Samsung 860 evo or Crucial MX500 1TB

[TrainFan475]

Is there any real world advantage to paying extra for the Samsung 860 evo 1TB instead of going with the Crucial MX500 1TB?

[Doramius]

The Evo is a slightly better drive (and not by much).....but for the increase in cost, not worth it. Get the Crucial.

[Jimkirk363]

One vote here for the Samsung Evo 860.

[5x5]

Samsung is slightly better, Crucial is slightly cheaper - your choice what to get.

[hello_there_123]

Topend sata in this day and age in the US are a waste of money. Sabrent Rocket is the same price as mx500/wd blue 3d, 660p cheaper. 

 

If you're justl ooking for a 1tb boot drive for games, then I would recommend the Intel 660p. Cheaper by $15 than the mx500. If it's for a 4k video editing scratch disk, then the Sabrent Rocket 1tb. 

[ConfusedNewby]

I mean I recently got a 860 EVO(so a bit biased here), but the average price difference is about  $40-50(making the Crucial much cheaper).

[5x5]

6 minutes ago, ConfusedNewby said:

I mean I recently got a 860 EVO(so a bit biased here), but the average price difference is about  $40-50(making the Crucial much cheaper).

I'd personally get the EVO - the Magician software alone is worth imo. In any case - both are vastly superior to QLC junk like the 660p from Intel. There's a reason it's cheap - it's crappy.

[Doramius]

On 8/30/2019 at 4:41 PM, 5x5 said:

I'd personally get the EVO - the Magician software alone is worth imo. In any case - both are vastly superior to QLC junk like the 660p from Intel. There's a reason it's cheap - it's crappy.

It's reliability rating is actually quite high, and matches the EVO.  I'm not saying the EVO is bad, but for barely showing improvement in capability, there's no point in wasting the money.  If it were on sale for the same price, or lower, as the Crucial, obviously go EVO.  To say the Crucial is crappy, is just baseless opinion.

[5x5]

1 minute ago, Doramius said:

It's reliability rating is actually quite high, and matches the EVO.  I'm not saying the EVO is bad, but for barely showing improvement in capability, there's no point in wasting the money.  If it were on sale for the same price, or lower, as the Crucial, obviously go EVO.  To say the Crucial is crappy, is just baseless opinion.

I never called the MX500 crappy - I'm calling the 660p crappy

[Doramius]

Well hell......then we're on the same page, then.  

[VEXICUS]

11 hours ago, 5x5 said:

I never called the MX500 crappy - I'm calling the 660p crappy

Any reasons for that?

[LukeSavenije]

12 hours ago, 5x5 said:

I never called the MX500 crappy - I'm calling the 660p crappy

 

12 hours ago, Doramius said:

Well hell......then we're on the same page, then.  

but we sure aren't

 

why is everyone bashing a good ssd here? like, that 660p will stomp all over a mx500

[5x5]

19 minutes ago, LukeSavenije said:

 

but we sure aren't

 

why is everyone bashing a good ssd here? like, that 660p will stomp all over a mx500

QLC, no cooling, meh controller. The actual DRAM, once cache is full, drops to 40-50MB/s. Three times lower than a 5400RPM HDD.

[LukeSavenije]

2 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

QLC, no cooling, meh controller. The actual DRAM, once cache is full, drops to 40-50MB/s. Three times lower than a 5400RPM HDD.

ehm... for once a hdd can't do 50mb 4k read/writes outside of cache, especially with good testing

 

and second, you're taking the absolute worst numbers here, anandtech has reports that show around 200 mbit on slc cache and 100 on a FULL drive

[JoostinOnline]

31 minutes ago, LukeSavenije said:

 

but we sure aren't

 

why is everyone bashing a good ssd here? like, that 660p will stomp all over a mx500

Maybe in transferring multi-gigabyte files, but not in average performance. Most Intel SSDs are a good example of how NVMe doesn't mean better. Having a higher bandwidth doesn't mean it's any faster.

 

Edit: My mistake, the 660p is decent. I was thinking of the 600p.

[5x5]

1 minute ago, LukeSavenije said:

ehm... for once a hdd can't do 50mb 4k read/writes outside of cache, especially with good testing

 

and second, you're taking the absolute worst numbers here, anandtech has reports that show around 200 mbit on slc cache and 100 on a FULL drive

That's still 5 times slower than a SATA SSD, though

[LukeSavenije]

Just now, 5x5 said:

That's still 5 times slower than a SATA SSD, though

i'm not talking sequential here, i'm taling 4k read/writes simaltaniously

[JoostinOnline]

Just now, 5x5 said:

That's still 5 times slower than a SATA SSD, though

That's a meaningless statement. There's no standard speed for a SATA drive.

[5x5]

Just now, LukeSavenije said:

i'm not talking sequential here, i'm taling 4k read/writes simaltaniously

Fair enough. Im still not convinced especially since we bought a bunch of QLC models when they dropped on the market and returned all of them due to constant slowdowns at work. We do work with larger files but people were swarming IT constantly due to slow and unresponsive systems. Apparently the multiple software packages were filling up the cache too fast for the flush makking the laptops borderline unusable

[DoctorNick]

If you have M.2 get the Corsair MP510 - faster and better than 660P and its 3D TLC just like the Samsung 

[Doramius]

The reliability of the QLC is pretty low.  We've had several of them overheat, and for the price, there are better options out there.  You might get your faster speeds for a limited time, but the constant downtime from dead or throttled drives is not worth it.  I'd rather have something more stable and reliable.  Granted there are many other drives I would choose, but these are the ones that were brought up as comparison.  There's a lot I'd take over a 660p.

 

[VEXICUS]

8 hours ago, 5x5 said:

...

 

16 minutes ago, Doramius said:

...

Source - Anandtech

Spoiler

As the first SSD with QLC NAND to hit our testbed, the Intel SSD 660p provides much-awaited hard facts to settle the rumors and worries surrounding QLC NAND. With only a short time to review the drive we haven't had time to do much about measuring the write endurance, but our 1TB sample has been subjected to 8TB of writes and counting (out of a rated 200TB endurance) without reporting any errors and the SMART status indicates about 1% of the endurance has been used, so things are looking fine thus far.

On the performance side of things, we have confirmed that QLC NAND is slower than TLC, but the difference is not as drastic as many early predictions about QLC NAND suggested. If we didn't already know what NAND the 660p uses under the hood, Intel could pass it off as being an unusually slow TLC SSD. Even the worst-case performance isn't any worse than what we've seen with some older, smaller TLC SSDs with NAND that is much slower than the current 64-layer stuff.

The performance of the SLC cache on the Intel SSD 660p is excellent, rivaling the high-end 8-channel controllers from Silicon Motion. When the 660p isn't very full and the SLC cache is still quite large, it provides significant boosts to write performance. Read performance is usually very competitive with other low-end NVMe SSDs and well out of reach of SATA SSDs. The only exception seems to be that the 660p is not very good at suspending write operations in favor of completing a quicker read operation, so during mixed workloads or when the drive is still working on background processing to flush the SLC cache the read latency can be significantly elevated.

Even though our synthetic tests are designed to give drives a reasonable amount of idle time to flush their SLC write caches, the 660p keeps most of the data as SLC until the capacity of QLC becomes necessary. This means that when the SLC cache does eventually fill up, there's a large backlog of work to be done migrating data in to QLC blocks. We haven't yet quantified how quickly the 660p can fold the data from the SLC cache into QLC during idle times, but it clearly isn't enough to keep pace with our current test configurations. It also appears that most or all of the tests that were run after filling the drive up to 100% did not give the 660p enough idle time after the fill operation to complete its background cleanup work, so even some of the read performance measurements for the full-drive test runs suffer the consequences of filling up the SLC write cache.

In the real world, it is very rare for a consumer drive to need to accept tens or hundreds of GB of writes without interruption. Even the installation of a very large video game can mostly fit within the SLC cache of the 1TB 660p when the drive is not too full, and the steady-state write performance is pretty close to the highest rate data can be streamed into a computer over gigabit Ethernet. When copying huge amounts of data off of another SSD or sufficiently fast hard drive(s) it is possible to approach the worst-case performance our benchmarks have revealed, but those kind of jobs already last long enough that the user will take a coffee break while waiting.

Given the above caveats and the rarity with which they matter, the 660p's performance seems great for the majority of consumers who have light storage workloads. The 660p usually offers substantially better performance than SATA drives for very little extra cost and with only a small sacrifice in power efficiency. The 660p proves that QLC NAND is a viable option for general-purpose storage, and most users don't need to know or care that the drive is using QLC NAND instead of TLC NAND. The 660p still carries a bit of a price premium over what we would expect a SATA QLC SSD to cost, so it isn't the cheapest consumer SSD on the market, but it has effectively closed the price gap between mainstream SATA and entry-level NVMe drives.

Power users may not be satisfied with the limitations of the Intel SSD 660p, but for more typical users it offers a nice step up from the performance of SATA SSDs with a minimal price premium, making it an easy recommendation.

For majority of users, 660p is more than fine.