Crucial MX500 vs Samsung 860 Evo

Abdul Rafay Mian · 24 Mar 2019 at 03:46

Hi Guys,

Is it worth spending extra money on the samsung 860 evo over the crucial MX500 the difference is about £30 for the 500GB one.

tamzzy · 24 Mar 2019 at 08:00

no. they're about equal in performance (mx500 perhaps a tiny bit slower - but mostly intangible real-world difference). i'd get whichever is the cheapest at the time of purchase.

EsaT · 24 Mar 2019 at 09:28

Both use same level technology (3D TLC) and have same five year warranty.
So just take what is cheaper... unless you purposely want to spend more money.
WD Blue "3D" would be another candidate and lately has been cheaper than Crucial.
(Sandisk Ultra 3D should be same except different sticker on top)

Smoogels · 24 Mar 2019 at 09:34

They perform the same and both have a 5 year warranty. I would pocket the £30 and get the MX500.

Cooper · 24 Mar 2019 at 10:43

The only reason I'd spend more on the Samsung would be for aesthetic reasons if you were to have the SSD on display in a PC case with a side window, as (IMO) the mostly black look of the Samsung is much nicer than the garish silver/blue colours of the Crucial.

..and that is the only reason, certainly not anything to do with (noticeable) performance.

Abdul Rafay Mian · 24 Mar 2019 at 19:27

Thanks, went for the Crucial and its working great.

The Old School Gamer · 28 Mar 2019 at 05:07

Those MX500 SSDs were the value buy.

But looks like Samsung takes the crown once again.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sams...-solid-state-drive-mz-76q2t0bw-hd-240-sa.html

Hopefully this means affordable 3 to 4tb SSD's are not far away.

tamzzy · 28 Mar 2019 at 05:50

The Old School Gamer said:
But looks like Samsung takes the crown once again.

Not quite.
QLC nand is quite noticeably inferior to TLC nand both in speed and in longevity.
QVO review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd-review
QLC nand drives dedicates quite a large portion of its free nand to use as a SLC cache. The drive performance falls off a cliff the fuller it gets...not a very nice attribute

edscdk · 28 Mar 2019 at 05:59

tamzzy said:
Not quite.
QLC nand is quite noticeably inferior to TLC nand both in speed and in longevity.
QVO review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13633/the-samsung-860-qvo-ssd-review
QLC nand drives dedicates quite a large portion of its free nand to use as a SLC cache. The drive performance falls off a cliff the fuller it gets...not a very nice attribute

I can barely tell the difference between nvme 4k/3k and normal sata ssd... Without a benchmark you are not telling the difference between qlc and tlc..

The Old School Gamer · 28 Mar 2019 at 06:11

@tamzzy

While true, such things depend on your point of view and use case.
These 2.5" drives are a slower class of SSD now due to being limited to the older SATA interface.
So performance is pretty much tapped out and a non-issue.

For example I have installed a 4-bay hotswap Icydock cage in my new build. The idea being going forward I will simply replace large capacity storage HDDs for lower grade SSDs in the future.

@edscdk

That's right. In a actual real usage case scenario the question is how fast is fast enough.
The m.2 NVMe SSDs are awesome for OS/app/scratch drives but are overkill otherwise.

tamzzy · 28 Mar 2019 at 06:38

The Old School Gamer said:
These 2.5" drives are a slower class of SSD now due to being limited to the older SATA interface.

The same holds true for the QLC nvme drives like the intel 660p. The cliff edge is horrendous.

tamzzy · 28 Mar 2019 at 06:41

@The Old School Gamer
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph13078/heavy-bw.png

EsaT · 28 Mar 2019 at 09:05

The Old School Gamer said:
So performance is pretty much tapped out and a non-issue.

For example I have installed a 4-bay hotswap Icydock cage in my new build. The idea being going forward I will simply replace large capacity storage HDDs for lower grade SSDs in the future.

If job is data storage you don't want to touch QLCs, except maybe with blunt instrument, untill they've been beta tested for many years.
They're pretty much analog storage and need to distinguish between ridiculous 16 charge states to avoid error.

Planar TLC already run into serious issues in data retention in Samsung 840 EVO.
Which needed bubblegum/duct tape "fix" with firmware frequently rewriting data to prevent it from evaporating.
And TLC needs to distinguish just 8 charge levels/states having more tolerance for degradation.

And haven't seen any non-synthetic measurements proving NVMe as really much faster for say OS loading.
Drives in this list are fifity-fifty NVMe and SATA-signaled:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Crucial/MX500_M.2_1_TB/8.html
Continuous copying of big amounts of data back and forth is in home use really only thing where NVMe's speeds would show.
Would be simply extremely hard to be limited by IOPS of SATA SSDs.

The Old School Gamer · 28 Mar 2019 at 19:23

Things will greatly improve by the time I getting around to migrating over in a year or two. (it's just forward thinking, future proofing on my part at this point).
At the moment I'm using conventional HDDs as they have the capacity I require (24Tb-RAID1).
I'll probably replace/upgrade to 8 or 10Tb HDDs first, so actually it could be even longer yet.