They should get realistic about their naming as well - this is clearly a BX300 ... Or perhaps a BX298.32, given more crappy performance considering the BX100 ...
The drive beats the 850 EVO in the power consumption (except idle) tests, though. So, if the drive is going to be used in a laptop that doesn't idle much it could be a potential choice over the Samsung based on that.
I was hoping it would be faster than the MX200. I have 3 of those.
It's top of the charts in power efficiency though, so it might be a great choice for a laptop. The performance difference is probably barely noticeable in real world use, but the battery life advantage might be tangible.
Also, launch price is $199 for 750 GB, which is not bad at all.
I also use an MX 200,which actually only has a write speed of 330. I suspect launch price is a suits guestimate at selling point. Real world differences are indeed minimal, price will be the main selling point later for the mainstream crowd (me).
Prices quoted are MSRP, as an example, the Trion 150 listed above debuted at 38.5 cents per gb. Don't be surprised to see this drive drop below 20 cents a gig in a few months.
Strange comment. Anandtech article is not negative at all about this SSD driver, Techreport too says "recommended" at the end of the review. So you are a little biased in my opinion.
Um, the conclusion is entirely negative. Read the conclusion? It's slow, but not as slow as planar TLC drives. It's inexpensive, but not super cheap. It's a generation "above" in naming of the MX200, but is slower. It has to compete on price because it can't compete on performance. It has an acute weakness in random reads.
The main strengths are that it's fairly power efficient.
If you need >512GB, but don't NEED 1TB and can't justify the price of a 1TB drive.
I need to, sadly, buy a new SSD soon and I've been going back and forth between MLC and TLC. My issue is that my budget is extremely limited right now, but I also can't wait a whole lot longer.
The 240/256GB TLC drives just seem to have shite for performance once their SLC caches are filled, and their random read performances are nothing to write home about either. They also tend to have small SLC caches, which increases the likelihood of hitting the cache limit and near full drive performance is especially bad on most of them and I have about 130GB of data I need to transfer off a 120 and a 60GB SSD to it to run one SSD boot drive. 480/512GB TLC drives at around $110-120 are a bit out of my price range (yes, my budget is THAT limited), but it would keep utilized capacity fairly low.
240/256GB MLC drives on the other hand tend to have much better performance, especially as the drive fills up, except the MX200 :-(. Which means in the 240-256GB capacity range, an MX200 isn't much of an option for me. Right now I am looking at a PNY 2211 240GB drive as it seems to be a good blend of price and performance, especially performance once the drive is pretty highly utilized, and I have to face the fact that I might only have 130GB of data to move to the drive right now, but I am sure drive utilization will creep up to 150, 160, 170, 180GB given a year or two (I have a 5.4GiB RAID0 array for bulk storage of 2x3TB drives, but applications aren't getting smaller, even if I stay good on keeping only a few games loaded on the SSD at a time).
Sadly MLC 480/512GB are just well outside my price range right now.
What would be nice is seeing m.2 PCI-e based drives that aren't such a huge jump in $ per GB.
While TLC drives do slow down a lot once the SLC cache is exhausted, unless you're doing video editing, batch processing of media files, etc sustained multi-gigabyte writes tend to be very uncommon in the consumer market. SLC caches are used because they're large enough to handle normal use. You really need to be pushing a lot of data at once to exhaust them.
I've tried cloning a existing build to the TLC type SSDs (I often will build a machine using a old 64GB SSD then clone it over when the new larger SSD arrives) and the write speeds can drop below 40MBps after about 2 minutes of cloning. We are talking about mainstream SSDs with USB2.0 levels of performance. Even a 5400 RPM HDD will do better.
Our sequential write test runs for three minutes at each queue depth. The slowest 3-minute average we've recorded at any queue depth was 61MB/s. For your drive cloning to be running at only 40MB/s after a mere two minutes, there has to be some other bottleneck. Your software is probably preventing the copy from proceeding at full speed, such as by alternating reading from the source drive and writing to the destination.
I said about 2 minutes. I don't actually have an exact record as I wasn't writing an article or review but let's say very soon after starting the cloning the performance dropped to a 'unacceptable' level. Anything below 200MBps write in a 2016 SSD should be classed as unacceptable. By the way it was a BX200 SSD.
Truth be told I bet the 830 might still beat it. I put my 830 in my new 4.5GHz skylake system and it was still blazing fast. Put in a m.2 950pro and can't really even tell a difference. Now the low end stuff like Sandisk SSD Plus, you can actually tell its slower at everything.
I'd believe it, at least for run of the mill tasks... More demanding usage cases and apps will see a benefit but for the average user gaming and doing web/office stuff? SATA is enough.
Just buy a used MLC drive dirt cheap on eBay. Even if it has 20TB written (what I've seen about average for used SSD's, but who knows) that'll still exponentially outlast a TLC drive, while being more consistent.
Or just pick up a new old stock M500 480GB SSD for <$100. M500's are my go to drives. Still haven't seen one fail. Not lightening fast, not slow, but very reliable and consistent. Sandisk also makes quite a few 480GB MLC drives for <$100.
Stay away from TLC. I just don't believe in the long run they are going to have adequate data retention and reliability.
Several TLC drives lasted for far more than 1 Petabyte read/writes. It's more likely that SATA port interfaces won't exist 10 years from now on the new motherboard you buy than a TLC drive you buy today would be dead with average daily use after a lifespan of 10 years.
The test Techreport ran did not really cover data retention, if their goal was to test data retention they would gone about it differently. Because instead of focusing on writing until the SSDs just laid down and died they would have used up a certain amount of write cycles and then left them unpowered and later tested if the data stored on them was intact.
An example of such tests not being indicative of data retention would of course be the 840 EVO managing over several PB of writes in such tests but despite how well it performed in those tests it still leaked electrons at a rapid rate for any data stored on it.
Also there is just one TLC drive in Techreports test and it came close to a PB of writes before it died but did not go past it.
>Can you even name one instance of a TLC drive failing on you, dude?
I've had one fail hours after unboxing it, but that can happen with any product. The warranty replacement worked fine.
I've also had a different one (840 non-EVO) have serious performance degradation issues, and Samsung only applied the firmware fix to the EVO versions.
Data retention for SSDs for non-consumer workloads, for example the case of a NAS/SAN supplied with an SSD-only volume, isn't an issue. NAS/SANs should be up 24/7, and data retention is an issue of NAND retaining data despite long-term loss of power. NAS/SANs should be up 24/7, so therefore SSDs not having power in a NAS/SAN is a non-issue.
Data retention for SSDs for consumer workloads, for example the case of a DAS, boot drive, or scratch drive, is again, mostly a non-issue. Boot drives and scratch drives get power every time the device is powered on, and most consumers using an SSD internally on a PC will actually boot their device at least once a week. DAS is more fickle, as this comes down to how often the user needs to use their external SSD, for example. Assuming someone actually went out of the way to buy a fast SSD-based external rather than a slower HDD-based external, would typically mean that they use their external drive often enough that they can warrant paying extra for less space, for the benefit of having faster storage.
Nobody uses SSDs as cold storage. Not even HDDs are useful for cold storage. This is where tape drives are best at, as they have the best data retention of any drive type on the market.
The entire argument of TLC-based SSDs having poor data retention should be a complete non-issue, because if you're using the SSD in its most suitable application (devices you use frequently that need the better speed that SSDs offer over HDDs, or network storage that is always available for other devices requesting files hosted on that server), then data retention is a non-issue.
It's like dogging on a sports car (ex: Mustang) for not being gas-efficient, or dogging on a hybrid-electric car (ex: Prius) for not being fast. Two different solutions for two different problems.
It's literally the same story for PC data storage. TLC, MLC, and SLC NAND-based SSDs are all worse at data retention than HDDs, and HDDs are worse at data retention than tape drives. If you wanted data retention, why are you even looking at SSDs? Likewise, if you wanted fuel-efficiency, why would you go to an online article talking about a brand new Dodge Viper that makes 12 MPG city, then make a post on the article dogging sports cars in general for awful fuel efficiency?
SSDs are a data storage product tuned for sequential and random read/write speeds, and TLC is a particular flavor of SSD NAND that's tuned for particularly cost-effective speed.
tl;dr Get the right product for the right situation. If you're looking at SSDs for any kind of long-term data storage retention, then you pretty much have your head in the dirt.
You do realize one of the reasons SSD's haven't been catching on in the PC market for the last decade comes down to data retention. If a manufacture builds a system, images it, and it sits in a box in a hot warehouse for 9-12 months, the data in many consumer level drives will be corrupted. Which means the system will be sent in for warranty to be reimaged and that isn't cost efficient for OEM's so they don't even bother putting themselves in that position.
The Seagate SSHD's were unaffected by this aspect of solid state storage because they only cache high IO hit rates. If the buffer is corrupted tibia simply flushed and rebuilt. Odds are after a fresh image the buffer hasn't even been built yet because no more than one IO hit has occurred to any sector of the drive.
Believe me, I work in refurbishing and data retention of SSD's, even older MLC models, is a serious issue. Considering the number of voltage states is exponentially higher in TLC drives, data retention is an even greater issue. In refurbishing, the only was to actually recover a frozen or corrupted drive from data retention illness is a secure erase. And as I mentioned, some of these systems have manufacture dates just a year old (they could be new overstock that were shifted to our reseller because the warranty expired or they are older models...) and depending on how they were stored or where they sat, sometimes the systems can't even boot Windows to the OOBE.
To refute your point that "Nobody Uses SSDs for Cold Storage", I'll give a real-world counterexample... I make a machine vision system that I sell into a factory environment. I build the PCs that the system runs on, and sell it as a turnkey system. For reliability and performance, these PCs are equipped with SSDs as their boot and data drives. As this system, and therefore the PC it runs on, is mission critical, many customers purchase extra preconfigured PCs from us... which can sit around for several years before being used. Data retention on the boot drives of these cold-stored PCs is therefore quite a big issue... one I was ignorant of until a year or so ago, unfortunately. Oops.
The MX300 had best in class mixed read/write power performance, and close to the best in other power benchmarks. It seems to beat it's primary competitors (< $.30/GB) on performance, like the OCZ Trion. It could be a better value to make it an obvious buy, but it seems fair to me. It costs less and performs worse than the > $.30/gb range and costs more and performs better than the < $.25/GB.
Pricing average for 1TB(960GB) is about $200 (you can get ocz trion or silicon power at this price point every day, they are decent mainstream SSDs). This would need to be $150 to even be worth considering. If this had better performance maybe I can see it being worth more. I used a ton of Crucial SSDs and they are fine, but so are pretty much all the other brands i've used. I've only had 1 sandisk low end SSD die on me, and i've handled a few hundred.
Oh no! Less SSD endurance! My current SSD gets winded after only 30 seconds of running! Whatever shall I do with typical consumer I/O workloads and less "endurance"!?[/sarcasm]
Do people even read the article before posting negative crap anymore?
It's not more power hungry. In fact, the article shows that it's quite power efficient.
I also hope you're not seriously comparing the MSRP of this drive versus the street prices of other drives. Street prices are always lower than the MSRP, especially in the SSD market.
Good point. The real story the have not even read the article, or maybe there is a lot of marketing guys at work here. After all Samsung has shipped for two years 3D SSD drivers in nearly money loss cause the low yields of their manufacturing process on a 3D structure.
What is the expected performance of the 3D MLC NVMe SSD, or is that too many variables different to tell from here? I'm curious if the charge trap/floating gate decision affected performance.
Unless you move tons of data per day with more than 1 pci-e nvme drive there's no difference between sata and pcie ssd's. PCie ssd uses more power and produces more heat.
With the advent of PCIE 3.0 X4 NAND drives a while ago, the whole SATAIII segment of SSDs are essentially obsolete. The lack of significant competition in the PCIE3.0 X4 NAND drives bringing down prices quickly is disconcerting.
The only COGS difference between PCIE3.0 X4 NAND drives and SATAIII drives is the controller, which doesn't actually cost much at all.
Buying into SATAIII SSDs at this point in time simply is a bad idea comparatively.
Sara is hardly obsolete. Pcie m2 drives still only hit 512gb vs the 2tb sata drives, still run hotter, and don't offer much but a faster boot time. Day to day performance between sata and pice is nil unless you are moving hundreds of gigs of data per day onto/off of the drive.
Until m.2 is cheaper, cooler, and the same capacity as sata, sata isn't going anywhere.
Windows 8.1 includes basic NVMe support and will boot from a NVMe drive with no trouble. Windows 10 added support for some of the more obscure features like the administrative commands necessary for secure erase. But the driver loading that has the most potential to affect boot performance is the UEFI NVMe driver, which some motherboards might not load until after probing for the existence of any NVMe devices that they would need to inspect for the presence of a bootloader.
Don't see how that's possible unless your needs are pretty basic and sufficiently sated by a single drive, maybe two, in which case you probably don't need the performance of a PCI-E drive...
Running a smaller 256GB SM951 here and two SATA 1TB 850 EVO, the only thing I see changing in that equation is going to 512GB for the OS apps drive and to multiple 2TB drives on the SATA side.
Whether PCI-E drives should cost more than SATA ones or not isn't the issue, they're gonna keep carrying a premium as long as they're only really useful to a small niche... The only thing that will potentially lower prices quickly is their common use on laptops, but they can also opt for lower end SATA M.2 drives.
The main things most of the users notices changing and HDD for an SSD is the orders of magnitude lower latency/access time and 4k/4k random performance.
That's why unless you have an specific need for faster transfer rates people wont notices differences between pcie/sata ssd,
“The lack of significant competition in the PCIE3.0 X4 NAND drives bringing down prices quickly is disconcerting. Buying into SATAIII SSDs at this point in time simply is a bad idea comparatively.”
But on the other hand buying into PCIe drives at this point when the pricing is so high when for many users the benefits over SATA drives is minimal for general usage makes them a bad idea relatively.
Or, you know, for all of the folks who don't have a chipset or board that supports m.2, let alone m.2 PCI-e drives currently. I am still rolling an Ivy Bridge. No m.2 anywhere in my system, and frankly the extra cost to go with an M.2 to PCI-e bridge card, to then pay a premium on an m.2 PCI-e based drive to then drop in...and not confident my board can actually boot from PCI-e storage...
Yeah, SATA for me. Frankly drives are cheap enough it isn't that big a deal if I end up dropping $70-80 on an MLC 240GB drive that I use for a couple of years before shuffling it off in to my server as it's boot drive and get an m.2 PCI-e ~480GB drive or similar when finally upgrading my computer to Kaby/Castle.
One benchmark that I wish Anand would do that I have seen a few other sites do are some of the PRACTICAL benchmarks. Such as application load times, or other disk intensive operations to compare between drives, especially between "empty" and "full" states.
Do many users care if Photoshop launches in 5.2s versus 6s of a slower drive? Possibly not, but there probably are some who do. What about reloading 50 web browser tabs? Or loading 100 RAW images from disk in photoshop? A handful of real world tests would be nice to provide some more perspective too. The few sights that do, do that kind of stuff, MLC drives generally seem to have a pretty commanding lead over MLC. Again, many users might not care about shaving a second or two off an application launch time, but some do.
I went with an M.2 boot drive after seeing the difference it makes in some demanding Adobe tasks on HardOCP's reviews (of the 750 IIRC), but I chose an SM951 with confidence based largely on AT's exhaustive reviews... So yeah I'd agree, some practical tests beyond the patented AT torture tests would be nice, specially at this juncture where some people are still asking whether PCI-E/M.2 is for them... At the end of the day tho, the old cliche probably serves most well, if you even gotta ask then you're probably fine with a SATA drive.
Our AnandTech Storage Bench Light, Heavy and Destroyer tests are the tests you're looking for. They're composed entirely of real-world I/O from things like Photoshop, web browsing, gaming, virus scanning, software development and virtual machine use. It wouldn't be useful for us to report dozens of subscores breaking out each individual application: that's an overwhelming amount of data to present and contextualize, short tests of individual applications are harder to make repeatable and valid with high enough resolution, and if you have a single specific use that is most important to you, our synthetic benchmarks probably cover that. Instead we present and analyze three different real-world mixes of I/O.
It's just hard to translate the results from the Storage Bench to real world impact Billy... Sometimes people just like knowing "oh, it'll actually cut that workload in half". Some may be able to extrapolate that from the AT Bench but it's not immediately obvious. I don't think anyone's asking for a breakdown of every single app involved in the traces, maybe one or two of the most stressful tho? Just a thought.
Unless you move tons of data per day with more than 1 pci-e nvme drive there's no difference between sata and pcie ssd's. PCie ssd uses more power and produces more heat.
They are 2 years late. Two freaking years. Intel's holy grail hybrid disruptive memory tech is going to compete at $/gb with traditional ram + stupidly cheaper samsung 3d nand.
In the last chart, "SSD Price Comparison (Sorted by Price/GB of Highest Capacity Drive,)" you have the heading as "750TB" As that price, for 750TB, I'll take as many as they can produce!!! :-)
Putting out a new SSD in 2016 and saddling it with SATA III is utterly unacceptable. If you want to make an entry level SSD, you should be using SATA Express. For anything else U.2 or M.2 (and not SATA over M.2, actual NVMe M.2). At this point I think the onus is on journalists and consumers to ignore any manufacturer who tries to sell a new SATA III product. Otherwise the industry is just going to continue spinning its wheels.
Most users are still served fine by lower cost SATA drives and they'll probably remain common for years to come... And nobody is using SATA Express, wouldn't be surprised if it disappears from mobos, stillborn interface.
M.2/PCI-E vs SATA is almost like 7,200+ RPM vs 5,400 RPM at this point.
That's part of the problem. Why is this a state of affairs that we're OK with? To me, the fact that no manufacturer has yet released, or has future plans to release, a SATA Express drive is infuriating, and even more so when they continue to put out AHCI SATA drives. That every flash manufacturer is so satisfied with the status quo and uninterested in improving the technology they sell is outrageous. And they're following the same pattern with U.2 - I've read about at least one executive who had the gall to claim his company wasn't adopting it for their SSD line because consumers "aren't interested." The industry might be satisfied with mediocrity, but we shouldn't be.
I don't think it's about mediocrity on the manufacturer's party... It's just a mediocre interface. M.2/U.2 are far better suited for next gen drives, and if you don't need that kinda performance (and most people don't) then SATA is fine. SATA Express represents an awkward middle ground that would potentially bottleneck next gen PCI-E/M.2 drives, so it seems the industry just said "why bother?".
1. Samsung's accomplishment with the 850 EVO looks even better today. I was expecting that the Intel/Micron product would be as good as the Samsung 3D NAND when it finally came to market. But it appears that the 1.5 year old Samsung 3D TLC NAND is faster than the 3D TLC NAND that Intel/Micron has just introduced.
2. Fifteen months ago we were hearing claims that Intel/Micron 3D NAND would have "disruptive pricing." Currently, the 750GB MX300 sells for its list price of $200. Last October, hypothetical 750GB BX-100 SSD would have cost $232. (This price is computed by averaging the price of the 500GB and 1TB models.) That's a 14% price decrease over eight months, which is significant, but hardly "disruptive." Perhaps we will see some aggressive pricing in the future, once production ramps up, but for now "disruptive pricing" isn't happening.
We can hope that Toshiba/SanDisk 3D NAND (which should appear this year) will prove more exciting. There's also SK Hynix, which as far as I know is currently using its 3D NAND only in enterprise products.
Exactly... it's not all about performance... features matter too. This drive has good performance, good feature set, and good prices. It is an all around great mainstream drive.
Makes me so glad to have gotten a BX100 when they came out. Why can't they pull off something like that again? The budget drive that competed with Samsung on general performance and beat everything on power consumption.
Yes, the endurance specs are correct. I can't say for sure that the MX300 specs are equally conservative as the MX200 specs, but the whole point of 3D NAND is to enable a return to larger memory cells that are more like the ones from the early days of the SSD revolution, where even tiny drives had high endurance ratings because they had P/E cycle ratings that were five or six digits long instead of three or four. 3D NAND makes it possible to have big memory cells and still have a lot of them on one chip.
Haha the performance is horrible for the price. Seriously MX200 kills it which means Transcend SSD370s kill it too. Even the crappy X400 kills it.... where is the Ultra II on the list? I'm sure it kills it also.
These comments show that people don't understand the durability of this drive. Since it's using the 3D-Nand technology that Samsung first adopted, this drive has a better durability rating than a Samsung 850 Pro. Like holy shit.. It uses TLC memory too! It's a TLC drive that's more durable than a MLC drive. It's also a very good priced drive. from $0.26 to $0.24.. That's amazing pricing lol. I don't fucking know why people are complaining.
3D-NAND for the lulz'ers?...I can coat a turd with 24k gold, but at the end of the day it's still crap. And this sure is crap...shame on you Crucial! Given this is [by design] an inferior product to the MX-200, they should have named it something other than the MX-300. TLC has inferior endurance, inferior real-world write performance, and inferior error correction capability. So here we have another TLC drive that is priced almost as high as Transcend's 370, but the 370 uses MLC...MADE FROM MICON'S OWN PREMIUM NAND SUPPLY. Don't count on this drive to give anywhere near the reliability or longevity of the venerable MX-200. This is like changing movie night up from The Godfather to Freddy Got Fingered. Yay Micron!
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fanofanand - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Slower and more expensive than the competition. Bravo Micron/Intel! Bravo!ddriver - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
They have no choice but to get realistic about the price.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Other SSD manufacturers are living in la-la land then? Because other OEMS seem to have no trouble selling SSDs for less.Arnulf - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
They should get realistic about their naming as well - this is clearly a BX300 ... Or perhaps a BX298.32, given more crappy performance considering the BX100 ...Oxford Guy - Friday, July 8, 2016 - link
The drive beats the 850 EVO in the power consumption (except idle) tests, though. So, if the drive is going to be used in a laptop that doesn't idle much it could be a potential choice over the Samsung based on that.barleyguy - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
I was hoping it would be faster than the MX200. I have 3 of those.It's top of the charts in power efficiency though, so it might be a great choice for a laptop. The performance difference is probably barely noticeable in real world use, but the battery life advantage might be tangible.
Also, launch price is $199 for 750 GB, which is not bad at all.
chrisso - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
I also use an MX 200,which actually only has a write speed of 330.I suspect launch price is a suits guestimate at selling point.
Real world differences are indeed minimal, price will be the main selling point later for the mainstream crowd (me).
chrisso - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
(my drive IS the humble 256 gig, btw). I would buy a 750 later as pointed out,prices are a tumbling.eek2121 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Prices quoted are MSRP, as an example, the Trion 150 listed above debuted at 38.5 cents per gb. Don't be surprised to see this drive drop below 20 cents a gig in a few months.Gondalf - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Strange comment. Anandtech article is not negative at all about this SSD driver, Techreport too says "recommended" at the end of the review.So you are a little biased in my opinion.
Lonyo - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Um, the conclusion is entirely negative. Read the conclusion? It's slow, but not as slow as planar TLC drives. It's inexpensive, but not super cheap. It's a generation "above" in naming of the MX200, but is slower. It has to compete on price because it can't compete on performance. It has an acute weakness in random reads.The main strengths are that it's fairly power efficient.
rtho782 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Meh, another SSD to compete on price. They have really become commodities!cknobman - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Not cheaper.Slower.
Uses more power.
No improvement on endurance.
Am I missing anything major here?
I just dont see anything that is purchase worthy here.
azazel1024 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
If you need >512GB, but don't NEED 1TB and can't justify the price of a 1TB drive.I need to, sadly, buy a new SSD soon and I've been going back and forth between MLC and TLC. My issue is that my budget is extremely limited right now, but I also can't wait a whole lot longer.
The 240/256GB TLC drives just seem to have shite for performance once their SLC caches are filled, and their random read performances are nothing to write home about either. They also tend to have small SLC caches, which increases the likelihood of hitting the cache limit and near full drive performance is especially bad on most of them and I have about 130GB of data I need to transfer off a 120 and a 60GB SSD to it to run one SSD boot drive. 480/512GB TLC drives at around $110-120 are a bit out of my price range (yes, my budget is THAT limited), but it would keep utilized capacity fairly low.
240/256GB MLC drives on the other hand tend to have much better performance, especially as the drive fills up, except the MX200 :-(. Which means in the 240-256GB capacity range, an MX200 isn't much of an option for me. Right now I am looking at a PNY 2211 240GB drive as it seems to be a good blend of price and performance, especially performance once the drive is pretty highly utilized, and I have to face the fact that I might only have 130GB of data to move to the drive right now, but I am sure drive utilization will creep up to 150, 160, 170, 180GB given a year or two (I have a 5.4GiB RAID0 array for bulk storage of 2x3TB drives, but applications aren't getting smaller, even if I stay good on keeping only a few games loaded on the SSD at a time).
Sadly MLC 480/512GB are just well outside my price range right now.
What would be nice is seeing m.2 PCI-e based drives that aren't such a huge jump in $ per GB.
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
While TLC drives do slow down a lot once the SLC cache is exhausted, unless you're doing video editing, batch processing of media files, etc sustained multi-gigabyte writes tend to be very uncommon in the consumer market. SLC caches are used because they're large enough to handle normal use. You really need to be pushing a lot of data at once to exhaust them.jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
I've tried cloning a existing build to the TLC type SSDs (I often will build a machine using a old 64GB SSD then clone it over when the new larger SSD arrives) and the write speeds can drop below 40MBps after about 2 minutes of cloning. We are talking about mainstream SSDs with USB2.0 levels of performance. Even a 5400 RPM HDD will do better.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Our sequential write test runs for three minutes at each queue depth. The slowest 3-minute average we've recorded at any queue depth was 61MB/s. For your drive cloning to be running at only 40MB/s after a mere two minutes, there has to be some other bottleneck. Your software is probably preventing the copy from proceeding at full speed, such as by alternating reading from the source drive and writing to the destination.jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
I said about 2 minutes. I don't actually have an exact record as I wasn't writing an article or review but let's say very soon after starting the cloning the performance dropped to a 'unacceptable' level. Anything below 200MBps write in a 2016 SSD should be classed as unacceptable. By the way it was a BX200 SSD.vladx - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Yes, most TLC drives are enough for consumer drives. In fact, I'd bet my 840 EVO still kicks this MX300's ass.Byte - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Truth be told I bet the 830 might still beat it. I put my 830 in my new 4.5GHz skylake system and it was still blazing fast. Put in a m.2 950pro and can't really even tell a difference. Now the low end stuff like Sandisk SSD Plus, you can actually tell its slower at everything.Arnulf - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
You can't tell a difference between NVMe drive with 2000 MB/s read speed and SATA drive with 500 MB/s read speed?I own 830, it's a great drive, but it's SATA drive.
Impulses - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I'd believe it, at least for run of the mill tasks... More demanding usage cases and apps will see a benefit but for the average user gaming and doing web/office stuff? SATA is enough.Samus - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Just buy a used MLC drive dirt cheap on eBay. Even if it has 20TB written (what I've seen about average for used SSD's, but who knows) that'll still exponentially outlast a TLC drive, while being more consistent.Or just pick up a new old stock M500 480GB SSD for <$100. M500's are my go to drives. Still haven't seen one fail. Not lightening fast, not slow, but very reliable and consistent. Sandisk also makes quite a few 480GB MLC drives for <$100.
Stay away from TLC. I just don't believe in the long run they are going to have adequate data retention and reliability.
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
>adequate data retention and reliability.Can you even name one instance of a TLC drive failing on you, dude?
Tech Report's already covered actual real-life endurance, and here you continuing this "SSD Endurance" meme, as if it mattered.
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-enduran...
Several TLC drives lasted for far more than 1 Petabyte read/writes. It's more likely that SATA port interfaces won't exist 10 years from now on the new motherboard you buy than a TLC drive you buy today would be dead with average daily use after a lifespan of 10 years.
Glaring_Mistake - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
The test Techreport ran did not really cover data retention, if their goal was to test data retention they would gone about it differently.Because instead of focusing on writing until the SSDs just laid down and died they would have used up a certain amount of write cycles and then left them unpowered and later tested if the data stored on them was intact.
An example of such tests not being indicative of data retention would of course be the 840 EVO managing over several PB of writes in such tests but despite how well it performed in those tests it still leaked electrons at a rapid rate for any data stored on it.
Also there is just one TLC drive in Techreports test and it came close to a PB of writes before it died but did not go past it.
Gigaplex - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
>Can you even name one instance of a TLC drive failing on you, dude?I've had one fail hours after unboxing it, but that can happen with any product. The warranty replacement worked fine.
I've also had a different one (840 non-EVO) have serious performance degradation issues, and Samsung only applied the firmware fix to the EVO versions.
Samus - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Joeyjojo. Do you even know what data retention is, dude?JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Data retention for SSDs for non-consumer workloads, for example the case of a NAS/SAN supplied with an SSD-only volume, isn't an issue. NAS/SANs should be up 24/7, and data retention is an issue of NAND retaining data despite long-term loss of power. NAS/SANs should be up 24/7, so therefore SSDs not having power in a NAS/SAN is a non-issue.Data retention for SSDs for consumer workloads, for example the case of a DAS, boot drive, or scratch drive, is again, mostly a non-issue. Boot drives and scratch drives get power every time the device is powered on, and most consumers using an SSD internally on a PC will actually boot their device at least once a week. DAS is more fickle, as this comes down to how often the user needs to use their external SSD, for example. Assuming someone actually went out of the way to buy a fast SSD-based external rather than a slower HDD-based external, would typically mean that they use their external drive often enough that they can warrant paying extra for less space, for the benefit of having faster storage.
Nobody uses SSDs as cold storage. Not even HDDs are useful for cold storage. This is where tape drives are best at, as they have the best data retention of any drive type on the market.
The entire argument of TLC-based SSDs having poor data retention should be a complete non-issue, because if you're using the SSD in its most suitable application (devices you use frequently that need the better speed that SSDs offer over HDDs, or network storage that is always available for other devices requesting files hosted on that server), then data retention is a non-issue.
It's like dogging on a sports car (ex: Mustang) for not being gas-efficient, or dogging on a hybrid-electric car (ex: Prius) for not being fast. Two different solutions for two different problems.
It's literally the same story for PC data storage. TLC, MLC, and SLC NAND-based SSDs are all worse at data retention than HDDs, and HDDs are worse at data retention than tape drives. If you wanted data retention, why are you even looking at SSDs? Likewise, if you wanted fuel-efficiency, why would you go to an online article talking about a brand new Dodge Viper that makes 12 MPG city, then make a post on the article dogging sports cars in general for awful fuel efficiency?
SSDs are a data storage product tuned for sequential and random read/write speeds, and TLC is a particular flavor of SSD NAND that's tuned for particularly cost-effective speed.
tl;dr
Get the right product for the right situation. If you're looking at SSDs for any kind of long-term data storage retention, then you pretty much have your head in the dirt.
Impulses - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Agreed.Samus - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
You do realize one of the reasons SSD's haven't been catching on in the PC market for the last decade comes down to data retention. If a manufacture builds a system, images it, and it sits in a box in a hot warehouse for 9-12 months, the data in many consumer level drives will be corrupted. Which means the system will be sent in for warranty to be reimaged and that isn't cost efficient for OEM's so they don't even bother putting themselves in that position.The Seagate SSHD's were unaffected by this aspect of solid state storage because they only cache high IO hit rates. If the buffer is corrupted tibia simply flushed and rebuilt. Odds are after a fresh image the buffer hasn't even been built yet because no more than one IO hit has occurred to any sector of the drive.
Believe me, I work in refurbishing and data retention of SSD's, even older MLC models, is a serious issue. Considering the number of voltage states is exponentially higher in TLC drives, data retention is an even greater issue. In refurbishing, the only was to actually recover a frozen or corrupted drive from data retention illness is a secure erase. And as I mentioned, some of these systems have manufacture dates just a year old (they could be new overstock that were shifted to our reseller because the warranty expired or they are older models...) and depending on how they were stored or where they sat, sometimes the systems can't even boot Windows to the OOBE.
euskalzabe - Sunday, June 19, 2016 - link
Excellent reply, bravo.tonyman - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
To refute your point that "Nobody Uses SSDs for Cold Storage", I'll give a real-world counterexample... I make a machine vision system that I sell into a factory environment. I build the PCs that the system runs on, and sell it as a turnkey system. For reliability and performance, these PCs are equipped with SSDs as their boot and data drives. As this system, and therefore the PC it runs on, is mission critical, many customers purchase extra preconfigured PCs from us... which can sit around for several years before being used. Data retention on the boot drives of these cold-stored PCs is therefore quite a big issue... one I was ignorant of until a year or so ago, unfortunately. Oops.JKJK - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
Raid 0 for storage?Russian rulette ... catch you on the flipside.
sor - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
The MX300 had best in class mixed read/write power performance, and close to the best in other power benchmarks. It seems to beat it's primary competitors (< $.30/GB) on performance, like the OCZ Trion. It could be a better value to make it an obvious buy, but it seems fair to me. It costs less and performs worse than the > $.30/gb range and costs more and performs better than the < $.25/GB.barleyguy - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
"uses more power" isn't accurate. The power usage under load is flat out excellent.Byte - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Pricing average for 1TB(960GB) is about $200 (you can get ocz trion or silicon power at this price point every day, they are decent mainstream SSDs). This would need to be $150 to even be worth considering. If this had better performance maybe I can see it being worth more. I used a ton of Crucial SSDs and they are fine, but so are pretty much all the other brands i've used. I've only had 1 sandisk low end SSD die on me, and i've handled a few hundred.Gondalf - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Techreport (and Anandtech) say the contrary and i think they are a lot more reliable than you like hardware testers.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
More power hungry, worse endurance, slower, and more expensive then the competition. Truly an amazing drive ! /sJoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Oh no! Less SSD endurance! My current SSD gets winded after only 30 seconds of running! Whatever shall I do with typical consumer I/O workloads and less "endurance"!?[/sarcasm]kyuu - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Do people even read the article before posting negative crap anymore?It's not more power hungry. In fact, the article shows that it's quite power efficient.
I also hope you're not seriously comparing the MSRP of this drive versus the street prices of other drives. Street prices are always lower than the MSRP, especially in the SSD market.
Gondalf - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Good point. The real story the have not even read the article, or maybe there is a lot of marketing guys at work here.After all Samsung has shipped for two years 3D SSD drivers in nearly money loss cause the low yields of their manufacturing process on a 3D structure.
icrf - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
What is the expected performance of the 3D MLC NVMe SSD, or is that too many variables different to tell from here? I'm curious if the charge trap/floating gate decision affected performance.jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
I'm taking it that Crucial have given up on SSD R&D? After all each Crucial SSD post BX100 (what a great SSD) just gets slower than the previous.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
If Crucial has "given up" then what does that speak for Toshiba and other manufacturers that STILL haven't done 3D stacked MLC NAND?Samsung led the innovation 2 years ago and now their first competitor just showed up.
vladx - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Sandisk X400 seems to be the king of budget SSDs, paying 80USD more for 850 EVO is definitely not worth it imo.Meteor2 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Can't dispute that.Lolimaster - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
They're not.Unless you move tons of data per day with more than 1 pci-e nvme drive there's no difference between sata and pcie ssd's. PCie ssd uses more power and produces more heat.
Communism - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
With the advent of PCIE 3.0 X4 NAND drives a while ago, the whole SATAIII segment of SSDs are essentially obsolete. The lack of significant competition in the PCIE3.0 X4 NAND drives bringing down prices quickly is disconcerting.The only COGS difference between PCIE3.0 X4 NAND drives and SATAIII drives is the controller, which doesn't actually cost much at all.
Buying into SATAIII SSDs at this point in time simply is a bad idea comparatively.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Sara is hardly obsolete. Pcie m2 drives still only hit 512gb vs the 2tb sata drives, still run hotter, and don't offer much but a faster boot time. Day to day performance between sata and pice is nil unless you are moving hundreds of gigs of data per day onto/off of the drive.Until m.2 is cheaper, cooler, and the same capacity as sata, sata isn't going anywhere.
vladx - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Actually, NVMe drives boot slower because of additional drivers needed to be loaded.hechacker1 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Is the driver not included with Windows 10 yet?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Windows 8.1 includes basic NVMe support and will boot from a NVMe drive with no trouble. Windows 10 added support for some of the more obscure features like the administrative commands necessary for secure erase. But the driver loading that has the most potential to affect boot performance is the UEFI NVMe driver, which some motherboards might not load until after probing for the existence of any NVMe devices that they would need to inspect for the presence of a bootloader.Impulses - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Don't see how that's possible unless your needs are pretty basic and sufficiently sated by a single drive, maybe two, in which case you probably don't need the performance of a PCI-E drive...Running a smaller 256GB SM951 here and two SATA 1TB 850 EVO, the only thing I see changing in that equation is going to 512GB for the OS apps drive and to multiple 2TB drives on the SATA side.
Whether PCI-E drives should cost more than SATA ones or not isn't the issue, they're gonna keep carrying a premium as long as they're only really useful to a small niche... The only thing that will potentially lower prices quickly is their common use on laptops, but they can also opt for lower end SATA M.2 drives.
Lolimaster - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
The main things most of the users notices changing and HDD for an SSD is the orders of magnitude lower latency/access time and 4k/4k random performance.That's why unless you have an specific need for faster transfer rates people wont notices differences between pcie/sata ssd,
smilingcrow - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
“The lack of significant competition in the PCIE3.0 X4 NAND drives bringing down prices quickly is disconcerting.Buying into SATAIII SSDs at this point in time simply is a bad idea comparatively.”
But on the other hand buying into PCIe drives at this point when the pricing is so high when for many users the benefits over SATA drives is minimal for general usage makes them a bad idea relatively.
azazel1024 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Or, you know, for all of the folks who don't have a chipset or board that supports m.2, let alone m.2 PCI-e drives currently. I am still rolling an Ivy Bridge. No m.2 anywhere in my system, and frankly the extra cost to go with an M.2 to PCI-e bridge card, to then pay a premium on an m.2 PCI-e based drive to then drop in...and not confident my board can actually boot from PCI-e storage...Yeah, SATA for me. Frankly drives are cheap enough it isn't that big a deal if I end up dropping $70-80 on an MLC 240GB drive that I use for a couple of years before shuffling it off in to my server as it's boot drive and get an m.2 PCI-e ~480GB drive or similar when finally upgrading my computer to Kaby/Castle.
One benchmark that I wish Anand would do that I have seen a few other sites do are some of the PRACTICAL benchmarks. Such as application load times, or other disk intensive operations to compare between drives, especially between "empty" and "full" states.
Do many users care if Photoshop launches in 5.2s versus 6s of a slower drive? Possibly not, but there probably are some who do. What about reloading 50 web browser tabs? Or loading 100 RAW images from disk in photoshop? A handful of real world tests would be nice to provide some more perspective too. The few sights that do, do that kind of stuff, MLC drives generally seem to have a pretty commanding lead over MLC. Again, many users might not care about shaving a second or two off an application launch time, but some do.
Impulses - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I went with an M.2 boot drive after seeing the difference it makes in some demanding Adobe tasks on HardOCP's reviews (of the 750 IIRC), but I chose an SM951 with confidence based largely on AT's exhaustive reviews... So yeah I'd agree, some practical tests beyond the patented AT torture tests would be nice, specially at this juncture where some people are still asking whether PCI-E/M.2 is for them... At the end of the day tho, the old cliche probably serves most well, if you even gotta ask then you're probably fine with a SATA drive.Billy Tallis - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Our AnandTech Storage Bench Light, Heavy and Destroyer tests are the tests you're looking for. They're composed entirely of real-world I/O from things like Photoshop, web browsing, gaming, virus scanning, software development and virtual machine use. It wouldn't be useful for us to report dozens of subscores breaking out each individual application: that's an overwhelming amount of data to present and contextualize, short tests of individual applications are harder to make repeatable and valid with high enough resolution, and if you have a single specific use that is most important to you, our synthetic benchmarks probably cover that. Instead we present and analyze three different real-world mixes of I/O.Impulses - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
It's just hard to translate the results from the Storage Bench to real world impact Billy... Sometimes people just like knowing "oh, it'll actually cut that workload in half". Some may be able to extrapolate that from the AT Bench but it's not immediately obvious. I don't think anyone's asking for a breakdown of every single app involved in the traces, maybe one or two of the most stressful tho? Just a thought.Lolimaster - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
They're not.Unless you move tons of data per day with more than 1 pci-e nvme drive there's no difference between sata and pcie ssd's. PCie ssd uses more power and produces more heat.
redzo - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
They are 2 years late. Two freaking years. Intel's holy grail hybrid disruptive memory tech is going to compete at $/gb with traditional ram + stupidly cheaper samsung 3d nand.ratbaby - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Intel is working to Micron to produce xsp.TheCurve - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
I always look forward to your stuff, Billy. Nice job and thanks for the hard work!AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
In the last chart, "SSD Price Comparison (Sorted by Price/GB of Highest Capacity Drive,)" you have the heading as "750TB" As that price, for 750TB, I'll take as many as they can produce!!! :-)Lazlo Panaflex - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
SanDisk ultra II 960GB is on sale for $230 @ the Egg. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...Seems like a pretty good deal.
sunshine - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
$219.70 at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-2-5-Inch-Heig...Lazlo Panaflex - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
nice :)euskalzabe - Sunday, June 19, 2016 - link
OCZ Trion 150 960GB is at $199 at this point.DeepLake - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
How did 512GB Samsung EVO got such a jump since 2014?Adam-James - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Putting out a new SSD in 2016 and saddling it with SATA III is utterly unacceptable. If you want to make an entry level SSD, you should be using SATA Express. For anything else U.2 or M.2 (and not SATA over M.2, actual NVMe M.2). At this point I think the onus is on journalists and consumers to ignore any manufacturer who tries to sell a new SATA III product. Otherwise the industry is just going to continue spinning its wheels.Impulses - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Most users are still served fine by lower cost SATA drives and they'll probably remain common for years to come... And nobody is using SATA Express, wouldn't be surprised if it disappears from mobos, stillborn interface.M.2/PCI-E vs SATA is almost like 7,200+ RPM vs 5,400 RPM at this point.
Adam-James - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
"And nobody is using SATA Express..."That's part of the problem. Why is this a state of affairs that we're OK with? To me, the fact that no manufacturer has yet released, or has future plans to release, a SATA Express drive is infuriating, and even more so when they continue to put out AHCI SATA drives. That every flash manufacturer is so satisfied with the status quo and uninterested in improving the technology they sell is outrageous. And they're following the same pattern with U.2 - I've read about at least one executive who had the gall to claim his company wasn't adopting it for their SSD line because consumers "aren't interested." The industry might be satisfied with mediocrity, but we shouldn't be.
Impulses - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
I don't think it's about mediocrity on the manufacturer's party... It's just a mediocre interface. M.2/U.2 are far better suited for next gen drives, and if you don't need that kinda performance (and most people don't) then SATA is fine. SATA Express represents an awkward middle ground that would potentially bottleneck next gen PCI-E/M.2 drives, so it seems the industry just said "why bother?".KAlmquist - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
1. Samsung's accomplishment with the 850 EVO looks even better today. I was expecting that the Intel/Micron product would be as good as the Samsung 3D NAND when it finally came to market. But it appears that the 1.5 year old Samsung 3D TLC NAND is faster than the 3D TLC NAND that Intel/Micron has just introduced.2. Fifteen months ago we were hearing claims that Intel/Micron 3D NAND would have "disruptive pricing." Currently, the 750GB MX300 sells for its list price of $200. Last October, hypothetical 750GB BX-100 SSD would have cost $232. (This price is computed by averaging the price of the 500GB and 1TB models.) That's a 14% price decrease over eight months, which is significant, but hardly "disruptive." Perhaps we will see some aggressive pricing in the future, once production ramps up, but for now "disruptive pricing" isn't happening.
We can hope that Toshiba/SanDisk 3D NAND (which should appear this year) will prove more exciting. There's also SK Hynix, which as far as I know is currently using its 3D NAND only in enterprise products.
Impulses - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Indeed.ST33LDI9ITAL - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
Name other SSD's at this price point that also have power protection and full encryption/edrive support....ST33LDI9ITAL - Sunday, June 19, 2016 - link
Exactly... it's not all about performance... features matter too. This drive has good performance, good feature set, and good prices. It is an all around great mainstream drive.dananski - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
Makes me so glad to have gotten a BX100 when they came out. Why can't they pull off something like that again? The budget drive that competed with Samsung on general performance and beat everything on power consumption.ZapNZs - Sunday, June 19, 2016 - link
Are the endurance specs correct? It seems unlikely the TLC in the MX300 will be anywhere near the MX200, even regardless of capacity differences.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Yes, the endurance specs are correct. I can't say for sure that the MX300 specs are equally conservative as the MX200 specs, but the whole point of 3D NAND is to enable a return to larger memory cells that are more like the ones from the early days of the SSD revolution, where even tiny drives had high endurance ratings because they had P/E cycle ratings that were five or six digits long instead of three or four. 3D NAND makes it possible to have big memory cells and still have a lot of them on one chip.PVG - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
Does anyone know the cell size of Micron's 3D TLC?Jimster480 - Tuesday, July 5, 2016 - link
Haha the performance is horrible for the price.Seriously MX200 kills it which means Transcend SSD370s kill it too.
Even the crappy X400 kills it.... where is the Ultra II on the list? I'm sure it kills it also.
3D nand sucks.
Weasle - Monday, August 15, 2016 - link
These comments show that people don't understand the durability of this drive. Since it's using the 3D-Nand technology that Samsung first adopted, this drive has a better durability rating than a Samsung 850 Pro. Like holy shit.. It uses TLC memory too! It's a TLC drive that's more durable than a MLC drive. It's also a very good priced drive. from $0.26 to $0.24.. That's amazing pricing lol. I don't fucking know why people are complaining.ZapNZs - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
3D-NAND for the lulz'ers?...I can coat a turd with 24k gold, but at the end of the day it's still crap. And this sure is crap...shame on you Crucial! Given this is [by design] an inferior product to the MX-200, they should have named it something other than the MX-300. TLC has inferior endurance, inferior real-world write performance, and inferior error correction capability. So here we have another TLC drive that is priced almost as high as Transcend's 370, but the 370 uses MLC...MADE FROM MICON'S OWN PREMIUM NAND SUPPLY. Don't count on this drive to give anywhere near the reliability or longevity of the venerable MX-200. This is like changing movie night up from The Godfather to Freddy Got Fingered. Yay Micron!TimAhKin - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
Got this just now for £100. I think that for this price it's a really good deal.