then decompresses is going to be an obvious increase in performance - provided it is not left up to developers to implement - like multi GPU being a part of DX12 - but only if it is implemented.
  • Beaver M. - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Its working on consoles already. And of course the devs can choose to use it or not. But since its part of consoles, and most PC games are console ports, its very likely to be very common in the future.
  • Spunjji - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    It's going to affect performance plenty for people who run software that uses it. Your personal attitude to new games and their "political" content doesn't really have any bearing on that.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    "Flash memory prices have been on a downward trajectory for years."

    And now, thanks to QLC, quality, too!
  • Spunjji - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    How many posts do you need to make the same point?
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    When QLC is no longer being shoved down my throat? 0.
  • inighthawki - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    One additional purpose for high capacity M.2 drives is that they're compatible with the new RTX IO/DirectStorage requirements (NVME drive over PCIe), which will not work on a standard SATA drive. So if you have a lot of large games that you want to be able to take advantage of this feature, you will need higher capacity drives.

    And yes for many people 2TB or 4TB will be more than sufficient for this, at least within the next few years until games more commonly adopt the feature. I'm by no means calling this a requirement for anyone, just merely pointing out an upcoming use case.
  • DigitalFreak - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    My 860 EVO 4TB is humming along just fine for now. Still costs the same as what I paid for it a couple of years ago, which is a joke. I'm waiting for DirectStorage before I buy another high capacity drive for games. By that time PCIe 4.0 drives should be more commonplace, and hopefully cheaper.
  • DigitalFreak - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    BTW, excellent article Billy.
  • inighthawki - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    For sure. By all means I'm not expecting this to be a requirement any time soon. I just wanted to point out an upcoming reason that high capacity M.2 drives may be of value. Even right now I'm using a 4TB HDD, but for my upcoming build I was considering the 8TB sabrent drive just for future proofing.
  • PopinFRESH007 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Any idea if/when you’ll review the Sabrent 4 Plus? Interested to see how it stacks up with the 980 Pro
  • Billy Tallis - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    I don't have the Rocket 4 Plus or another Phison E18 in hand yet. I'm almost ready to launch the new PCIe gen4 test suite, but the first few reviews with that will be stuff like the Rocket Q4, WD Black SN850 and ADATA S50 Lite (with those reviews including new test results for Phison E16 drives and the 980 PRO). So I probably won't be able to get around to a Phison E18 drive until January.
  • Beaver M. - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Others have tested it. It is good, but not quite as good as the SN850 or 980 Pro.
  • lilmoe - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    With MLC drives so close in price, you've got to be crazy to even consider a QLC drive.
  • lilmoe - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    TLC**
  • Dug - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    The price difference is significant at 4TB and 8TB
  • lilmoe - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    Do you really want to put 4-8 TB of data into one single, 3rd rate drive?
  • TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    With games like the new COD eating up over 250GB for a single game, that 4-8TB may not feel as large as you think.

    People made the same argument with 2TB SSDs years ago.
  • Deicidium369 - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Well if you are smart you have a backup and not that SPOF
  • Beaver M. - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Not really. You can get 4TB TLC NVMe drives for around the same price as this QLC one.
    QLC would need to be 50% cheaper at least to make any sense.
  • Spunjji - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    From an actual manufacturing perspective, even 33% cheaper would be a reach. We'll be lucky to see 25%.
  • Beaver M. - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link

    I agree.
    Thats why I think they are trying to fool buyers with QLC.
  • DeathArrow - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Why is Anandtech the last to conduct reviews on many products? By the time you review the latest graphic cards or SSDs, there is not much interest since most people already get their info from other outlets.
  • Beaver M. - Thursday, December 10, 2020 - link

    Anandtech has declined massively this year. Most of their "articles" are "Best This And That Buy Right Now" and other ads nowadays.
    Im about to remove them from my bookmarks...
  • Luuta - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    The product comparisons would be so well and good if companies like ADATA haven't swapped out premium components from initial drive launches for far cheaper ones, with dramatic loss in performance. It's fraudulent. It also makes a nonsense of all these reviews and the comparisons because the consumer won't see any of it, once the first batch is off the production line. These companies need to be held accountable by law to stop them ripping off consumers with their own counterfeit products. Until then, I no longer believe any bench marking of either SSD or hard drive products from any manufacturer.
  • Deicidium369 - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    Here's a tip - Stay as far away from the budget manufacturers like ADATA - for our datacenter SSDs it's all Intel Optane U.2 - and for my desktops - Samsung and looking into the new Phison based controllers that are 7GB/s R&W. I pretty much put Sabrent into that category with ADATA - only Sabrent part I have is a 2.5" to 3.5" drive sled.
  • Cliff34 - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    For me, the sweet spot is 4 TB. I need a lot of space to store media on my laptop. Right now using 2 TB, I am doing alright. But I feel 4 TB will give me more confidence I won't run out of space.

    Sadly, it doesn't look like the market is ready to move on. I've got my 2TB three years ago and prices wise, it hasn't changed so much.
  • Slash3 - Sunday, December 6, 2020 - link

    I have two 2TB Crucial MX500s for general storage and they're only ten bucks cheaper than what I paid, over two years ago.
  • MDD1963 - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Hmmm...wonder what the "Q" in QVO stands for? :)
  • Scour - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    After experiences which some QLC-SSDs from Samsung and Crucial I have to say: Stay away from QLC if you want performance.

    Maybe it´s OK for ppl who install a windows and store some music or photos on it, but if you want to write larger amount of data you will be faster with HDDs.

    It´s a shame that some ppl recommend a QVO because it have a Samsung-controller and DRAM. Don´t agree with them because some cheap TLC-SSDs are much faster.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    Samsung is often overrated anyway. Their planar TLC drives were so poorly made that they have to periodically rewrite the data that's on the drive to maintain decent performance.

    I also remember the company's completely bogus power consumption claims, claims that were taken as truth by consumers who would recommend the drives based on the deception.
  • Scour - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link

    My 840 (first version) never was good, it was slower than some of my cheapest SSDs in daily use. I use it now for video-recording on a set-top-box. It´s fast enough for the writing-speed and it gets erased all 2-3 weeks.

    But the 850 and 860 Evo works good and fast.

    The QVO-series maybe beats other QLC-products like DRAM-less BX500 (so far never seen benchmarks of new Sandisk Plus with QLC) but is to expensive in capacities less than 8TB
  • WaltC - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link

    This has to be the first NMEe .M2-interface vs. SATA3-interface SSD comparison that ignores the differences in bus connections as if they don't exist--or as if they don't matter. Scratching my head over this one. Max optimal bandwidth for Sata3 SSD's is generally less than 550MB/s. Max optimal bandwidth for an .M2 NVMe 3x4 PCIe 3 drive like the Sabrent here is 3.5-5.x GB/s. And for PCIe 4 3x4 NVMe drives like the 980 Pro from Samsung, the max optimal bandwidth is as much a 7+ GB/s. Comparing the internal drive controllers and the onboard ram between SSD's is fine and should be done--but *never* at the expense of treating the drive interfaces into the system as if they just don't matter, imo...;) If people are merely looking capacities and prices without regard to performance this might be a helpful review. But when is that ever really the case? With SATA3 SSDs, it doesn't really matter about the internals, the performance is caped at < 550MB/s. The bottleneck being the drive's system interface.
  • peevee - Wednesday, December 9, 2020 - link

    2TB of SLC is equal to 8TB of QLC. I doubt the SLC flash is separate from QLC, they probably use QLC in SLC mode until 2TB fill up, and then start compressing the data into QLC. So the switch might happen without constant sequential write too.
  • ballsystemlord - Wednesday, December 9, 2020 - link

    @Billy , Under "Random Write Performance" (burst and sustained,) you'll notice that you wrote the same comment twice by mistake.
  • zhpenn - Monday, February 8, 2021 - link

    About the 8TB version power consumption, I notice in the spec is 5.5W when compare to 860 EVO(4W) Can I put 870 QVO 8TB into a USB 3.0 SATA enclosure and used it without an unstable issue? or it may eject unexpectedly or slow speed due to high power consumption?
  • PushT - Thursday, October 14, 2021 - link

    How big is the cache on this drive ? The 32 GB "sustained"transfer falls within that cache, is that right ? Say I wanted to make a backup of my whole system, on this drive, or just move the backup to it, or other large files for that matter. How would the sustained 128KB write performance look ? Why do you test for this rather small transfer size when it only showcases the faster cache ? Am I wrong ? Please tell me why you can't just as well include longer and larger transfers, so as to show what happens when the QLC nand is written to ?
  • PushT - Thursday, October 14, 2021 - link

    To be fair this drive has a large dynamic cache. You can transfer a lot of data before you hit the QLC nand directly. But if you look at the review at Tom's you can see how the perfomance actually drops to 200 MB/s after the cache is filled up, about that of a WD black HDD. That is not too impressive. Also I wonder about the heat when you start using these small drives for bulk storage...
  • PushT - Thursday, October 14, 2021 - link

    With the Samsung 870 Evo, as an example, you can fill up the whole drive with sequential writes at 500 MB/s. Looking at a potential bulk storage solution, you would write a full hypothetical 8TB Samsung Evo 870 sata ssd in approximately 4,43 hours, whereas filling a Sabrent rocket 8TB would take about 6,2 hours. So depending on your usage, there are trade-offs. If I was to copy drives I don't see why I would use this over a top Sata ssd.

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