Storage available in SSDs (and quality)

[mkdabra]

I'd like to know if space in SSDs follow the same marketing fraud as HDDs and pendrives where they translate units at 1000 instead of 1024 and you end up with 930GB of storage in a "1TB" drive.

Like, how much storage is there in a cheap 480GB Kingston/SanDisk? Or in the 500GB and 1TB versions of WD Blue, Crucial MX500 or Samsung 860 EVO?

Just to make calculations around my need so I don't exceed say 70% of the drive and all that. Mainly I'm choosing between the 500GB (67€) or the 1TB (111€) MX500, 'cause the Samsungs are a bit more expensive (at 77€ and 140€ respectively). About the Kingston, asking for a friend.
 

Also, how good are the WD Blues? From what I've gathered they seem to way ahead the Kingston but still a bit behind Crucial speed-wise, but how are quality-wise?

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, mkdabra said:

I'd like to know if space in SSDs follow the same marketing fraud as HDDs and pendrives where they translate units at 1000 instead of 1024 and you end up with 930GB of storage in a "1TB" drive.

yes thats exactly what they still do

 

[minibois]

Windows is the one 'lying' here. Hardware manufacturers work in GB, where 1 = 1000.

Windows says it works in GB, but it actually works in GiB (Gibibyte) (where 1 = 1024). Google has a handy way of figuring out what translates to what. So if you just google "500GB to GiB" it will tell you the usable size of the drive:

So your 500GB SSD or HDD will show up as 465 'GB' (actually GiB) in Windows and 1000GB = 931GiB.

 

Keep in mind WD has purchased SanDisk some years ago and merged Sandisk's SSD division into the WD division (or simply put, slapped a WD logo on those SSD's). If you're looking at a SanDisk SSD, it might just be an older drive.

But the quality is good. Not exceptional in any way, comparable to an MX500.

Usually I don't see as good prices as Crucial in WD though, same for Kingston.

 

Something you can check to see the quality of the drives is check how long they will last. This can be found on the datasheet of a drive. Higher capacity drives will last longer.

This is measured in TB written to the drive, with higher being better.

MX500 (500GB, 1TB): 180TB, 360TB written.

WD Blue (500GB, 1TB): 200TB, 400TB written.

 

Not that this a is a gigantic difference, but you can see they have similar trust in their drives. Both have a 5 year warranty too I believe. Quite similar drives.

[vanished]

It's not fraud, just confusion on the part of users and frankly I blame Windows (well, Microsoft) for a lot of it.

 

Officially, the "B" endings (MB, GB, TB, etc.) are actually base 1000.  It is the "iB" endings (GiB, TiB, etc.) that is base 1024.  For this reason the drive makers are reporting their sizes truthfully.

 

However, for reasons I do not yet understand, Windows uses the base 1024 system but labels sizes with the "B" endings.  This is confusing for two reasons - one, it's different than what drive makers use (why do they not just use base 1000 as well?), and two, well, it's not hard to see how blatantly using the wrong symbol could lead to confusion.

 

As for how SSDs factor in, they are labelled the same way as HDDs, yes.

[wojtepanik]

In samsung magician you can lower overprovisioning, which is the space that is reserved for ssd health managment, standard is 10% i think.

[mkdabra]

2 hours ago, Minibois said:

Keep in mind WD has purchased SanDisk some years ago and merged Sandisk's SSD division into the WD division (or simply put, slapped a WD logo on those SSD's). If you're looking at a SanDisk SSD, it might just be an older drive.

But the quality is good. Not exceptional in any way, comparable to an MX500.

Usually I don't see as good prices as Crucial in WD though, same for Kingston.

Oh, for some reason I thought it was Kingston who bought SanDisk, coupled them together in the post because of that.