SSD's got even bigger? PLC nand

[Augustin]

Just now, leadeater said:

I had 4 of them in RAID 0, living on the edge lol

it is 100% OK to put games on RAID0. Worst case scenario you get an excuse to buy a box of beers on a weeknight and reinstall an operating system!

[hello_there_123]

9 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

QLC is already really slow at only 80-120mb/s for sustained writes, so this will be even slower.

This is after you fill the SLC cache, which is already an *extremely* unlikely scenario for most consumers. 

 

Besides, in order for the 80-120mb/s to bottleneck you, you would have to be doing a massive file transfer with either gigabit ethernet or a local transfer between multiple drives. 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

With that said, I held off buying SSD's and didn't recommend them for high-reliability systems due to experiences with them on servers where they die annually. I just can't recommend using them on web servers or anything that has a high level of random writing.

You're talking TLC here or consumer SSDs in general? I've never actually had a server SSD fail, had one Samsung 840 EVO fail but I abused that pretty badly in a system that didn't support TRIM.

[Augustin]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

You're talking TLC here or consumer SSDs in general? I've never actually had a server SSD fail, had one Samsung 840 EVO fail but I abused that pretty badly in a system that didn't support TRIM.

i had a pair of early 60gb Intel drives. Can't remember exactly what they were but they were good quality for their time. I upgraded them for capacity before they died but they did eventually die about 6 or 7 years after I bought them. My point is: capacity & price of new drives made them obsolete before they died.

[hello_there_123]

9 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

Because it will be slower than a hdd, but atleast it will be fully silent.

How would you know that?? Are you a future time traveller who has looked at the 4K rand r/w QD1 of various PLC SSDs and come back??

[hello_there_123]

9 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

for example, Samsung's consumer drives are rated for up to 520MB/sec. 

You probably won't ever see that 520MB/s speed in real life, given that the speed advertised is peak sustained sequential QD32, while most consumers only care about (or should care about) 4K rand r/w QD1. 

[hello_there_123]

Overall I believe that the article was written mainly for people who actually give a crap about endurance (content creators, etc) but this comments section has spun that into "PLC slower than an HDD reeeeeee"

[dizmo]

6 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

That is precisely the case, look at the durability differences between 1tb  samsung 860qvo (QLC), Samsung 860evo (TLC) and 860 pro (MLC).

The durability rating is still awfully good. The 1TB is rated at what, 330TB? Who even writes that much? It'd take many, many years to reach that point, and by then you'll have likely upgraded or swapped it out for something else.

3 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Is there a technical reason they cant just build SSD's bigger. Like 3.5 inch like standard hard disks size?

It's not needed? It's not like it'd save costs or something.

[Origami Cactus]

22 minutes ago, hello_there_123 said:

This is after you fill the SLC cache, which is already an *extremely* unlikely scenario for most consumers. 

 

Besides, in order for the 80-120mb/s to bottleneck you, you would have to be doing a massive file transfer with either gigabit ethernet or a local transfer between multiple drives. 

12 minutes ago, hello_there_123 said:

How would you know that?? Are you a future time traveller who has looked at the 4K rand r/w QD1 of various PLC SSDs and come back??

9 minutes ago, hello_there_123 said:

You probably won't ever see that 520MB/s speed in real life, given that the speed advertised is peak sustained sequential QD32, while most consumers only care about (or should care about) 4K rand r/w QD1. 

7 minutes ago, hello_there_123 said:

Overall I believe that the article was written mainly for people who actually give a crap about endurance (content creators, etc) but this comments section has spun that into "PLC slower than an HDD reeeeeee"

 

 

 

 

You know that you can quote multiple things at once, instead of spamming posts?

 

Now lets get into it:

1) You know that the SLC cache size reduces dramatically as you fill up the drive right? Not hard to fill up 6gb.

Just look at this graph: But i agree, for normal users it is fine, especially if the drive is not near full.

Spoiler

2) I have a QLC SSD, and that thing only does 80mb/s writes, and PLC will be about 2x as slow, so rip. But Random writes will still probably be better than HDD, and small writes will be ok thanks to the SLC cache.

3) Have you never used a samsung SSD? I see 520mb/s all the time, even if the drive is full, the problem with samsung 860 evo is that it is bottlenecked by the SATA interface, especially the higher capacity models

4) There just isn't any need for the downgrade that is PLC right now, it doesn't save enough money to justify it's downsides, unless they finally come out with 8TB+ consumer drives. The highest QLC drive is currently 4TB? I hoped to see atleast a 10TB drive.

 

TLDR: Yes, PLC has it's use cases, but the increase in complecity over QLC downplays the small size increase.

[MadDuke]

Personally. 

 

I just want the capacity for the cheapest price.  Then one day simply go Optane for the OS and main apps and a large few TB for storage. 

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

The 1TB is rated at what, 330TB? Who even writes that much? It'd take many, many years to reach that point, and by then you'll have likely upgraded or swapped it out for something else.

Many SSDs will happily do a multitude of the rated write endurance. 

 

As for who writes that much and how long it takes to wear out an SSD, I just did a Crystal Disk Info check of my old 1TB 840EVO, which is mostly used for multiplexing fresh Blu-Ray rips and editing audio files.

Spoiler

48TB written in just over 5 years (I bought that drive in August 2014), with 0 reallocated sectors and 100% drive health still.

Samsung doesn't give a maximum write endurance for this drive, but the 250GB version in Techreport's endurance test died shortly before hitting 900TBW. 

At this rate I'll need 88 more years to hit that 900TBW number.  Seeing as I'll be well into my 120s by then, I'll probably wear out long before the NAND does.

[ARikozuM]

10 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

Space increase per cell increase:

SLC 

MLC +100%

TLC +50%

QLC +25%

PLC +20%?

QLC +33%

PLC +25%

 

Can we just go to NVMe already? At some point, SATA will be a bottleneck with its queuing ability. 

[porina]

49 minutes ago, MadDuke said:

Then one day simply go Optane for the OS and main apps and a large few TB for storage. 

That's my game system you just described. I have an Optane 600P 280GB for OS, and Crucial 1TB + Sandisk 960GB SSDs for game storage, as well as HDs for less important stuff.

 

Lessons learnt: 

Optane makes no noticeable performance difference compared to a decent flash SSD for OS/gaming uses. You can detect a difference in benchmarks but you can't really feel it.

It is worth putting all large games on SSD than HD. That loading time difference is noticeable. 

 

For those wondering about endurance, according to SMART I've written 6.6TB to the Sandisk, and 3.3TB to the Crucial. The Sandisk Ultra II was bought November 2015, so nearly 4 years old. They don't give an endurance rating for that model, but Anandtech testing estimates it above 400TB, so I'm over 1% into it. The Crucial MX200 was bought August 2015, so somehow I've written less to it even though it is slightly older? Maybe it just happens the games I put on there happen to require fewer updates, and/or I change what is installed less. They do rate theirs at 320TBW so again I'm just over 1% wear on that.

 

Back to these PLC SSDs, it is likely for game storage scenarios, endurance is not going to be a problem, and nor is read speed. Write speeds for normal use should be ok as you're not going to hammer it with large writes all the time. 

[CircleTech]

10 hours ago, 5x5 said:

This is literally the point where an HDD makes more sense as a product. Who in their right mind thinks making an SSD slower than a 5400RPM HDD is a good idea?

The one edge that SSDs will continue having over HDDs no matter how terrible they get: Access times. The access time of even the shittiest SSD is 10x better than an SSD, and access times is what actually makes an SSD feel fast in the first place. 

 

I'm not complaining about PLC SSDs. In fact, I think it's a good thing because now consumers have more options. You can still buy MLC SSDs even today if that's what you want.

[dizmo]

1 hour ago, Captain Chaos said:

Many SSDs will happily do a multitude of the rated write endurance. 

 

As for who writes that much and how long it takes to wear out an SSD, I just did a Crystal Disk Info check of my old 1TB 840EVO, which is mostly used for multiplexing fresh Blu-Ray rips and editing audio files.

 

48TB written in just over 5 years (I bought that drive in August 2014), with 0 reallocated sectors and 100% drive health still.

Samsung doesn't give a maximum write endurance for this drive, but the 250GB version in Techreport's endurance test died shortly before hitting 900TBW. 

At this rate I'll need 88 more years to hit that 900TBW number.  Seeing as I'll be well into my 120s by then, I'll probably wear out long before the NAND does.

Oh, definitely. That's what I was saying. The endurance of drives is insane. If it's rated at 330TBW, it's been quoted as such with a wide margin, and will likely last much, much longer. On my laptop, which granted I don't use that often for huge files and such, but has had numerous games installed on it and loads and loads of movies, and is 7 years old, has 19TBW. The desktop I have now that gets a lot of games installed on it only has 11TB written to it over a year. So, as you say, the drives are nearly indestructible from a regular wear use standpoint. It'd take me 25 or 30 years to reach the "suggested" EOL rating...by the SSDs will have likely been replaced by something entirely different.

[Colonel_Gerdauf]

A random question, but where did the SLC SSDs go? I get that we have SLC cache, but I have heard nothing of full-blown drives since 2013.

[JoostinOnline]

1 minute ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

A random question, but where did the SLC SSDs go? I get that we have SLC cache, but I have heard nothing of full-blown drives since 2013.

They're not really made anymore. MLC is good enough that there wasn't a significant demand for SLC anymore. It's not till TLC that you start seeing significant degradation and speed problems.

 

On a side note, the one SLC drive I have is an mSATA one that I pulled from a very old high end laptop. It's 32GB.

[leadeater]

52 minutes ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

A random question, but where did the SLC SSDs go? I get that we have SLC cache, but I have heard nothing of full-blown drives since 2013.

Server SSDs, Write Intensive optimized ones. Bloody expensive $/GB. Nobody needs SLC in a desktop, nobody. MLC is extremely good and you can get Write Intensive optimized MLC SSDs, again server SSDs and high $/GB.

 

This is SLC NAND if you're interested though: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13951/the-samsung-983-zet-znand-ssd-review. Lots of others on the market too.

[bcredeur97]

More Bits per cell is fine if your drive is big enough for it to not matter 

 

bring on the 10TB Ssd’s 

[Colonel_Gerdauf]

I want 6 2TB MLC NVME SSDS stacked in a RAID 100 array configuration inside a 3.5 inch form factor with a PCIe 8x cable connector

[Flying Sausages]

Time to store up those high performance SSDs before low performance SSDs taken over the market.

[DeScruff]

14 hours ago, Donut417 said:

That’s what the tread is pertaining to PLC. At this point 3.5 inch SSD’s for larger storage. 

As far as I am aware, except for M.2 SSDs physical space in terms of being cramped is not actually an issue with (consumer level) SSDs.
This is a Samsung 860Pro SSD:


The chip on the bottom is a 256GB TLC Flash chip (This board is dual sided, with another Flash chip on the other side making this a 512 GB SSD ). The middle chip is the ARM controller chip, and the one on top is 512MB of LPDDR4 Cache chip. You can see the impressions on the housing for where the 1 and 2TB versions boards line up.

From what Ive gathered the problem isn't physical room for chips. Its more about how complicated and expensive, the design gets when you have 8+ flash chips.- Which is probably why the form factor is targeted towards enterprise who will gladly pay more per GB unlike consumers.

I believe the processing of a wafer is where the expense is, while the what you are processing it into is overall negligible once you have the infrastructure. So the game is to maximize how many SSDs one can make per Wafer - and with PLC they are looking at a 66% increase over TLC.

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

You're talking TLC here or consumer SSDs in general? I've never actually had a server SSD fail, had one Samsung 840 EVO fail but I abused that pretty badly in a system that didn't support TRIM.

Lemme find out, because I'm not the one who put it together. Each machine has two drives.

 

Machine with replaced drives:

"Samsung SSD 840 PRO", total LBA written: 240,807,343,067 : 36,932,696,9123 

 

Newer Machine still using drives purchased:

" Samsung SSD 850 PRO" , total LBA written: 378,769,718,615 : 231,973,652,880

 

higher end machine:

"INTEL SSDSC2BA400G4" host writes 32MiB: 630,733

"Samsung SSD 850 PRO" total LBA written: 15,793,315,449

 

Looks like they're all MLC. Technically they're probably rated as consumer drives since they're all also SATA.

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Looks like they're all MLC. Technically they're probably rated as consumer drives since they're all also SATA.

Most server SSDs are SATA but use different controllers, more physical NAND over provisioning and have power loss protection. Samsung is the one who has the closest hardware between their consumer Pro series and their actual server products, I personally only buy Samsung myself.

 

18 minutes ago, Kisai said:

INTEL SSDSC2BA400G4

This is a server rated SSD.

[GoldenLag]

TL;DR: if its cheap enough, get two and Raid them together for speed. to heck with reliability.