SSD TIER LIST

[VEXICUS]

23 minutes ago, Juular said:

They're better than garbage bin tier 

While it's arguably the most important metric for SATA drives, it's really useless for NVMe ones as all of them have enough endurance to not care about it at all (aside from QLC ones probably), if you need to choose single most important metric for NVMe drives then it's probably sustained write speed at some mark (say after 50Gb written when the drive are 80% full). Tweaktown, THG & some TPU reviews have graphs for sustained write speeds for example if you want data sources.

NVMes hv been sorted on the basis of sustained write speeds as well. Check it out.

[GoldenLag]

53 minutes ago, VEXICUS said:

NVMes hv been sorted on the basis of sustained write speeds as well. Check it out.

Thats not also not the case. Patriot scorch is faster than the sustained write on a qlc drive with no SLC cache. (Which doesnt happen often with the exception of 12 or more gb writes)

 

And Samsung DLC drives have the highest sustained writes out of them all iirc. Beating 4.0 drives as those are TLC based. 

[GoldenLag]

1 hour ago, Juular said:

Sure, you wouldn't notice that in most situations but they should've at least color coded with a note that they're not very good option if you need to write large amounts of data in one go.

Especially if that is your workload of writing a shitton lf data. DLC drives are just better due to their endurance and higher sustained writes. 

 

Even beating out 4.0 drives. As afaik those are still TLC based. 

[VEXICUS]

5 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

Especially if that is your workload of writing a shitton lf data. DLC drives are just better due to their endurance and higher sustained writes. 

 

Even beating out 4.0 drives. As afaik those are still TLC based. 

All the 4.0 drives have faster sustained write speeds when compared to Samsung dlc drives.

[GoldenLag]

11 minutes ago, VEXICUS said:

All the 4.0 drives have faster sustained write speeds when compared to Samsung dlc drives.

Actually no. They drop to about 632mb per sec of writes once the admiteddly massive cache runs out. 

 

DLC drives continue at about 1200 mb per sec. Im just doublechecking that number

 

Edit: just checked. 900-1500mb sustained once cache runs out

[Juular]

16 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

Especially if that is your workload of writing a shitton lf data. DLC drives are just better due to their endurance and higher sustained writes. 

 

Even beating out 4.0 drives. As afaik those are still TLC based. 

Sure but they cost twice the cost of high-end TLC drives and the only advantage they have is that they can sustain very high write speeds on the entire capacity range, while high-end TLC drives still offer very high performance in more realistic scenarios like 50GB write at 80% capacity. But yeah, they're of course higher in tier for that matter. I think they should be moved to tier A and 5 GB\s drives should be simply marked with different color to distinguish them.

[GoldenLag]

1 minute ago, Juular said:

-snip-

Color code. And put them in the same tier. 

 

And leave a seperate tier for the eventual 4.0 DLC drives. 

 

And im using DLC as the name as its far more descriptive. And doesnt fall into the missleading marketing of Samsung. 

[VEXICUS]

3 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

Color code. And put them in the same tier. 

 

And leave a seperate tier for the eventual 4.0 DLC drives. 

 

And im using DLC as the name as its far more descriptive. And doesnt fall into the missleading marketing of Samsung. 

Planning to add 2 more tiers in nvme ssds

[GoldenLag]

2 minutes ago, VEXICUS said:

Planning to add 2 more tiers in nvme ssds

And add in the cousin drives? (Same controller)

[VEXICUS]

1 minute ago, GoldenLag said:

And add in the cousin drives? (Same controller)

Yeah.

Tier b is mostly phison e12 drives

[GoldenLag]

1 minute ago, VEXICUS said:

Yeah.

Tier b is mostly phison e12 drives

And what will you rate based on?

 

A pro workload as in endurance and sustained writes. Or more consumer oriented?

[VEXICUS]

1 minute ago, GoldenLag said:

And what will you rate based on?

 

A pro workload as in endurance and sustained writes. Or more consumer oriented?

Both endurance and sustained writes.

The best of the best gets in tier A.

[Juular]

10 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

And add in the cousin drives? (Same controller)

Thing is they're not always perform the same, see Corsair MP500 \ Team MP34 vs MDSSD BPX Pro \ Plextor M9Pe (although Plextors are old and there might be improvements with newer firmware), or ADATA SX8200 Pro vs Mushkin Pilot-E & HP EX950. We can just mark the drives with estimated position in italic as in PSU tier list based on NAND and controller combination tho for which there are no reviews with sustained write speed data.

[GoldenLag]

Just now, Juular said:

Thing is they're not always perform the same, see Corsair MP500 \ Team MP34 vs MDSSD BPX Pro \ Plextor M9Pe (although Plextors they're old and there might be improvements with newer firmware).

They dont allways, but providing they are using same SLC and cache config, they should. 

 

 

Can allways mark with italics which are based of reviews of other drives with the same controller. 

[Juular]

1 minute ago, GoldenLag said:

They dont allways, but providing they are using same SLC and cache config, they should.

Yeah, i'm curious if firmware for drives based on the same controller are interchangeable so you can say flash firmware from Corsair MP510 or Team MP34 to say Plextor drives to get the same configuration.

[GoldenLag]

Just now, Juular said:

Yeah, i'm curious if firmware for drives based on the same controller are interchangeable so you can say flash firmware from Corsair MP510 or Team MP34 to say Plextor drives to get the same configuration.

That would be very interesting to test. 

 

The question is how that would affect a drive that have allready configured itself. 

[ewitte]

On 12/24/2019 at 9:33 AM, GoldenLag said:

 

If you are gonna start with something like that. Please look into how decent these drives actually are. 

 

Together with SLC cache they are far supirior than many old TLC drives. Not for long write loads, but consumer usecases. 

 

They should probably he colorcoded to tell people these have reduced endurance, but they are far from crappy

 

Look at the real numbers if an NVME drive drops to less than 200MB/s after the buffer its worse than a decent SATA drive!  Its the same reason I will not recommend less than 500GB for TLC.  I'm sure you can make the connection that normal people wouldn't notice but enthusiasts can easily.

[GoldenLag]

1 hour ago, ewitte said:

Its the same reason I will not recommend less than 500GB for TLC.

so that rules out every drive except samsung Pro drives, some adata drives and a few others. 

 

which go for about twice as much as regular TLC drives that have SLC cache. making them able to do massive writes at full speed. meaning they cost the same as 1TB drives. meaning you wont recommend anything less than 1TB drives? that seems a bit dumb, and unhelpful as the SLC cache of even 500GB drives is perfectly good. 

 

1 hour ago, ewitte said:

Look at the real numbers if an NVME drive drops to less than 200MB/s after the buffer its worse than a decent SATA drive!

well, for the first 40GB of writes at SLC speeds yeah. which for bootdrive loads and regular loads for any non-pro workload involving massive library or endurance straining workloads is perfectly good. better than Sata drives for the end consumer. 

 

1 hour ago, ewitte said:

I'm sure you can make the connection that normal people wouldn't notice but enthusiasts can easily.

for anyone who isnt a person who relies on a workflow involving massive multigig transfers (not game downloads as those run at less than QLC write speeds). for those people (the 99%) it doesnt matter. 

 

and for a tierlist one should mark the QLC drives for those who are concerned. for enthusiasts its all about having the epeen or the fun of stupidly overkill drives. keeping in mind that such people is in the tiny minority. and outside of certain workflows is completely irrelevant. hence marking them in a tierlist. 

 

it seems you arent making the connection that QLC drives with their SLC caches are perfectly good drives and better buys than similarly priced TLC based drives. offcourse a small bump in price gets you a TLC based drive, but often that isnt an option, and doesnt benefit the end user. 

 

also the one LTT video on the topic vastly missrepresented the subject. which if that is the one exposure to QLC performance, you should probably look into some deeper benchmarks. 

[Juular]

18 hours ago, ewitte said:

Its the same reason I will not recommend less than 500GB for TLC.

I wouldn't go that far, there's a lot of 500GB TLC drives that have somewhat acceptable write speeds, Phison E12 based ones mostly. Either way <1TB drives are rather budget oriented anyway so i wouldn't expect them to perform very good, if you want performance then go for 1\2TB.

[ewitte]

5 hours ago, Juular said:

I wouldn't go that far, there's a lot of 500GB TLC drives that have somewhat acceptable write speeds, Phison E12 based ones mostly. Either way <1TB drives are rather budget oriented anyway so i wouldn't expect them to perform very good, if you want performance then go for 1\2TB.

500 is good 256 is where it drops off.  Today its less of an issue as normally I go 1-2TB just so there aren't so many drive letters (I have about 8TB SSD on one machine).  I wish the Samsung 4TB QLC drive doubled the 2TB drive writes then it would be a contender.  But there are way better 2TB TLC NVME drives for just a bit over $200.

[ewitte]

22 hours ago, GoldenLag said:

it seems you arent making the connection that QLC drives with their SLC caches are perfectly good drives and better buys than similarly priced TLC based drives. offcourse a small bump in price gets you a TLC based drive, but often that isnt an option, and doesnt benefit the end user. 

 

Oddly I feel I'm not the one making the connection it definitely IS noticeable   As it is the prices are similar if the prices were much cheaper and they could handle at least 1GB/s and didn't have abysmal write ratings it would be fine.  But why for less than 10% price difference if your shopping around good and not insisting on Samsung?

 

IMO this is temporary the first few years of TLC drives weren't all that great either.  If there was an 4-8TB drive with decent real performance for a good discount over TLC I'd consider it.

[GoldenLag]

1 hour ago, ewitte said:

But why for less than 10% price difference if your shopping around good and not insisting on Samsung?

because it has been more than that before. 

 

and because sometimes you really dont have the budget to spare. and you wont notice the difference anyway so why spend the money. 30$ saved on the SSD can be spent elsewhere. 

 

1 hour ago, ewitte said:

Oddly I feel I'm not the one making the connection it definitely IS noticeable  

so you are one of the people doing multi gigabyte file transfers that exceed 40GB?

 

because most people arent those people. and the SLC cache gives the speed they need during file transfers. in more normal usecases of OS updates and game downloads, you wouldnt notice. 

 

1 hour ago, ewitte said:

As it is the prices are similar if the prices were much cheaper and they could handle at least 1GB/s and didn't have abysmal write ratings it would be fine

TLC doesnt do 1GB/s files transfers either. 

 

perhaps 2TB offerings, but not 1TB offerings. 

 

SLC cache is what gives you those amazing write numbers. and QLC drives have that SLC cache the same way TLC drives have it. 

[SSD Sean]

On 12/24/2019 at 12:05 PM, GoldenLag said:

Especially if that is your workload of writing a shitton lf data. DLC drives are just better due to their endurance and higher sustained writes. 

 

Even beating out 4.0 drives. As afaik those are still TLC based. 

What does DLC mean? 

[Juular]

6 minutes ago, SSD Sean said:

What does DLC mean? 

Commonly known MLC (multi layer cell), it's just that before the introduction of TLC & QLC it was logical name, next step from SLC (single layer cell), now it can be confused with them so alternative name would be DLC (dual layer cell) as it was the original meaning of this term.

[SSD Sean]

8 minutes ago, Juular said:

Commonly known MLC (multi layer cell), it's just that before the introduction of TLC & QLC it was logical name, next step from SLC (single layer cell), now it can be confused with them so alternative name would be DLC (dual layer cell) as it was the original meaning of this term.

Yeah, but it is not an industry standard term...So, you're saying DLC is a made up term by you forum goers for the real term - MLC?