Hardware Crucial M550 SSD 512GB Review

The M550 SSDs update Crucial's mainstream range and bring improved performance with them.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2014/03/18/crucial-m550-ssd-512gb-review/1

 

SSD's are starting to hit a wall now, performance is creeping up rather than jumping.

Wonder when/if we'll start seeing more significant gains anytime soon or an increase of life? 40GB per day is easy to use if it's used for a DB, cache, etc.

 

Sata Express is coming soon* which will remove some of the current performance limitations.

*whenever Intel gets around to launching new cpus / chipsets with it.

But until then the price war going on between the M500 and the 840 Evo just renders all other consumer ssds pointless, just my 2 cents.

 

They're not the only ones offering largish capacities at increasingly cheaper price points, there's at least 2 others now (who are also major nand fabs like samsung & micron) who are starting to do the same, but with SSD's that have markedly better perf. or reliability characteristics all-up. Sandisk (Extreme II) being just one of them...

 

ooo baby some of these in raid 0

 

I'm finding TheTechReport's experiment on SSD endurance interesting in this respect. They've written 600TB of data to the SSDs in the test and only the Samsung 840 (based on TLC NAND) has shown any signs of failure, and that was after 100TB (correction: 300TB) of writes. The rest, based on MLC flash, are still going strong. I think I've written about 10TB to my Corsair Neutron, so hope to use it for years (and more builds) to come.

 

reading that , they *think* the 840 will hit 1PB of writes before it fails , whereas the MLC based will cruise past that

 

How does this relate to the everyday user?

I mean how much data on average would I write to an SSD, if I'm not writing anywhere near the levels they are suggesting then whatever SSD I choose to buy is going to last well past any warranty.

Also are they just using one example of each drive?

If do they may just have a bad 840.

I'm trying to decide which SSD to buy to replace my 830 and was leaning towards the 840 evo but I'm not sure now.

 

I suspect that the take-away is don't worry about SSD reliability, it's fine.

 

Yeh that was what I was kinda leaning towards

 

Raid 0 is pretty much a waste of time with SSDs. Good for benchmarks, some very specific applications, but that is about it.

 

Agreed, not really worth the headache that comes with Raid 0, especially once you consider that the lower capacity versions are often slower than the larger capacity ones, so 2x 128GB SSDs may actually leave you with worse performance than 1x 256GB.
Also with the 840 Evo you loose the mind boggling speed courtesy of Rapid Mode as you can't use it in Raid.

Although considering the price of the 960GB M500 one might get tempted to drop a couple of them in Raid 0 for the capacity and go SSD only...

 

prices are very volatile right now - don't think it`ll be too long before they head south - again

 

I've got some Sandisk Extremes in RAID0, well 6 using an Areca 1882ix raid controller with 4GB cache. And I can say you don't notice the performance increase day to day, games load faster and things install incredibly quick but I don't use them for anything other than non critical data (keep downloads linked to another 2TB mechanical).

I had seen that article, interesting stuff.

What I should do really is just put everything on the SSD's and use torrents/newsgroups/etc to simulate heavy usage and see how long it realistically lasts but I'm not confident enough yet!