NVMe vs M.2

Avalon said:
Is it really so difficult to admit you did little/no research and just assumed SSD=fast? It’s been pretty obvious since you said you were aware of QLC’s limitations and then told us you did a full write. Also that ‘negligible’ is roughly 50%, obviously it’s all relative, but that is a pretty big price difference.

The encryption point is interesting, from a technical perspective firmware is lower level than software, this gives it a technical advantage and like for like makes it more secure, the point is moot if the implementation is flawed though, just as it would be with software. Software is often easier/more likely to be updated by an end user vs hardware.
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That's exactly what I said... I took it for granted that it was going to be fast even using QLC because that is the characteristic property of an SSD, just like you expect a car to be able to do 60mph, you don't expect to have to thoroughly research the model of car.

I said it didn't work for me and then you started being needlessly argumentative saying I should have done more research and then ironically said I should be using the hardware encryption which is hopelessly broken...

Where is this 50% price difference? 1TB TLC drives are about £120 and the same brand QLC drives I've seen are £100.

The fundamental problem with hardware encryption as it is implemented is that it is not open to scrutiny which is inherently less secure, cryptanalysts can't examine the encryption to see if there are any flaws such as those mentioned in the article. Open source software on the other hand like Veracrypt enables independent expert verification that it does not contain such flaws, furthermore software encryption offers multiple encryption such as AES-TWOFISH-SERPENT so if a cipher is broken the data is still secure, whereas I have only ever seen hardware use AES.
 
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Energize said:
Where is this 50% price difference? 1TB TLC drives are about £120 and the same brand QLC drives I've seen are £100.
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£100 for well-known brand QLC vs £120 for no-name brand TLC. But yes, I’m trying to figure out this pricing discrepancy as well.
 
Energize said:
The fundamental problem with hardware encryption as it is implemented is that it is not open to scrutiny which is inherently less secure, cryptanalysts can't examine the encryption to see if there are any flaws such as those mentioned in the article.
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Microsoft have recently announced that BitLocker will be software only from now on because the hardware encryption on the drives is laughably easy to bypass.

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1177429658259927040
 
As stated earlier, only 2-3 weeks back I paid £49 for a 500GB P1, £85 for a 1TB 660p and £149 for a 2TB 660p, that’s roughly half the price of the TLC equivalents, not 20%. Even today using a large UK supplier with same day/next day service that 2TB is under £200, the TLC version is more like £400.

The article is based on drives that are a few generations old, but the point is still the same, even if you did use software encryption, after the full write it would perform as normal, eg SLC cache speed followed by QLC if you dump enough data in one go.
 
I have 2x Samsung Pro's (512GB OS + 1TB Games) and 3x 2TB Samsung QVO (Windows Storage Spaces) so appears as 6TB drive.

I wanted 2x 4TB SSD's but they are too much money right now IMO so 2TB was more reasonable but look at the price different from the QVO to EVO to PRO and tell me what you would have bought.

The speed is basically the same and the warranty is long enough and going by reviews they were tested well beyond there advertised life explicit in the chart bellow.


Annotation-2019-10-06-172932.jpg
 
Man, QLC really is hilariously slow. I can't begin to imagine what PLC is going to be like?!
 
ATTO results have it north of 520MB/s Writes at my end so for now that will do as its obviously using the 4GB cache.

In an ideal price situation I would have bought the multiple 2TB or 4TB EVO's or PRO's like my main two drives but this is simply a Storage drive for mostly large media files.
 
4K8KW10 said:
The SATA interface provides speeds of 600 MB/s. The speed that is reported above is 80 MB/s....... has no connection with SATA whatsoever.
That's slower than a mechanical spinning drive 5400 rpm, not to mention 7200 rpm.
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The writes to the SLC cache are however absolutely connected to the SATA limitation.

The slower QLC write speed is the worst case scenario for QLC however, and occurs when the SLC cache is full. Most will find they won't write enough to exhaust the cache, on an NVME QLC based you'll see 1500MB/s writes until the cache is full.

So the figures posted don't tell the whole story. Yes QLC is slow as ass once the cache is full, reality is however that most people won't exhaust that cache and have a plenty fast drive.
 
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rotor said:
£100 for well-known brand QLC vs £120 for no-name brand TLC. But yes, I’m trying to figure out this pricing discrepancy as well.
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The Samsung EVO 860 is £120.

Avalon said:
As stated earlier, only 2-3 weeks back I paid £49 for a 500GB P1, £85 for a 1TB 660p and £149 for a 2TB 660p, that’s roughly half the price of the TLC equivalents, not 20%. Even today using a large UK supplier with same day/next day service that 2TB is under £200, the TLC version is more like £400.

The article is based on drives that are a few generations old, but the point is still the same, even if you did use software encryption, after the full write it would perform as normal, eg SLC cache speed followed by QLC if you dump enough data in one go.
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The Samsung EVO 860 500GB is £63 so that's a 22% difference and the 1TB is £120 which is a 30% difference which I don't think is economical personally and that is comparing different brands, if you look at the 1TB QVO it's £100 which is only a 17% difference, now people in a different financial situation might feel differently but I feel it's a pretty small difference for such a massive drop in performance. If the drives were 50% or more cheaper I might reconsider using them as a backup drive.

And which retailer was this with? If you go on Overclockers and Amazon etc I don't see that pricing being offered and you seem to be comparing different brands?

I think that as QLC matures we may see advancements in performance such as MLC cache which would start to make them a viable option for the majority, but it's a little immature at the moment.
 
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Mostly any SSD up to and inc 1TB is reasonable priced IMO (you can choose make and model to suit) it is 2TB+ that is gets crazy for 2.5" SATA drives, NVMe /M.2 are cheaper.
 
Energize said:
The Samsung EVO 860 is £120.



The Samsung EVO 860 500GB is £63 so that's a 22% difference and the 1TB is £120 which is a 30% difference which I don't think is economical personally and that is comparing different brands, if you look at the 1TB QVO it's £100 which is only a 17% difference, now people in a different financial situation might feel differently but I feel it's a pretty small difference for such a massive drop in performance. If the drives were 50% or more cheaper I might reconsider using them as a backup drive.

And which retailer was this with? If you go on Overclockers and ........ etc I don't see that pricing being offered and you seem to be comparing different brands?

I think that as QLC matures we may see advancements in performance such as MLC cache which would start to make them a viable option for the majority, but it's a little immature at the moment.
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860 is AHCI based SATA not NVMe, all the drives I referenced were obviously NVMe PCIe. As I mentioned an online retailer who offer same day delivery and you mentioned one that fits that description, if you look at the 2TB 660p pricing from them and then compare it to any main brand 2TB TLC drive you’ll see they are roughly twice the price, I haven’t looked at OCUK’s pricing recently, but they generally tend to be slightly higher with a similar metric.

You keep focusing on the type of cache, but ignoring that it’s less important than the size of cache. If the industry moved to MLC/TLC cache, that in itself will make little difference. A QLC drive is ‘fast’ if you stay in cache for writes, so as long as you are dumping under 76GB in one go to a relatively empty 500GB drive, you get full speed, as that scales up on a 2TB drive it becomes increasingly likely you won’t fill the cache. Reads will always be fast, so choose a drive with a large enough cache for your needs and you’re not going to notice the difference outside of synthetic benchmarks or doing something silly. Non of that will help a full write scenario though, which is where you went wrong.

As far as my pricing goes, I got cheap deals at the time, at least one other person got similar pricing on a 2TB 660p here, but pricing has generally gone up in recent months as the exchange rate has gone down, the % difference is still similar.
 
Avalon said:
It's available for £19x from very large and well known retailers, the same places have branded 2TB TLC NVMe for roughly twice the price, not 20% more, please stop referencing fictional numbers, it discredits what is otherwise a reasonably considered post.

First gen is always perceived as higher risk, it often has quirks, but it's usually not so inherently flawed as to make it unusable. The market will do what it has always done, TLC will remain as a enterprise/prosumer product for a generation or three and priced accordingly, QLC will be a consumer product, as capacities increase, so does the SLC cache, on a 2TB drive we already have 280TB of SLC, how many average desktop users do you think regularly dump 280TB to a drive? Big and cheap is what matters in most cases, those that need something else will pay a premium.
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If you going to take that attitude, I am not the one that posted £149 and £170 as prices. Those are fictional in the market place on 8 october 2019.

Your prediction is what I fear, QLC taking over as mainstream, it should only stay as a low end budget device designed for specific scenarios, TLC should be mainstream, and MLC for high end. I would understand more if QLC doubled capacity and halved costs, but it doesnt. If you see a bigger price differential it is for "other" reasons. The gains is only a small 25% to capacity. QLC is about manufacturers profit margin really. Same reason as shingled hard drives.

If we talking about average desktop users, I think its entirely reasonable to compare to SATA ssd's costs, as I can categorically say my nvme drive feels faster in nothing vs my usage of a sata ssd. It feels counter productive to use QLC nand on a nvme device, as the nature of nvme isnt budget in the first place.
 
b00merang69 said:
I have 2x Samsung Pro's (512GB OS + 1TB Games) and 3x 2TB Samsung QVO (Windows Storage Spaces) so appears as 6TB drive.

I wanted 2x 4TB SSD's but they are too much money right now IMO so 2TB was more reasonable but look at the price different from the QVO to EVO to PRO and tell me what you would have bought.

The speed is basically the same and the warranty is long enough and going by reviews they were tested well beyond there advertised life explicit in the chart bellow.


Annotation-2019-10-06-172932.jpg
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How much did you get the QVO's for? at the time I brought my 860 EVO (which was only about 2 months ago), it was the same price as their QVO drives. The QVO's are now a bit cheaper but not much cheaper where I checked. EVO to PRO, the price difference is large, but TLC is now proven, and both have 5 year warranties, but when I last checked from EVO to QVO it was a different story, differential of 10%, 2 years less warranty, much lower sustained writes and unproven tech, for me that is not worth a 10% saving.
 
chrcoluk said:
If you going to take that attitude, I am not the one that posted £149 and £170 as prices. Those are fictional in the market place on 8 october 2019.

Your prediction is what I fear, QLC taking over as mainstream, it should only stay as a low end budget device designed for specific scenarios, TLC should be mainstream, and MLC for high end. I would understand more if QLC doubled capacity and halved costs, but it doesnt. If you see a bigger price differential it is for "other" reasons. The gains is only a small 25% to capacity. QLC is about manufacturers profit margin really. Same reason as shingled hard drives.

If we talking about average desktop users, I think its entirely reasonable to compare to SATA ssd's costs, as I can categorically say my nvme drive feels faster in nothing vs my usage of a sata ssd. It feels counter productive to use QLC nand on a nvme device, as the nature of nvme isnt budget in the first place.
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NVMe isn’t premium, it’s almost 4 years on from that. Pricing you quoted in your reply was current at the time posted - that’s why I posted it, TLC was still (more than) twice the price of QLC on NVMe. The only time QLC would feel noticeably slower than TLC, let alone an AHCI based controller on SATA would be if you wrote enough data to fill the cache, how often do you personally drop 280GB onto a drive as a continuous write? That’s what I’d have to do to notice any significant slowdown on my 2TB drive, the reed speed would still be massively quicker than AHCI based drives irrespective of flash type. Your feels (while I’m sure they’re important to you) are not a recognised benchmark and comparing QLC to anything SATA is just silly.
 
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