SSD Deathmatch: Crucial's M500 Vs. Samsung's 840 EVO
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Page 1:Crucial's New m4 (Plus 496) Gets Reviewed
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Page 2:Inside Of Crucial's M500 SSD
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Page 3:Test Setup And Benchmarks
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Page 4:Results: 128 KB Sequential Reads
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Page 5:Results: 128 KB Sequential Write
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Page 6:Results: 4 KB Random Reads
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Page 7:Results: 4 KB Random Writes
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Page 8:Results: Tom's Storage Bench v1.0
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Page 9:Results: Tom's Storage Bench, Continued
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Page 10:Results: PCMark 7 And PCMark Vantage
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Page 11:Results: File Copy
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Page 12:Results: Power Consumption
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Page 13:Head To Head: Crucial's M500s Vs. Samsung's 840 EVOs
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Page 14:We Like The High-Capacity Crucial M500 SSDs Best...
Results: Power Consumption
Idle Power Consumption
Idle consumption is the most important power metric for consumer and client SSDs. After all, solid-state drives complete host commands quickly, and then drop back down to idle. Aside from the occasional background garbage collection, a modern SSD spends most of its life doing very little. Enterprise-oriented drives are more frequently used at full tilt, making their idle power numbers far less relevant. But this just isn't the case on the desktop, where the demands of client and consumer computing leave most SSDs sitting on their hands for long stretches of time.
Interestingly, the M500s demonstrate high idle power consumption. That's an important result for mobile users who may be inclined to swap drives and don't want to see their battery life suffer. Of course, with the implementation of device- and host-initiated power management, plus deeper sleep states in Intel's Haswell architecture, the significance of these numbers may be mitigated somewhat.
PCMark 7 Average Power Consumption
If we log power consumption through a workload, even a relatively heavy one, we see that average use is still pretty close to the idle numbers. Max power may spike fiercely, but the usage seen during a PCMark 7 run is pretty light. You can see the drives fall back down to the idle "floor", interspersed with peaks of varying intensity.
All four drives idle around the same wattage, so you mostly see them hanging out at a similar level. Then, when PCMark 7 ramps up its tests, we get spikes corresponding to heavier use, especially those triggered by writes to each drive. Maximum power consumption varies by capacity, so you don't even need the graphics legend to tell the four M500s apart.
The squadron of M500s follows the same pattern as most other drives, registering slightly more power consumption than the idle result during a complete run of the PCMark storage suite. Crucial's entire line-up does end up in the bottom half of this chart, though the results aren't bad considering how power scales up from idle. On average, the increase is only a few more milliwatts.
Maximum Observed Power Consumption
It's even better news that maximum power consumption isn't a critical specification for most desktop workloads. In the enterprise space, yes. This information goes into the calculation for total cost of ownership. But in a client environment, you shouldn't be seeing these numbers for more than short bursts.
It's safe to say that 1 TB of flash is a lot for one drive, and we don't find it unusual that the large 960 GB model uses the most power in Crucial's M500 line-up. Frankly, 5.3 W is a reasonable number for such a high-capacity SSD.
But Samsung's 1 TB 840 EVO places quite a bit more favorably, despite its use of three-bit-per-cell flash.
- Crucial's New m4 (Plus 496) Gets Reviewed
- Inside Of Crucial's M500 SSD
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Results: 128 KB Sequential Reads
- Results: 128 KB Sequential Write
- Results: 4 KB Random Reads
- Results: 4 KB Random Writes
- Results: Tom's Storage Bench v1.0
- Results: Tom's Storage Bench, Continued
- Results: PCMark 7 And PCMark Vantage
- Results: File Copy
- Results: Power Consumption
- Head To Head: Crucial's M500s Vs. Samsung's 840 EVOs
- We Like The High-Capacity Crucial M500 SSDs Best...
The SSD 840 is rated for 1000 P/E cycles, though it's been seen doing more like ~3000. At 10GB/day, a 240GB would last for 24,000 days, or about
766 years, and that's using the 1K figure.You're free to waste money if you want, but SLC now has little place outside write-heavy DB storage.
EDIT: Screwed up by an order of magnitude.
You are totally correct! You win a gold star, because I didn't even notice. Thanks for catching it, and it should be fixed now.
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
Not only are consumer workloads completely gentle on SSDs, but modern controllers are super awesome at expanding NAND longevity. I was able to burn through 3000+ PE cycles on the Samsung 840 last year, and it only is rated at 1,000 PE cycles or so. You'd have to put almost 1 TB a day on a 120 GB Samsung 840 TLC to kill it in a year, assuming it didn't die from something else first.
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
You may be thinking of the controller failures some of the Sandforce drives had, which are completely unrelated to the type of NAND used.
I would like to see, can TH use SSD put this 10GB/day and see for how long it will work.
After this I read this article, I think that Crucial's M500 hit the jackpot. Will see Samsung's response. And that's very good for end consumer.
Show me a report with a reasonable sample size (more than a couple of dozen drives) that says they have >50% annual failures.
A couple of years ago Tom's posted this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html
The majority of failures were firmware-caused by early Sandforce drives. That's gone now.
EDIT: Missed your post. First off, that's a perfect example of self-selection. Secondly, those who buy multiple SSDs will appear to have n times the actual failure rate, because if any fail they all appear to fail. Thirdly, that has nothing to do with whether or not it is a 1bpc or 3 bpc SSD - that's what you started off with.
Sounds a bit like a sore loser argument, unfortunately.
SSDs aren't perfect, but they generally do live long enough to not be a problem. Most of the failures have been overcome by now too.
Just realised there's an error in my original post - off by a factor of ten. Should have been 66 years.
Tell that to all the people on this forum still running intel X-25M that launched all the way back in 2008 and my Samsung 830 that's been working just fine for over a year.......
See what you're paying attention too is the loudest group of ssd owners. The owners that have failed ssd's.
See it's the classic "if someone has a problem, there going to be the one that you hear and the quiet group, isn't having the problem" issue.
Those that dont have issues (such as myself) dont mention about our ssds and is probably complaining about something else that has failed.
Those don't seem like opinions to me. It's customary to include some form of leeway in the sentence, like 'IMHO', 'often', or 'I've heard' etc.
Assuming the system has more than enough RAM to avoid needing any significant amount of swapping. If someone with 4GB RAM uses a 16GB swapfile to avoid upgrading to the 8-16GB RAM he really should have, he could end up writing over 1GB/minute.
I have ended up over-crowding my RAM many times in the past and it has a tendency to make my computers practically unusable when using mechanical HDDs at which point I had to spread my programs and swapfile across multiple HDDs to reduce the IO load on individual drives. I imagine this would burn through SSDs fairly quickly.
Anecdotal evidence is pretty useless. People with very good or very bad experiences tend to write reviews. People generally don't write reviews for random pieces of hardware that just work as expected. Provide citations with statistics to support your statements if you want anyone to take them seriously.
You are entitled to your opinion but you are making bold statements without any facts. A lot of people use forums like these to research products they are thinking about buying and you are spreading misinformation about SSD's without and evidence for your statements. I personally have 4 computers with SSD's in them that are over 2 years old and I haven't had a single issue or failure. It really pisses me off when people start spreading inaccurate statements that may turn away a potential user of a SSD. Out of all the PC upgrades I have done in the past 12 years the SSD has been the best most noticeable improvement I have done.
Just to stick an oar into the reliability issue, my Samsung 830 has run reliably for over two years now. The only SSDs I had fail in use were a couple of Sandforce drives, but their replacements have thus far been reliable. I think InvalidError has a good point about RAM though; I tend to use at least 8GB, which probably cuts down swapping quite a bit. I also prefer to close programs completely rather than have a lot of windows open, which would also reduce swapping. With a SSD, they re-open pretty quickly anyway.
LOL, when you come onto an article about SSD's and say nonsense like you did, you have to expect to get hate buddy. MLC/TLC is very viable and lasts much longer than a year kid, some drives do fail, and if they do you get your replacement. Other peoples drives are not lemons and last a normal lifetime, common sense bro.
Oh, I highly recommend getting the drive migration kit from Crucial for ~$20. It makes like much easier. It's a USB 3.0 SATA drive connector for your M500. Then just boot the supplied CD and run it in auto mode to copy over your drive exactly and make any sizing adjustments needed to the partitions to get it to fit. It works very nicely.
Once again the 840 Pro is in the top three of nearly every test and is the clear performance leader IMO. While the EVO is interesting, the Pro has the chops to be the best without tricks like "turbo-cache," which is an interesting feature.
It seems like the quality of each new generation of nand memory goes down and not up. The smaller die sizes seem to be the culprit. It reminds me of the race to increase the number of pixels in cameras. Having more pixels does not guarantee better pictures and too many pixels can actually hurt the camera sensor's performance.
The never ceasing shrinking nand sizes appear to have the same types of diminishing returns.
well next gen's equivalent to 840 pro will be shrunk with similar performance im sure. They will figure out the smaller nand deficits to make up for the performance im sure. Otherwise they wouldnt be pushing it so much.
Did I read this correctly?
I chose a single SSD over a Raid 0 SSD to make sure TRIM command was supported.
Is this true about Intel RST?