For an upcoming build, I'm looking for an SSD. Prices have come down, so a 480/500GB model is becoming attractive. I wanted to avoid the "cheaper" MLC variants, and the following drives caught my eye: Samsung 850 Evo (500GB) (which I believe some people here use) and the Toshiba Q300 (480GB). Toshiba builds it's own controlers and memorychips, is TLC based (as is the Samsung) but is quite a bit cheaper, it's also pretty much completely ignored. Any thoughts?
The Q300 is a variant of the OCZ Trion 100, &, in the scheme of things, is one of the slowest current SSDs in the marketplace. Whilst there's not a decent direct comparison on a single page, you 'could' use www.anandtech.com/show/10084/the-toshiba-q300-ssd-review & www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review to compare the two... ...however you could equally just scan through the first one & see how comparatively slow it is.
I have a 240GB OCZ Trion and while it won't set the world alight with it's speed, it was pretty damn cheap iirc.
Ah? Didn't know that, I had discarded the Trion and Arc series before due to low test results. Thanks! Ho hum, reading through those articles so at that pricepoint, I'm looking at a 850 Evo...
Don't discard the ARC 100 drives. I had a choice when I ordered my 480gb ARC 100 out of about three drives. I ended up choosing the ARC because it was ever so slightly better than the Crucial at around the same price. The ARC 100 480gb is £109 ATM. I've been using mine for game storage only as I have a Asus RAIDR 240gb as my boot drive but the OCZ has been excellent.
In case you would look at sth else, I bought 500GB SK Hynix Canvas SL301 few weeks ago and its been perfect for a games drive. Fast and cheap. I bought it when it came out for £93, now its for £107.
I'd imagine I'd be right in thinking that even the slowest of SSDs are still going to be faster than any mechanical drive by a fair margin? So the budget choices really end up coming down to reliability/price decisions.
Being faster than a mechanical drive doesn't really mean anything tbh. Well, a push bike is faster than walking, but that doesn't mean that there's no difference in speed between a bike & a car, does it? That said, ignoring marginal differences to boot times (which i see as irrelevant as you're not rebooting constantly) & very specific i/o tasks (for consumers typically heavy sequential r/ws, say for a/v editing/transcoding), there are points where the difference becomes relatively imperceptible... (much as a sports car is as fast as a small run-around in a 30mph zone or heavy traffic or whatever) ...however, for OS usage, that point was reached somewhere between the 256GB 840 Evo (excluding the f/w issue that could lead to long term slow downs of course) & 840 Pro. So, from my personal usage, the difference between either a single 256GB 830 or a pair in R0 vs a pair of 256GB 840 Pros in R0 was marked - but the difference between the pair of 840s & a 500GB 850 Evo was very marginal for a normal OS i/o usage... Well, small i/os are not helped by R0 for a consumer usage of course - as the r/ws are too small to be stripped & the QD is too low for there to be any advantage there, so it's only more sequential r/w where there was/is an improvement for R0 for a normal consumer. (i do a lot of a/v stuff btw which is why R0 is advantageous for me - though also, historically, it was vastly cheaper to buy a pair of smaller drives; always aiming to hit the point where there were enough nand dies for the channels on the SSD's controller of course) As to game drives, this is typically a very different level of i/o usage &, unless there's some major advantage to being able to start a level marginally faster (say it allowed you to spawn quicker than your opponents in some first/third person shooter in competitive gaming perhaps), because the difference in load times between a decent 3Gb/s SSD & a high end pci-e SSD are typically between 0.1 & 2 seconds then there is no point in spending money on a top end drive. This means that it would be reasonable to expect that the Q300 would be perfectly adequate as a secondary drive for that usage. (i've been saying the same thing in this regard going back to the Cruical M4 (for games) vs the 830 (for OS) btw - & nothing's altered with SSDs for games) As an aside, i'm not saying that you couldn't write a game or design an OS or whatever where there was more of advantage for pcie SSDs for the consumer by forcing everything to load using small high QD i/os; however this would come at the cost of making things appallingly dreadful for people still using HDDs & would inherently be hugely counter productive in general.
I want to use it as a boot drive, maybe as a single drive. (and have data on the NAS). With ~500GB i could use it as a boot AND gaming drive. The 850 EVO would probably be fast enough. As you said, for a secondary drive the Ultra II and the likes may be fast enough, it's a question of pricepoint really, do I buy around 250GB or 500gb ...................................240/250GB.....480/500GB 850 EVO........................~85€.............~150€ Q300/UltraII/BX200.......~60€.............~110€
A quick check & it appears that you can knock ~6 Euros off of the 500GB 850 Evo - https://geizhals.de/samsung-ssd-850-evo-500gb-mz-75e500b-a1194263.html - & ~5 Euro off the 250 - https://geizhals.de/samsung-ssd-850-evo-250gb-mz-75e250b-a1194261.html Otherwise it's all choice based on what you actually need & budget. Well, personally i'd buy the 500GB Evo as it's faster, cheaper per GB & would give more flexibility for usage if your needs alter than the 250... ...however i don't know what quantity of games you ideally want to install & what cash you've got to spend - as an alt option 'might' be to get both a 250GB Evo & a 480/500GB of one of the others. Now with SSDs then you need to (at least) have a reasonable amount of free space (ideally increasing the over provisioning as well - which Samsung's Magician s/w recommends btw) to maintain performance, unless your data is relatively static - so this other option would allow you to use more of the 2nd drive without impacting upon OS performance... ...however it's only relevant if you're wanting to have loads of games installed simultaneously. Well, whilst i have other SSDs that are solely used for a/v processing, for the OS, s/w (inc things like Adobe CC & MS Office & whatnot) & games that i want installed, i can still heavily increase the OP & still have bunches of free space with 512GB of SSD space - but that's just my usage.
