Hard drive upgrade

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#2557909 6-Sep-2020 15:33

The main thing for reliability is having as few bits per cell as possible. For example, 1 bit per cell is binary - on or off. Two bits per cell means it needs four voltage levels to determine what is stored. Three bits needs 8 levels, 4 bits 16 levels. More level = more chance of error. I tend to buy 2 bit per cell (Samsung Pro) as single bit is really expensive.

BiggusDoggus

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#2557910 6-Sep-2020 15:37

timmmay:

The main thing for reliability is having as few bits per cell as possible. For example, 1 bit per cell is binary - on or off. Two bits per cell means it needs four voltage levels to determine what is stored. Three bits needs 8 levels, 4 bits 16 levels. More level = more chance of error. I tend to buy 2 bit per cell (Samsung Pro) as single bit is really expensive.

Thanks. How/where can I tell how many bits per cell for the HP?

And I'm picking both those are better than this one: https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/HDDCRU21000/Crucial-BX500-1TB-25-inch-SSD-SATA-60GBs--up-to-54?qr=GShopping&gclid=Cj0KCQjw7sz6BRDYARIsAPHzrNK_srLJWZCR9FwIorIBU_Xo9VMX_Ewa0aIj0JATgvfZ2COemoxosGwaAvYTEALw_wcB

(Crucial BX500

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timmmay

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#2557915 6-Sep-2020 15:48

You look at the specifications. From memory:

SLC - single level cells, one bit per cell
MLC - multi level cells, usually means two bits per cell
TLC - three bits per cell
QLC - four bits per cell

TLC or QLC are probably fine for everyday stuff. I tend to buy drives and keep them - the Samsung 840 Pro SSD I purchased 2013 is still working 100%, it's MLC I think.

BiggusDoggus

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#2557921 6-Sep-2020 16:02

timmmay:

You look at the specifications. From memory:

SLC - single level cells, one bit per cell
MLC - multi level cells, usually means two bits per cell
TLC - three bits per cell
QLC - four bits per cell
TLC or QLC are probably fine for everyday stuff. I tend to buy drives and keep them - the Samsung 840 Pro SSD I purchased 2013 is still working 100%, it's MLC I think.

Thanks for that. The HP is TLC, the Samsung QLC.

However, the HP is also "DRAMless: - which from what I can tell is Bad Thing, but I'm not sure why?

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timmmay

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#2557945 6-Sep-2020 16:20

Typically DRAM acts as a cache. I guess data can be written from the PC to the SSD, which can cache it in RAM, tell the OS "ok, done", then write it to the memory cells when it has time - probably in the next few seconds as the cache isn't huge. The RAM could also be a cache, which helps performance.

I'd just buy the Samsung, evo if budget is priority, pro if reliability is the priority. If you don't then I'd just go with reviews. There was a huge SSD endurance test you might like to read - a bit out of date but read the series and you'll learn something.

BiggusDoggus

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#2557946 6-Sep-2020 16:22

timmmay:

Typically DRAM acts as a cache. I guess data can be written from the PC to the SSD, which can cache it in RAM, tell the OS "ok, done", then write it to the memory cells when it has time - probably in the next few seconds as the cache isn't huge. The RAM could also be a cache, which helps performance.

I'd just buy the Samsung, evo if budget is priority, pro if reliability is the priority. If you don't then I'd just go with reviews. There was a huge SSD endurance test you might like to read - a bit out of date but read the series and you'll learn something.

Great - thanks for the help.

Just one thing - budget is a HIGH priority, so it's not even an Evo - it's the Qvo

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#2557972 6-Sep-2020 16:36

I'm sure a qvo will do a perfectly good job for you. Just look at the warranty period to see how long the manufacturer has confidence in it. I'd probably go for a smaller, higher quality drive so long as it will fit what you need on it. I only have two 120GB SSDs, one for OS / programs, one for data I want low latency for, but I don't play games.

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#2557979 6-Sep-2020 16:49

Lias:

For many games, the difference between SATA SSD and NVME SSD is very much noticeable.

I'd pick the NVME personally if you are a gamer.

The blind tests I have seen show the opposite. Generally users can't tell the difference between an NVME and SATA SSD. Its of course different for large file operations.

That of course didn't stop me getting an NVME drive ;)

BiggusDoggus

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#2557992 6-Sep-2020 17:09

timmmay:

I'm sure a qvo will do a perfectly good job for you. Just look at the warranty period to see how long the manufacturer has confidence in it. I'd probably go for a smaller, higher quality drive so long as it will fit what you need on it. I only have two 120GB SSDs, one for OS / programs, one for data I want low latency for, but I don't play games.

Yeah, I'm no "gamer", but World of Warships, World of Tanks & War Thunder take up a LOT of room, and my son plays Battlefield 1, plus a couple of others so...no wonder 500gb isn't enough, really.

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richms

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#2558007 6-Sep-2020 17:38

Do not get dramless SSDs. Both the low tier ones and a couple of higher spec ones I have tried have been terrible once they have had a burst of writing to them while they have to delay things while housekeeping. The aliexpress one got so slow that windows would declare the drive offline and reboot the whole system, where it would timeout during the boot process because the drive was so slow.

The cheap small sandisk I got for a boot drive in an old system would start to behave worse than a HDD. It never got so bad that it would freeze but it was not pleasent to use. Installing apps on it when it was near full (was 120 gig) and it would slow to a crawl. - put my old intel bigger 240 gig drive into it which I dont know if was dramless or not, and the machine was responsive again. Same install, just cloned it over.

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#2558183 7-Sep-2020 02:34

richms:

The cheap small sandisk I got for a boot drive in an old system would start to behave worse than a HDD. It never got so bad that it would freeze but it was not pleasent to use. Installing apps on it when it was near full (was 120 gig) and it would slow to a crawl. - put my old intel bigger 240 gig drive into it which I dont know if was dramless or not, and the machine was responsive again. Same install, just cloned it over.

When any SSD is too full it will perform badly. The way SSDs work is that they have blocks of storage that are erased as a group. Erase is a very slow operation - seconds, not milliseconds or microseconds. So what they do to offset that problem is to always try to have enough blocks available that are already erased and are therefore ready to be written (which is a fairly fast operation). Writing to flash storage is only in one direction. If an erased block is all 1s, then it can only be written so that 1s get changed to 0s. If a write requires that a 0 be changed to a 1, that can only be done by a (very slow) erase operation. So the SSD uses one of its already erased blocks. It copies the data in the original block the OS wants to write to into its RAM, then writes the new data over the top of the old data in the RAM copy, and then writes all of that RAM block to the already erased block assigned for this job. It then updates its map of where blocks are allocated in the space that the operating system sees, so that the OS sees the data in the right place in the filesystem, and queues the old block to be erased. This is all invisible to the OS, except for one thing. When the OS frees filesystem disk space, the SSD needs to be told about that so that it can erase all the blocks formerly allocated to that disk space. That is what the TRIM operation does. As soon as a TRIM is received, all the blocks specified by the TRIM data are put on a queue to be erased as soon as possible. The SSD can only erase one or a few blocks at a time, as erasing is a power hungry operation that also causes heat that needs to be dissipated. So blocks that are TRIMmed may take a while before they actually get erased and are available to be written to again.

So if your SSD is very full, and you write data that requires more erased blocks than are already available, there will be a hideously long delay as the SSD erases and rewrites blocks. The way that SSDs prevent this problem is to simply have enough spare blocks available so that it can have enough pre-erased blocks available to cover whatever write activity is needed. They usually have some spare blocks internally that are not officially part of the capacity of the SSD, but if you want to do a lot of writing and particularly if you want to write very large files, you need to format your SSD so that it has sufficient spare space outside the space you allocate to partitions for the filesystems. Typically it is recommended to leave about 10% of the SSD unallocated to any partition, but if you know the requirements of your workload for the SSD, you should calculate what you actually require. This is what is called "overprovisioning" your SSD. All the blocks that are not part of the partitions are available to the SSD to erase for later use, so it will always have that number of blocks available for writing. If you do not overprovison your SSD, your experience with it will be very bad as it gets close to full, or if you write data to it so fast that it runs out of erased blocks.

Your description of what your small Sandisk did matches exactly what you would expect if you had failed to overprovisioned it. Moving the data to the 240 Gbyte SSD just made more blocks available to be erased, but if you fill that disk up and you have not overprovisioned it, the same problem will happen again.

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#2558286 7-Sep-2020 10:21

Keep it simple : allways the best way.

Dont use the option requiring an adapter unless there are no other options .

allio

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#2558450 7-Sep-2020 11:42

To ensure good and predictable performance with no sporadic and annoying slowdowns, aim for both TLC and a DRAM cache. Going for QLC or DRAM-less will be fine in most situations but there will likely be times where you notice holdups. Going for both QLC and DRAM-less is a recipe for a bad time.

Would suggest a Crucial MX500 as a highly reliable affordable 2.5" drive that meets both requirements. Samsung 860 EVO or WD Blue are also good at about the same price range ($200/1TB). Anything cheaper will compromise on either or both of those areas.

If you can't swing $200 the Samsung QLC drive for $150 isn't bad and will probably be absolutely fine in practice.

On the SATA vs M.2/NVMe question - interesting to note that we seem to have officially crossed over to SATA being more expensive as well as bigger, older and slower. The NVMe Kingston A2000 is $189/1TB and is hugely faster than any SATA drive.

BiggusDoggus

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#2558506 7-Sep-2020 13:04

allio:

To ensure good and predictable performance with no sporadic and annoying slowdowns, aim for both TLC and a DRAM cache. Going for QLC or DRAM-less will be fine in most situations but there will likely be times where you notice holdups. Going for both QLC and DRAM-less is a recipe for a bad time.

Would suggest a Crucial MX500 as a highly reliable affordable 2.5" drive that meets both requirements. Samsung 860 EVO or WD Blue are also good at about the same price range ($200/1TB). Anything cheaper will compromise on either or both of those areas.

If you can't swing $200 the Samsung QLC drive for $150 isn't bad and will probably be absolutely fine in practice.

On the SATA vs M.2/NVMe question - interesting to note that we seem to have officially crossed over to SATA being more expensive as well as bigger, older and slower. The NVMe Kingston A2000 is $189/1TB and is hugely faster than any SATA drive.

Thanks.

What kind of reputation does Gigabyte have? There's not a lot on them in the Google.

https://pp.co.nz/product/internal-solid-state-drives/gigabyte-solid-state-drive-1tb-sata-6gbs-pn-gp-gstfs31100tntd/AA96215/#&ref=pricespy

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allio

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#2559658 7-Sep-2020 14:27

BiggusDoggus:

What kind of reputation does Gigabyte have? There's not a lot on them in the Google.

https://pp.co.nz/product/internal-solid-state-drives/gigabyte-solid-state-drive-1tb-sata-6gbs-pn-gp-gstfs31100tntd/AA96215/#&ref=pricespy

They don't have one, really.

It's almost impossible to find out any details on that drive but it appears to be TLC with no DRAM cache. It will be fine day to day but pretty slow in some situations. The extra $25 for a better drive is well spent.

A DRAM-less TLC drive generally does pretty well with long sustained writes (i.e. copying a big file) because TLC memory is decently fast, but falls over badly when copying lots of little files (like installing a program or game) because there's no RAM buffer and the flash memory simply can't keep up.

A QLC with DRAM drive is basically the inverse: copying lots of little files is fast because it all hits the RAM cache, but copying large sequential files will drop to the speed of a mechanical hard drive or even lower once the drive runs out of RAM because the underlying QLC memory is very slow.

As I said before, basically everything cheaper than the Crucial MX500 will fall into one of those two camps. Just get the MX500 at PBTech or the 860 EVO at Playtech, they are far better than the ones you're looking at for not much more money. Or if you don't care about speed at all just get the absolute cheapest 1TB drive you can find (either the Samsung 870 QLC or the Crucial BX500, the two drives slugging it out for the title of 'Slowest SSD') and be done with it.

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