Gadgetory

our first major SSD guide was an architecture post back in 2014 and since then things have changed a lot once and force is kind of out of the game right now and two SSDs in the sort of 400 gigabytes plus range have finally become affordable at least a lot more than they used to be they are now available for under $200 which back then was unheard of so things changed a lot today is a lighter weight content piece on a Black Friday and Cyber Monday SSD sales we've seen that would be suitable for gaming and enthusiasts builds before getting to that this content is brought to you by AMD Tsar x4 70 video card which we found to be the best price to performance ratio in the sub $200 market though lately there's been a couple of rx for ATS available for under 200 as well so keep an eye out for those link in the description below if you're curious about a couple deals so we're about to ramp back into SSD reviews it's been a little while since we've done them but they've always been very in-depth on the gaming side we test a lot of different Io workloads with different game applications in mind in ramping into that content I've got a couple of the top choice SSDs we have right now for sales based on current Black Friday Cyber Monday offerings they are actually pretty big in some cases a couple things to remember with SSD purchases it's a lot more than just speed so that's the number everyone kind of gravitates toward because it's an easy number it looks large and impressive and it's kind of like with cars and horsepower whatever there's a lot more to it than that with SSDs more than speed you should care about things like endurance with endurance it becomes a matter of total terabytes written over the span of its life this is a metric that finally after years of kind of a lack of standards and specifications for SSDs manufacturers are starting to list this total terabytes written metric for their SSDs that gives you a loose idea of what it's capable of over an X year lifespan only three years or five years depending on whatever their warranty is so endurance is important that hinge is partly but not entirely on the NAND type that would be mlc SLC TLC is not really SLC anymore but LLC in TLC and v9 for the most part and we define those you can see an animation probably now that we made previously defining what those are if you're curious to learn what that means but also things like garbage collection we're leveling and right amplification factor all impact and SSDs endurance and lifespan you want the right amplification factor to be as close to or below one as is reasonable to reduce the wear on the mandibular we've talked about all this before but anyway those things aside all the links for the suggestions in this best sales guide are in the description below you can check those out if you want to find them for purchase the first one today is we're starting in ascending order so first one is the cheapest drive it's a $50 Plextor m7v which we just used in our ultra budget gaming PC Guide Plex stores m7v 128 gigabyte SSD VC is our go-to recommendation for budget oriented system builds the m7v is one of the most competitive drives at its price point for $50.00 it's 128 gigabytes and the most immediate competition you'll see is Kingston UV 400 also a pretty decent Drive nine dollars cheaper but a bit slower in terms of advertised speeds the m7v is capable using Iometer of about ninety eight thousand the IEEE ops 4k for read and about the same for write and this is the metric if you're not familiar with our previous SSD testing methodology looking at 4k performance it's also important to look at things like 16 K but generally 4 K is one of the most intensive workloads in terms of i/o requests that you see with a game and they're always defined as generally random since 4k random is what you'll see sequential is the number that you look for if you're the type of user who does a lot of large file transactions for example in our setups for the media production environment we'll do a lot of movement of multi gigabyte files from one drive to another things like that or even just write in large files to disk when you're dealing with a scenario like that if you're not bottleneck somewhere else in the system sequential is what you care about if you're more interested in gaming and windows kind of application performance than 4k is where you should be looking for the most part though obviously they're both a bit depending on what you do so the plaque store drive is what we'd recommend at the lowest end and is fairly affordable the next drive the HyperX savage is one that we reviewed previously and reviewed in 2015 I believe we have some of the metrics here on the screen where you can see the performance back then in 2015 of the savage drive versus things like the HyperX predator which is a PCIe enabled device it uses an m2 on an AIC and we've also got things like some of the samsung drives on that chart you can kind of compare them for basic metrics but the savage right now finally has dropped to a sub $100 price and this is something that in the original review I remarked that at its 120-130 dollar launch price it really it was good in terms of performance endurance all the test results were good but the price was kind of borderline not competitive now nearer $100 it is a more competitive device and the thing here to note is that in terms of cost per gigabyte the savage is a bit more expensive than some of these other devices we're talking about especially once you get up into the crucial MX 300 for example but it uses MLC which will aid in a few things but mostly endurance and again that also depends on how the controller interacts with the data and data entropy and things like that but it's got an LC that's a big difference and it is at more speed oriented than some of the other devices we'll be talking about so the savage drive is the one I'd recommend if you're looking for something like 240 gigabytes for basically an OS your most important applications like web browsers that tend to need the speed and office applications that if you run them production applications like premier that's what I'd use this average for your games would pretty much go on to another Drive normally a hard drive or a large SSD if you can afford it so that's where I'd look for someone who's more interested in the speed and endurance factor and doesn't care as much about capacity if you care more about capacity which is another completely valid use case scenario then you do speed the next drive to look at would be the crucial MX 300 this is a 525 gigabyte Drive it's currently available for $110 on I think both Amma's and Newegg I have at least one of the links below if you're interested in it I am Not sure that sale will last all the way through Cyber Monday but it's there now so 525 gigabytes at $110 is probably the best price to two gigabyte ratio that we have on this list but it is a bit slower and it's also using TLC that's not a bad thing necessarily it just means that generally you should expect a bit different performance and MLC with TLC you store three bits of data per cell with MLC you get two bits of data per cells so there's more data per cell with TLC but the voltage checks are also going to be more granular and that becomes a problem as the device ages and loses its electrical charge and so forth and again that's all discussed in our what is an and video on the channel but the MX 300 is a good drive at it's 500 plus gigabyte capacity especially if you're again we're concerned about storage than speed the next drive to look at is pretty comparable to the mi 300 but the main difference is that it comes with watchdogs 2 for free obviously coming out this week and that is the Samsung 850 Evo been around for a little while there's a 500 gigabyte option right now for $130 includes the watchdog's game if you don't want watchdogs I'd probably take this off the list because that is the major advantage here to this Drive still not a bad Drive but the competitors do tend to beat it out a little bit in price performance and price to the capacity without the watchdogs to bundle in there so that gets a quick aside mention the Samsung 850 Evo 500 gigabyte Drive operates at an advertised 540 or 520 megabytes per second readwrite sequential and then if you care more about 4k then you're looking at something like 98 thousand and 90,000 readwrite I ops using Iometer testing the MX 300 by way of comparison operates at about 90 mm I ops 4k read and about 83,000 4k right with sequential in the range of 530 and 510 read/write respectively moving down the list Intel's 600 P is the next major drive to look at Intel makes some of the most interesting drives to follow in the industry and that's because at the very start of this with the x-series SSDs from Intel which were SLC they were sort of the pioneers of modern SSDs and for that reason alone it's worth following them because nvme another modern technology is largely being driven by Intel devices you see there nvme SSDs that are in PCIe slots like the 750 series those are probably among the fast will definitely among the fastest SSDs on the market they're not included here because they're expensive and then on the other sort of cheaper end of the same spectrum the 600 P 512 gigabytes right now $150 Drive it peels off PCIe lanes it's basically it's an nvme drive and it operates upwards of 100 28,000 the IEEE ops 4k read that's the fastest we've seen here so far and the same for right so 128 K read/write performance now sequential is a bit more interesting with these nvm u drives both the ones we have listed here today which we've got the Plextor drive and the intel drive with sequential you're looking at a really high read in this case it's almost 1.8 gigabytes per second read 1775 megabytes per second or so at a bit lower write closer to 500 550 megabytes per second but almost all data that the average user is consuming on a PC is going to be read data it's only in specific cases like again with your developer or production worker then you're looking more at writes and if you care about writes you know who you are already on one thing with the 600 P it is an m2 Drive and it doesn't come with an add-in card at least not the one we've chosen at this price the next drive is another nvme drive this one is the Plextor M HP II which will soon be reviewing I've already got them in-house and they've been on the task bench but that drive currently $220 for the m8 PE 512 gigabytes and again this is a trade off where if you remember about a hundred dollars ago we had the crucial drive similar capacity but half the price the reason for that obviously is because we're working with nvme here it's much faster and the plaque store Drive specifically is looking at fairly competitive rates with the Intel 600 P it 120k is 4k read about 130 k 4k right the sequential speeds are some around 1600 megabytes per second read and some around 500 megabytes per second right so marginally slower on the reads for the I ops 4k read I ops and barge ly faster in the writes for 4k I ops and a bit slower in both metrics for sequential however the Plextor ma PE is an add-in card so this goes into a PCIe slot rather than an m dot 2 slot on the board so if you don't have an m dot 2 slot where you don't want to use it for some reason something like this would make sense now Plextor does have an on adding card version so if you prefer that it's out there as well but that will operate on nvm II it goes in a PCIe slot and finally just kind of to top off the high end or high end of price here anyway not actually performance these Sam's on 850 Evo is available now in two terabyte capacities pretty Tamm large and it's $585 that it sits in terms of price for SSDs at one terabyte and higher it's not bad when you look at them relatively kind of within a vacuum obviously that's very expensive because you could buy two terabyte hard drive for less than probably 60 65 dollars and it would be decent so that one's a bit of a harder pill to swallow if you are in one of the specific use cases where it would save you money in terms of production time to have a 2 terabyte SSD it's tremendously faster than a hard drive obviously it's got no moving components either it's going to be quieter things like that all true for all these drives so if you can afford that $600 two terabytes I suppose it's the best deal out there for this type of capacity on an SSD or at least one of the best few deals out there there are a couple competitor drives that are close but you're probably looking at the cheaper drives for the most part the 240 256 even 500 gigabytes in the case of the crucial and other Samsung 850 era drive but I want to throw the tube Tarot in there for fun because it's pretty impressive considering last year maybe 18 months this price for a 400 500 gigabyte drive was also really not that bad so thank you for watching as always patreon link in the post roll video we've got a couple more pieces coming out soon I have an update or in a sort of extended version of my conversation with build Zoid where we talk about the EVGA VRMs I know I said I'm done with that but we already filmed it and only included a few minutes in the video originally so that will be going up the next few days make sure you subscribe for that and for more coverage and as always I'll see you all next time you our first major SSD piece was back in 2014