1Tb SSD - Samsung worth it over TeamGroup

Associate
Joined
11 Sep 2008
Posts
712
Location
Stratford-Upon-Avon
Associate
Joined
14 Sep 2015
Posts
449
Location
Scotland
Just going to plump for the Crucial MX500 1TB myself. I've got a Samsung EVO 850 for my boot drive and its been great. I just can't justify the extra £40 for the Samsung EVO 860 1TB over the Crucial.

People often say the Samsung has higher dependency etc but the Crucial comes with a 5 year warranty and is good for 360TB Total Bytes Written (TBW), equal to 197GB per day for 5 years. That's more than enough for my games drive.
 
Soldato
Joined
29 Dec 2002
Posts
7,176
Personally, i only buy Samsung

In SSD performance terms, Samsung have a deserved reputation for being top end, but the majority of users are unlikely to ever put anything remotely like a workload that would significantly benefit near the drive, when the scenario is a simple steam drive then a 30 odd percent premium is of debatable benefit unless money is no object, in which case you’d buy NVMe anyway so probably not applicable in this case.
 
Soldato
Joined
15 Apr 2012
Posts
6,605
Location
Rannoch
I only buy Samsung but that’s a personal choice. Over the years I’ve used and installed 100s of various SSD drives and only had one failure.
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
19 Dec 2005
Posts
1,429
Another vote for Samsung, I have installed so many of these and touch wood none have failed yet, even the original ones!
 
Associate
Joined
28 Jun 2017
Posts
102
Samsung all the way. Got a 970 EVO, 960 EVO and a 860 EVO (all M.2) in my machine, no problems at all. Still using an old XP941 (or whatever it was called) in my server, and it gets a hammering with VMs and downloads all day, every day. Still trucking.
 
Permabanned
Joined
12 Sep 2013
Posts
9,221
Location
Knowhere
I noticed Samsung have these new silver cased SSD's that tend to be a bit cheaper than the usual EVO's If you look in the right place you can get the 1TB Samsung 860 QVO SSD for less and it comes with a free copy of The Division 2 which seems to be a great deal but what are these models and how do they compare to the Samsung EVO?

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sams...-solid-state-drive-mz-76q1t0bw-hd-23u-sa.html

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sams...olid-state-drive-mz-76e1t0b-eu-hd-234-sa.html

A £34 saving is great but why?
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Jun 2008
Posts
11,616
Location
Finland
I noticed Samsung have these new silver cased SSD's that tend to be a bit cheaper than the usual EVO's If you look in the right place you can get the 1TB Samsung 860 QVO SSD for less and it comes with a free copy of The Division 2 which seems to be a great deal but what are these models and how do they compare to the Samsung EVO?

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sams...-solid-state-drive-mz-76q1t0bw-hd-23u-sa.html

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sams...olid-state-drive-mz-76e1t0b-eu-hd-234-sa.html

A £34 saving is great but why?
That isn't any saving price, but pretty complete Samsung's marketing scam for leeching lot for inferior tech.

Heck, WD Blue is clearly cheaper at £110:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/wd-b...-solid-state-drive-wds100t2b0a-hd-54j-wd.html

And no matter the price or manufacturer, wouldn't personally touch QLC until there's been couple years of real world testing.
QLC is pretty much analog storage and needs distinguishing between ridiculous 16 charge/voltage states to avoid errors!

Already "just" eight charge levels TLC run into data retention problems in planar-NAND.
With Samsung needing to bubblegum and duct tape "fix" 840 EVO with firmware, which regularly rewrites data to prevent it from evaporating.
3D-NAND brought bigger and more robust transistors taking TLC to level of planar-MLC, but QLC no doubt pushes again close to edge of the fall.
Really wouldn't wonder any if all QLC drives already include regular refresh of data.
 
Permabanned
Joined
12 Sep 2013
Posts
9,221
Location
Knowhere
That isn't any saving price, but pretty complete Samsung's marketing scam for leeching lot for inferior tech.

Heck, WD Blue is clearly cheaper at £110:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/wd-b...-solid-state-drive-wds100t2b0a-hd-54j-wd.html

The Blues a decent price but elsewhere I can get the Samsung QVO for only six quid more than the blue & it comes with a copy of The Division 2 which I can sell for £30 on the MM.


And no matter the price or manufacturer, wouldn't personally touch QLC until there's been couple years of real world testing.
QLC is pretty much analog storage and needs distinguishing between ridiculous 16 charge/voltage states to avoid errors!

Already "just" eight charge levels TLC run into data retention problems in planar-NAND.
With Samsung needing to bubblegum and duct tape "fix" 840 EVO with firmware, which regularly rewrites data to prevent it from evaporating.
3D-NAND brought bigger and more robust transistors taking TLC to level of planar-MLC, but QLC no doubt pushes again close to edge of the fall.
Really wouldn't wonder any if all QLC drives already include regular refresh of data.

I'm not even sure what the bit I highlighted means but I remember the 840 EVO bug, at the time I'd bought the original 840 SSD before the EVO released so I never bought an 840 EVO series drive, The original 840 was my boot drive for years and it's still installed today as a games drive, It's been faultless, My current boot drive is a Samsung nvme drive and having never had issues with either of them I'm more than happy to save a few quid on one of the new QVO models, It won't be used for anything important, just games so if it has issues it'll go back under the warranty, It's silly to write the brand off over an issue years ago, I haven't read or heard of any issues since the 840 Evo.
Getting a 1tb Samsung SSD for £86 is a great deal.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
27 Feb 2015
Posts
12,596
I have no opinion no the teamgroup drives, but I feel with nand you should stick to a well known brand.

MX500's are definitely good bang for buck, otherwise I would go samsung.

My 1TB 860 EVO I was lucky to get on offer for £115.
 
Permabanned
Joined
12 Sep 2013
Posts
9,221
Location
Knowhere
@nashathedog
have a read: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd-review/10
look at all the benchmarks on the prior pages as well if you wanna.
imo mx500/860evo is still the better choice if you can get it for a similar price to qvo.
(also 860evo has the same division 2 giveaway as the qvo i think?)

Thanks for the review link, In the review he mentions the Intel 660 as being a similar drive, My second M.2 slot has an Intel 660 nvme drive in it and although it isn't as fast as my Samsung Polaris M.2 boot drive it gives me reads & writes that are both around the 1800 mark so for a no-work gaming PC it does it's job well as I imagine the Samsung QVO will, If it cost the same as the EVO I'd go with the EVO but with the actual price and the free game taken into account it's a lot cheaper than anything else currently available, for me it's a no-brainer.

I have no opinion on the teamgroup drives, but I feel with nand you should stick to a well known brand.

MX500's are definitely good bang for buck, otherwise I would go samsung.

My 1TB 860 EVO I was lucky to get on offer for £115.

I know the Team Group 8pack DDR4 memory uses Samsung B-die chips, It'll be worth finding out where they source the SSD memory from, As a rule I do prefer keeping to what I know whenever possible and I don't mind spending a little more for my preferred products.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Jun 2008
Posts
11,616
Location
Finland
I'm not even sure what the bit I highlighted means but I remember the 840 EVO bug...

It's silly to write the brand off over an issue years ago
It wasn't really bug, but feature resulting from pushing tech too hard.
All semiconductors are made on silicon substrate, with components builts as layer on its surface.
Semiconductor grade silicon (impurities measured in few parts per billion) is just very expensive.
So to fit more circuitry (or in this case storage capacity) into same surface area, manufacturers push component sizes down.
That has major negative side effecs for use as Flash memory:
When transistors were becoming smaller and smaller, amount of charge they could store in their insulated floating gate was becoming smaller. (less tolerance for leakage)
While also insulation got weaker and weaker making that memory "cell" less durable and worser at retaining charge.

Single Level Cell (SLC) storing only one bit needs to only differentiate between empty and full charge, which is easy to read/write and has lots of tolerance for degradation.
Multi Level Cell (MLC) was next step storing second bit per cell and requiring distinguishing between four charge states lowering tolerance for charge leakage and other degradation.
Triple Level Cell (TLC) crammed third bit into cell requiring eight charge levels.
And that simply exceeded capabilities of tiny transistors, with those smaller charges degrading over time after write.
Errors from that degradation again started causing increasing amount of re-reads and stressed error corrections more and more causing drive slowing down.

In 3D-NAND instead of single layer on silicon's surface components are built into vertical structures with multiple layers on top of each others.
That allows using bigger (and better) transistors while decreasing size of silicon chip per capacity.
Which brought TLC's reliability back to level of planar MLC.
Hence no 840 EVO like problems in succeeding EVOs, or in any of the countless TLC drives of other makers.

Quad Level Cell (QLC) crams now fourth bit into that cell.
And naturally writing and reading 16 different charge levels is lot harder than same for eight charge levels.
While tolerance for charge degradation/transistor wear etc. is very small.
That's feature of technology itself.
And reason why it would be completely silly to pay anything approaching TLC price, or same price, for technically lot worser QLC.
No matter the brand.
And in this case Samsung's QLC drive is more expensive than TLC drives of others.
 
Soldato
Joined
27 Feb 2015
Posts
12,596
I would avoid the samsung QVO drive. Its a first gen 4 bit drive, doesnt bench well and untested in the market which is perhaps the most important thing.

It seems what samsung have done is instead of lowering the price of the QVO to reflect the lower quality and cheaper manufacturing, they made the EVO more expensive to create a price gap between the products, my 1tb EVO was nowhere near the current price of the EVO drives.
 
Permabanned
Joined
12 Sep 2013
Posts
9,221
Location
Knowhere
@EsaT Interesting stuff, I learned a little today so thanks. It'll be interesting to see how it performs as a simple games drive, I can't see it making much of a difference other than maybe slower loading speeds when booting up a game which doesn't really bother me, plus I don't see much of a difference between games running on HDD's & SSD's if I'm honest. Anyway thanks for replying. :)
 
Back
Top Bottom