Fantastic review as always. Thanks for your hard work. But I'm curious as to why the Samsung EVO 860 isn't in the benchmarks. It was recently selling for under $130 (not back at $150) and seems to be the benchmark to which most drives in this category should be compared?
The problem for Samsung's consumer market is they've been making drives that max out the capabilities of SATA for 5 years. There just isn't much more room to improve.
And the problem for Samsung's prosumer market is the WD Black NVMe is an overall better value than the 970 NVMe, ESPECIALLY in mobile where the 970's (even the EVO) are so power hungry they constantly throttle in laptops, while reducing battery life.
Samsung is riding on reputation right now. Superior products in the SATA space are irrelevant because at the high end you wont notice a real difference between SATA drives. And in the NVMe space, there are plenty of players on par with Samsung.
I used to think that SATA is dumb for recent SSDs. However, I noticed that it is only for sequential workloads which can be left running in the background. SATA still has a lot of life for SSDs. The 2.5" form factor is still dumb though. It is huge waste of space and materials. Can't they make the case the size of the PCB using only the first pair of screws for mounting?
The reason this was done was to safe on space knowing that eventually they would deployed in laptops.
Another reason was that when ssds were first being released with SLC, they were incredibly expensive and nobody could afford to buy your 1 Terabyte 3.5" drive filled to the brim with SLC nand. Of course we can afford it now ...
My smallest 860 EVO sample is 1TB, and I didn't want to put that on the graphs as the only drive of that capacity. Performance generally increases with drive capacity, so the 1TB would exaggerate the performance advantage of the 860 EVO over the BarraCuda (and probably slightly understate the efficiency advantage). You can make the comparison with our Bench tool if you're interested: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2201?vs=21...
not everyone has m.2 on their boards and many of those boards overheat the drive in that slot anyways....t each own, "slow" drives are best kept as full out SATA sized drive (which vast majority are 2.5" anyways. the samsung 8/9xx are "unique" in that the pcb housing the memory chips etc is quite small compared to many so they "easily" put on a m.2 "gum stick"
The caddy would adapt an m.2 to a full 2.5" SATA socket, so you would have an m.2 in a chassis adapting it to 2.5" & classic SATA.
That being said, I can't see that doing anything but increasing costs, though having one primary line to manufacture m.2 and the little bit of work needed to adapt an m.2 SATA drive to 2.5", it *could* see some benefit to the manufacturer.
Huh? M.2 SATA doesn't overheat, that's M.2 NVME/PCIe (which is a bit more difficult to adapt to 2.5" SATA, so I don't care as much). 2.5" SATA drives already have tiny PCBs. They are already bottlenecked by the protocol. With them being M.2 in a 2.5" caddy, they can serve double purpose. I just bought an M.2 drive and a caddy for my Fujitsu T904 laptop, which still has only a 2.5" slot. But I know when that laptop is gone, I'm not gonna need a 2.5" drive. That M.2 drive can be converted into all kinds of useful devices, small desktops, laptops, USB thumb drive. It'd cost them a couple dozens of cents more to manufacture, would it'd be soo much more useful. :D Eventually, more people will use M.2 SATA than 2.5". At least those who buy standalone drives.
Dragonstongue I don't think you really know what the OP is talking about, just how tiny the PCB seems to be on newer 2.5" SSDs, thus just being a whole lot of waste of space anyway and/or you don't realize adapters already exist and/or don't realize M.2 is just a formfactor and can be NVMe/PCIe or AHCI/SATA. There's always someone who confidently posts a "neg" at a suggestion without even knowing hardware much in the first place.
When I was a systems admin for a server software test lab, we received a set (108) of 3TB Seagate Constellation ES.2 SAS drives for a new prototype appliance that would eventually become the DXi6900 series. I was pretty excited to see the new hardware come in, so I got things set up within a day.
The test team wasn't ready to test for another week. In that week, we had 12 of those drives go bad. By two months into the project, every single Seagate drive had gone bad. (These are their enterprise level drives, which are supposed to have better reliability.) We ended up requesting a different brand drive from NetApp (the maker of the storage portion of the DXi6900) because of these problems. We replaced them with HGST 4TB drives, and didn't have a single one fail up to the point when I left over two years later.
In the years leading up to that, I had bought several Seagate drives, including 4 1TB drives, 2 2TB drives, and one 3TB drive, and had the drive fail within warranty in EVERY SINGLE CASE. That was specifically why I quit buying them, and the 3TB drive is the last Seagate drive I am ever going to buy intentionally.
This just might be a decent crive, and if Seagate were to put a concerted effort into improving their reliability, they might be something I'd consider. However, as things stand, Seagate and Toshiba are on my NEVER BUY list, along side Biostar, ECS, and Gigabyte.
What does this have to do with SSDs at all? Seriously? This is just some overreaching rant saying that one specific type of product means that ALL their products are a problem. Especially about spinning rust several years old; even BackBlaze doesn't use those. Have you even bothered to look into reliability statistics/information on even consumer TLC drives? It's so odd to see people who claim to be in tech but are so antiquated in their knowledge.
Quite a humorous post from someone with a supposed heavy tech/admin background but so short-sighted on the big picture. He lists a bad experience from a completely unrelated product line likely not even sharing manufacturing or R&D ties in any way making him ban products from some of the largest tech companies in the world with for the most part tremendous track records. Even if it is in "principle" for how the company leaders model their QC, all the executives making these decisions at the time of the archaic hard drive problems are likely working with other companies by now (pretty good chance for one of his "new" favorite companies). Similar to the comments on some of Samsung's early SSD fiascos banning all Samsung products "for life." And of course shortly after their fiascos, they quickly became essentially the world's benchmark for performance and reliability in this same product line lol.
I think I'd probably opt for a Crucial MX500 over a Seagate SSD. Seagate's reputation and my experiences with their mechanical drives make me reluctant about giving them yet another chance.
"they bought controller designer SandForce right around when SandForce drives disappeared from the market for good."
That's not strictly true. Seagate still use controllers based on SandForce for some of their enterprise SSDs. Look for DuraWrite Technology in their marketing materials to know which ones.
SandForce disappeared from the *consumer* market, to be precise. And it was all the more surprising because of how much they shaped the formative years of mainstream SSDs. Reading about the reasons behind that company's implosion in someone's autobiography is going to be interesting.
IIRC Rumor mill at the time was that their next gen controller wasn't competitive and unable to get the design wins they needed they ran out of money and got snapped up on the cheap.
Nothing was surprising. Every expert knew they wouldnt last long with their focus on compressed performance and manufacturers promoting that without criticism. Many customers felt scammed when the controllers never delivered the performance they promised, because the real high numbers were only achievable with compressible content (who the hell has a 5 GB doc file?).
In every forum experts told people not to buy Sandforce SSDs or memory sticks, because of that fact. That sealed their fate.
I just purchased on Dec 4th a brand new Intel 545s 2.5" 512GB SATA III 64-Layer 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive SSD from Newegg for $34.99 (after $20 PayPal coupon)
Looking forward to these being the first SSDs exhibiting the "click of death". Makes no sense I know, low quality humor. I actually do have a Seagate Archive 8TB in my case.
If any manufacturer could accomplish this it would definitely be Seagate. They are the Hynix of hard drives - Mostly OEM, not reliable and shockingly still in business. I wouldn't buy anything from that company if my life depended on it.
I owned several mechanical hard drives from Seagate and all of the failed at some point. I know it doesn't mean that their SSD drives will be as unreliable but it is funny that first thing came to my mind is this as I saw the title.
Indeed. Yet Seagate wasnt very good at that either. They had far higher failure rates than WD and even Samsung (which also werent great). But its good to see that this seems to have changed. At least with their bigger drives. They seem to be on par with WD now, but WD isnt as good as it was a few years ago. I guess this HDD cartel made them sloppy. Thats why I bought a Toshiba and HGST (shortly before they rebranded them as WD).
When it was an independent company, Sandforce never demonstrated the ability to effectively test and debug their products. So the good think about Seagate going with a time-tested Toshiba controller is that it's possible to buy these drives and be confident that they will work correctly. If Seagate drops the price to the point where these drives represent a good value for the money, I would have no problem recommending them.
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Hulk - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Fantastic review as always. Thanks for your hard work.But I'm curious as to why the Samsung EVO 860 isn't in the benchmarks. It was recently selling for under $130 (not back at $150) and seems to be the benchmark to which most drives in this category should be compared?
Gasaraki88 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
The 850 EVO and 860 EVO are very similar in performance.Samus - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
The problem for Samsung's consumer market is they've been making drives that max out the capabilities of SATA for 5 years. There just isn't much more room to improve.And the problem for Samsung's prosumer market is the WD Black NVMe is an overall better value than the 970 NVMe, ESPECIALLY in mobile where the 970's (even the EVO) are so power hungry they constantly throttle in laptops, while reducing battery life.
Samsung is riding on reputation right now. Superior products in the SATA space are irrelevant because at the high end you wont notice a real difference between SATA drives. And in the NVMe space, there are plenty of players on par with Samsung.
zodiacfml - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
I used to think that SATA is dumb for recent SSDs. However, I noticed that it is only for sequential workloads which can be left running in the background. SATA still has a lot of life for SSDs.The 2.5" form factor is still dumb though. It is huge waste of space and materials.
Can't they make the case the size of the PCB using only the first pair of screws for mounting?
derekullo - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
The reason this was done was to safe on space knowing that eventually they would deployed in laptops.Another reason was that when ssds were first being released with SLC, they were incredibly expensive and nobody could afford to buy your 1 Terabyte 3.5" drive filled to the brim with SLC nand. Of course we can afford it now ...
derekullo - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
save on space* be deployed*Billy Tallis - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
My smallest 860 EVO sample is 1TB, and I didn't want to put that on the graphs as the only drive of that capacity. Performance generally increases with drive capacity, so the 1TB would exaggerate the performance advantage of the 860 EVO over the BarraCuda (and probably slightly understate the efficiency advantage). You can make the comparison with our Bench tool if you're interested: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2201?vs=21...Hulk - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Okay that makes sense.Death666Angel - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
2.5" SATA SSDs should just become M.2 SATA SSDs with a caddy. :)Dragonstongue - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
not everyone has m.2 on their boards and many of those boards overheat the drive in that slot anyways....t each own, "slow" drives are best kept as full out SATA sized drive (which vast majority are 2.5" anyways. the samsung 8/9xx are "unique" in that the pcb housing the memory chips etc is quite small compared to many so they "easily" put on a m.2 "gum stick"seamonkey79 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
The caddy would adapt an m.2 to a full 2.5" SATA socket, so you would have an m.2 in a chassis adapting it to 2.5" & classic SATA.That being said, I can't see that doing anything but increasing costs, though having one primary line to manufacture m.2 and the little bit of work needed to adapt an m.2 SATA drive to 2.5", it *could* see some benefit to the manufacturer.
Death666Angel - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Huh? M.2 SATA doesn't overheat, that's M.2 NVME/PCIe (which is a bit more difficult to adapt to 2.5" SATA, so I don't care as much). 2.5" SATA drives already have tiny PCBs. They are already bottlenecked by the protocol. With them being M.2 in a 2.5" caddy, they can serve double purpose. I just bought an M.2 drive and a caddy for my Fujitsu T904 laptop, which still has only a 2.5" slot. But I know when that laptop is gone, I'm not gonna need a 2.5" drive. That M.2 drive can be converted into all kinds of useful devices, small desktops, laptops, USB thumb drive. It'd cost them a couple dozens of cents more to manufacture, would it'd be soo much more useful. :D Eventually, more people will use M.2 SATA than 2.5". At least those who buy standalone drives.CheapSushi - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
Dragonstongue I don't think you really know what the OP is talking about, just how tiny the PCB seems to be on newer 2.5" SSDs, thus just being a whole lot of waste of space anyway and/or you don't realize adapters already exist and/or don't realize M.2 is just a formfactor and can be NVMe/PCIe or AHCI/SATA. There's always someone who confidently posts a "neg" at a suggestion without even knowing hardware much in the first place.dgingeri - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
When I was a systems admin for a server software test lab, we received a set (108) of 3TB Seagate Constellation ES.2 SAS drives for a new prototype appliance that would eventually become the DXi6900 series. I was pretty excited to see the new hardware come in, so I got things set up within a day.The test team wasn't ready to test for another week. In that week, we had 12 of those drives go bad. By two months into the project, every single Seagate drive had gone bad. (These are their enterprise level drives, which are supposed to have better reliability.) We ended up requesting a different brand drive from NetApp (the maker of the storage portion of the DXi6900) because of these problems. We replaced them with HGST 4TB drives, and didn't have a single one fail up to the point when I left over two years later.
In the years leading up to that, I had bought several Seagate drives, including 4 1TB drives, 2 2TB drives, and one 3TB drive, and had the drive fail within warranty in EVERY SINGLE CASE. That was specifically why I quit buying them, and the 3TB drive is the last Seagate drive I am ever going to buy intentionally.
This just might be a decent crive, and if Seagate were to put a concerted effort into improving their reliability, they might be something I'd consider. However, as things stand, Seagate and Toshiba are on my NEVER BUY list, along side Biostar, ECS, and Gigabyte.
CheapSushi - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
What does this have to do with SSDs at all? Seriously? This is just some overreaching rant saying that one specific type of product means that ALL their products are a problem. Especially about spinning rust several years old; even BackBlaze doesn't use those. Have you even bothered to look into reliability statistics/information on even consumer TLC drives? It's so odd to see people who claim to be in tech but are so antiquated in their knowledge.gglaw - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
Quite a humorous post from someone with a supposed heavy tech/admin background but so short-sighted on the big picture. He lists a bad experience from a completely unrelated product line likely not even sharing manufacturing or R&D ties in any way making him ban products from some of the largest tech companies in the world with for the most part tremendous track records. Even if it is in "principle" for how the company leaders model their QC, all the executives making these decisions at the time of the archaic hard drive problems are likely working with other companies by now (pretty good chance for one of his "new" favorite companies). Similar to the comments on some of Samsung's early SSD fiascos banning all Samsung products "for life." And of course shortly after their fiascos, they quickly became essentially the world's benchmark for performance and reliability in this same product line lol.Donkey2008 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link
108 enterprise-class hard drives failed in 2 months?[Insert Doubt meme]
sarahkevin - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
thanks for sharing I really need this for my office.PeachNCream - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I think I'd probably opt for a Crucial MX500 over a Seagate SSD. Seagate's reputation and my experiences with their mechanical drives make me reluctant about giving them yet another chance.Fujikoma - Friday, December 21, 2018 - link
I feel the same way about Quantum SCSI drives. Not that Seagate rates much higher...takeshi7 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
"they bought controller designer SandForce right around when SandForce drives disappeared from the market for good."That's not strictly true. Seagate still use controllers based on SandForce for some of their enterprise SSDs. Look for DuraWrite Technology in their marketing materials to know which ones.
The_Assimilator - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
SandForce disappeared from the *consumer* market, to be precise. And it was all the more surprising because of how much they shaped the formative years of mainstream SSDs. Reading about the reasons behind that company's implosion in someone's autobiography is going to be interesting.mikato - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I would like to know this also. Did the top brains get hired away to somewhere else somehow right when Seagate bought them or what?DanNeely - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
IIRC Rumor mill at the time was that their next gen controller wasn't competitive and unable to get the design wins they needed they ran out of money and got snapped up on the cheap.Qasar - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForceBeaver M. - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
Nothing was surprising. Every expert knew they wouldnt last long with their focus on compressed performance and manufacturers promoting that without criticism.Many customers felt scammed when the controllers never delivered the performance they promised, because the real high numbers were only achievable with compressible content (who the hell has a 5 GB doc file?).
In every forum experts told people not to buy Sandforce SSDs or memory sticks, because of that fact. That sealed their fate.
HighTech4US - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Not competitive on price.$84.99 for the 500GB model.
I just purchased on Dec 4th a brand new Intel 545s 2.5" 512GB SATA III 64-Layer 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive SSD from Newegg for $34.99 (after $20 PayPal coupon)
Death666Angel - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
"after $20 PayPal coupon" So, Christmas offerings plus another coupon? Great comparison!HighTech4US - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
So show me where I can get the this 500GB model for $54..99 then. That was what I paid pre-coupon for the 512GB Intel SSD.Like I said Seagate is not competitive on price.
Donkey2008 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link
I used a $50 Amazon gift certificate to get my Samsung SSD for $4.99. Seagate will never beat that price.(sarcasm)
automator_devops - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Looking forward to these being the first SSDs exhibiting the "click of death". Makes no sense I know, low quality humor. I actually do have a Seagate Archive 8TB in my case.Donkey2008 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link
If any manufacturer could accomplish this it would definitely be Seagate. They are the Hynix of hard drives - Mostly OEM, not reliable and shockingly still in business. I wouldn't buy anything from that company if my life depended on it.Donkey2008 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link
Oh, and I laughed when I first read your comment :-)aylak - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I owned several mechanical hard drives from Seagate and all of the failed at some point. I know it doesn't mean that their SSD drives will be as unreliable but it is funny that first thing came to my mind is this as I saw the title.Alim345 - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
There was one particularly unreliable series of those hard drives. Also HDD are not absolutely reliable and will inevitably fail after some timeBeaver M. - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
Indeed. Yet Seagate wasnt very good at that either. They had far higher failure rates than WD and even Samsung (which also werent great).But its good to see that this seems to have changed. At least with their bigger drives. They seem to be on par with WD now, but WD isnt as good as it was a few years ago. I guess this HDD cartel made them sloppy.
Thats why I bought a Toshiba and HGST (shortly before they rebranded them as WD).
KAlmquist - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
When it was an independent company, Sandforce never demonstrated the ability to effectively test and debug their products. So the good think about Seagate going with a time-tested Toshiba controller is that it's possible to buy these drives and be confident that they will work correctly. If Seagate drops the price to the point where these drives represent a good value for the money, I would have no problem recommending them.III-V - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
Bit hard to read the article title on the front page -- white text on white photo doesn't really work!Billy Tallis - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
There's supposed to be a partially transparent dark overlay at the bottom of the photo to serve as a background for the title text. Try re-loading the page, and if it still doesn't render, send us a bug report with a screenshot.