TLC drives

[Buttkicker]

pretty new to all these m.2 drives and thought it would be easy to upgrage my 8yr old ITX rog system but having a few headaches now with all this TLC drives been downgraded to SLC

i want to get 2 drives for my new pc one larger one for storage and was looking at the sn550 wd 1tb version which seems cheap

and for my boot drive i was looking into a nice fast pci3 or pci4 one around 500gb but with all this TLC v SLC and some reports saying steer well clear of SLC

how do i atually know which have been downgraded - i see the 970pro evo for £99 which looked just the job as a boot drive but now reading the various comments about it been downgraded

how do i know which is which and which drives are TLC with dram cache etc please forgive my silly questions but been out of the loop of new tech in my pc for a looooong time and the more i read about these drives been 'docterd' the confused i am finding what to buy for my pc to go with my other hardware i intend buying but dont want non TLC as my boot drive whether pci3 or 4

 

[EsaT]

It's QLC with four bits and semi analog 16 charge/voltage states per cell, which is garbage and has worser uncached write speed than HDDs.

SLC would be upgrade being the original Flash memory with single bit (fast to write and read full or zero charge/voltage) stored per cell.
Except maybe outside industrial/special use drives you don't find it from SSDs on market, because of high cost per capacity.
(MLC with 2bits fits same data into 1/2 the silicon area and TLC into 1/3)


And there's zero sense to waste limited M.2 slots for small drives.
(unless you only need little storage capacity)
If you're worried about need to reinstall OS, partitioning is for that.


Also unless you're rebooting your PC every ten minutes it doesn't even really matter on what SSD Windows is:
Once booted, Windows does only small drive accesses.
And if problem is too little memory causing heavy page file usage, you need more RAM.


Also brand overpricing Samsung joined bait&switch brands by changing parts in 970 Evo to cheaper ones.
https://www.extremetech.com/computi...atest-ssd-manufacturer-cheating-its-customers

You can get PCIe v4 drive for the same price, like 5GB/s Phison E16 based very high (Samsung 970 Pro beating) write endurance Seagate, or normal endurance WD Black SN850.
Seagate Firecuda 520 500GB SSD PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive (ZP500GM3A002)= £89.99
WD Black 500GB SN850 SSD M.2 2280 NVME PCI-E Gen4 Solid State Drive (WDS500G1X0E)= £89.99

Also there's 1TB full speed PCIe v3 drive for less.
WD Black 1TB SN750 M.2 2280 NVME PCI-E Gen3 Solid State Drive (WDS100T3X0C)= £89.99

 

[Tetras]

pretty new to all these m.2 drives and thought it would be easy to upgrage my 8yr old ITX rog system but having a few headaches now with all this TLC drives been downgraded to SLC

i want to get 2 drives for my new pc one larger one for storage and was looking at the sn550 wd 1tb version which seems cheap

and for my boot drive i was looking into a nice fast pci3 or pci4 one around 500gb but with all this TLC v SLC and some reports saying steer well clear of SLC

how do i atually know which have been downgraded - i see the 970pro evo for £99 which looked just the job as a boot drive but now reading the various comments about it been downgraded

how do i know which is which and which drives are TLC with dram cache etc please forgive my silly questions but been out of the loop of new tech in my pc for a looooong time and the more i read about these drives been 'docterd' the confused i am finding what to buy for my pc to go with my other hardware i intend buying but dont want non TLC as my boot drive whether pci3 or 4

I'd expect the 'premium' SSDs (that are available right now) will always be TLC with a DRAM cache. The 970 Evo Plus will never use QLC and will never remove the DRAM (it is stated on their website and in the datasheets). The changes Samsung made were of a different nature.

Cheaper SSDs like the SN550 appear to no longer guarantee TLC, but will always be DRAM-less.

 

[Buttkicker]

Thanks for the input guys so looking at my boot drive options looking at getting one of these
wd black 1tb sn750 or a EVO 970 1tb plus which are a similar price and the board i am looking at getting is Gigabyte b550I aurora pro itx with a 5700g
which of the two drives would be the best buy to fit that set up thanks

 

[EsaT]

wd black 1tb sn750 or a EVO 970 1tb plus which are a similar price and the board i am looking at getting is Gigabyte b550I aurora pro itx with a 5700g

No sense to pay Samsung's extra over SN750, when that drive has been "updated" to use also cheaper components.
(and isn't anymore entirely top TLC drive)

And while motherboard is capable to PCIe v4, that APU is limited to PCIe v3.
So if you aren't going to update CPU in future, no sense to pay PCIe v4 extra.

Cheaper SSDs like the SN550 appear to no longer guarantee TLC, but will always be DRAM-less.

400 MB/s write speed on "updated" SN550 is too high for QLC.
Hence component change was something similar to what Samsug did for 970 Evo, which also lost roughly similar percentage of uncached write speed.