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  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Mmm, delicious low endurance storage! Sign me up for some QLC so I can out-crap the already crappy TLC we used to replace fairly low endurance MLC! I wonder what the per-cell P/E cycle numbers are like for this drive. Since they're hiding behind an obfuscation of 0.1 DWPD, I'm guessing we're in the 500 - 1,000 range. NAND used to have no trouble with a million P/E cycles, but we've really pushed the technology to an unreasonable limit without a clear path out of the poor retention and short lifespan corner we've painted ourselves into in the name of racing to the bottom of the barrel. What a great time to be alive!
  • Drazick - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Give us U.2 SSD's instead of M.2.

    I'd be happy to have this one in U.2 form.
  • Flunk - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    M.2 to U.2 converters do exist.
  • Drazick - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    I want the U.2 form in order to have less thermal limitations.
    M.2 is for Laptops, I want to see more drives designed for Desktops - Less thermal throttling.
  • Samus - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    What kind of throttling do you expect from a drive that is physically limited to 2000MB/sec? We aren't talking about a Samsung 970 or WD Black class drive here. The SM2263 for all intents and purposes simply isn't powerful enough to tax NAND or overwork itself to the point of performance reduction.
  • Chaitanya - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    Check Techpowerup's review of P1, even this drive limited to 2000MBps throttles thermally.
  • Death666Angel - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    And the first time the 512GB 970 Evo throttles to any appreciable degree is aber over 6 minutes and even then it is likely hardly noticeable in normal workloads. U2 is too bulky for my SFF tastes. Get a heatsink or a fan blowing a little air over it and it's fine. M.2 has much more versatile applications, U.2 won't gain any foothold in the consumer space.
  • chrcoluk - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link

    Do they test in open benches?

    My 970 evo idles at 57C on the nand and 79C on the controller.
    If I do a bench on it, it throttles within 30 seconds.

    The m.2 port placement seems about the worst place possible, I dont know what asrock were thinking, basically my m.2 drive is sandwiched between a 1080ti and a o/c 8600k LOL. Practically impossible to give it airflow as its below the gpu and cpu heatsink half and half. If they cannot put these ports at the far edge of the board away from cpu/gpu then m.2 for desktops needs retiring in my view and we just use pcie slot nvme drives instead or U.2.

    I think the main reason there is no U.2 is vendors dont want enterprise's using cheaper consumer drives. Market segmentation at work here.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    U.2 is a dead format. Most motherboards dont have a connector for it anymore, and drives that use it are scarce.
  • WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Then don't buy it. This is a product of the race to the bottom. For most people this drive will still outlast the computer they put it in. It takes cheap NAND to get NVMe-class drirves down to SATA SSD prices and higher bit-per-cell NAND is still the easiest way to lower the cost of NAND. Samsung's 970 Pro is still using MLC and has the absurd endurance rating to match if you need to write more than 1 petabyte to your drive. For almost everyone else TLC has proved to be a good enough compromise between speed and endurance and QLC will slowly take over as people demand cheaper storage.
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Not buying it probably won't be an option soon enough. Just like we're largely stuck with TLC (which we all generally can agree is abysmal when it comes to endurance) currently, if there isn't a way forward out of NAND, we are going to end up with widespread consumer QLC and that is a future I don't relish. Optane/Xpoint might be a viable alternative, but cold retention of ~3 months is a hard sell. There are no options for a durable and fast storage option for client systems these days. You either get high durability and the long retention of a mechanical drive at the cost of poor shock resistance and slow performance or you flip for speed and shock resistance while losing durability and retention. Sure, you can and should be looking at multiple storage solutions to suit each need, but then you wind up with multiple tiers of said storage that add a layer of complexity in the name of compensating for the individual shortcomings of mechanical drives, NAND, and now Xpoint. All of it has a very cobbled together feel.
  • WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    There will continue to be a market for fast, high-endurance NAND-based SSDs for years and 3D MLC like the 970 Pro will likely continue to fill that need in the consumer space. However there's a reason so few drives use it. TLC and QLC exist because most people don't *need* extreme high-speed and high-endurance storage. They just want to replace slow, bulky, and loud mechanical hard drives with solid state storage and high bit-per-cell NAND is the best available solution. QLC will be a major factor for cheap SSD storage and will open the door to 4TB+ SSDs at less than 20c per GB but it comes with tradeoffs. The need for extreme high-endurance storage in the client space is dwindling as storage continues to get cheaper and computers are treated like commodity items and are completely replaced every few years instead of being upgraded to extend their lifespan.
  • saratoga4 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    > Just like we're largely stuck with TLC (which we all generally can agree is abysmal when it comes to endurance)

    We aren't stuck with TLC, you can still buy MLC drives, they just don't make a lot of sense since TLC endurance is already more than sufficient for most people. Not really seeing what the problem is here? Buy what you need, don't complain when other people do the same.
  • chrcoluk - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link

    QLC is only 33% cheaper to produce than TLC tho and thats assuming it has as good yields. Any bigger price differentials will be for other reasons (such as profit margins). So e.g. TLC is 50% cheaper than MLC to produce yet samsung TLC drives are almost half price of their MLC drives, so that doubling price has some artificial inflation for the premium'ness of the PRO models.

    The 860 QVO actually was same price as the EVO on launch LOL.
  • nathanddrews - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    If the price is right, this would be perfect for a Steam/GOG drive.
  • Kamgusta - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link

    For STEAM/GOG I am using a 50$ 1TB 2,5" SATA mechanical drive. I would not replace it with this P.1 by any means: 5x price increase, 3x power consumption increase, 0% performance increase.
  • PaoDeTech - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    If the price is right... Today on Amazon: MX500 1TB SATA M.2 is $160 (basically the SATA M.2 consumer value leader), this one (P1 1TB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2) is $220 (the PCIe M.2 consumer value leader?). Samsung 970 EVO 1TB is $277. Obviously I would't use it for OLTP.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Thats just not true. There was never a consumer NAND rated for million p/e. The most we got was a 100k SLC around the 50nm node. Obviously you could find some enterprise solutions for more, but that was pretty niche. When SSD really took off, we were already at MLC with around 3-5k p/e which was perfectly usable. Even todays NAND with ~1k p/e or so is more than enough for typical client workloads.
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    You are correct that there wasn't a consumer product with that sort of endurance. They were the domain of flash found on devices like thin clients (which were fun to modify into desktop PCs). Regardless of the consumer availability, the fact that NAND hasn't got legs to go further and the writing has been on the wall for as long as we've had MLC makes it a confusing fact that we currently lack a sufficiently durable, cost-effective replacement. We've had years to solve the problem so even though it is a non-trivial task, wringing NAND with QLC as state-of-the-art is a poor example of how far we've fallen.
  • Flying Aardvark - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Yup. I only buy MLC drives. Using a 960 Pro 1TB at this time. Still have my old Intel X25-M 160GB drive in use too after all these years. It's worth the money to me, to have something that can last a while and be reliable without fiddling. Replacing stuff, worrying, all is worth money. Not always about performance/$ (the last metric I actually look at, as I prefer this wholistic view on buying).
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    Because 40 years just isnt enough for a PC drive.
  • hojnikb - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link

    Not only that, but reliability in the past was almost always dependant on controller and not flash.
  • deil - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    this is clearly laptop drive. Once installed most users will use maybe 20 GB per day. With 1 TB of space, its still 10 years before drive will bust. Way more than CPU/GPU will be sufficient.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    The drive "busting" is also not a guarantee. This has been proven multiple times over, that TBW isnt an exact science. MLC drives have hit as much as 2 petabyte written before keeling over. Techreport's worst drive still lasted nearly twice its TBW rating.
  • JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    Oh joys. The idiots whining about write endurance are back making a ruckus about a problem that never existed with their workloads.

    Do tell, how many drive(s) have failed on you due to NAND endurance failing?
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link

    Two and counting. Both planar MLC. The good thing is that you can still generally recover your data which is unlike a click of death failure on a mechanical disk. You and TheinsanegamerN seem uninformed on the rate at which P/E is exhausted under even what are fairly light workloads.
  • hojnikb - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link

    And how exactly did you figure out NAND wore out and not the controller crapping out ?

    It was very common with some models in the past to just die (like vertex series and recently some Phison S10 drives) but the culprint was the never NAND but controller just dying.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link

    After popping the drives into an external case, I was able to pull my data off them. Creating new partitions was possible, but OS installation resulted in corrupted files and a non-functional system. Perhaps that was a controller problem, but it seems unlikely since reads were fine.
  • philehidiot - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    This really is a stupid product - look at the just released Corsair MP510. At ~the same capacity (480GB Vs 500GB) the endurance of the MP510 is 4x as high and instead of just 0.1 DWPD they're verging on 1 DWPD. That's before you get to the speed of the thing. The overall increase in cost? $15. If the difference was $50-100 then I could see why you'd strongly consider this for a storage drive for media or something but with this reliability combined with a price very near high end competition it's basically a non-product for anyone who cares to do any research. Random read... 90K IOPS Vs 360K IOPS for $15 more...

    It may be that this is a perfectly sound product for average users but even then I'd be asking the question of why take the risk? A lower endurance is almost certainly going to lead to a lower MTBF. I'm currently looking for an SSD with high capacity for low use (i've got a failing WD Raptor HDD and an ancient Intel SSD which is approaching EOL and I don't particularly want to lose the data) and even for this use case, the lower endurance for saving such a relative pittance just doesn't make a sensible argument.
  • chrcoluk - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link

    you get it.

    They priced it slightly lower so people not in the know buy it looking for the cheapest drive, without realising they getting a vastly inferior product for that slight saving, in the meanwhile the vendor makes more profit as QLC is cheaper to produce.
  • OhCripesADuck - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Wonderful. Already got myself two Samsung 950 EVOs, but Crucial makes up my mass storage drives due to cost. Great long-term performance for what you pay.
  • dromoxen - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    bUT , P&c , IF YOU BUY THE 2tb model and only fill up to say 20% , you will be getting mostly slc performance.. these look like starting prices , with black friday and november sales to factor in . 2tb for £80 of this low qlc might be ok maybe to go in OEM PC's and sticker says NVME SSD .. yay.
  • mga318 - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Okay, so this drive is $219.99 (22¢/GB) for 1TB and the high performance Corsair drive announced today is $235.99 (25¢/GB) and that drive is rated as:

    Sequential Read: 1.74x
    Sequential Write: 1.76x
    Random Read: 3.59x
    Random Write: 2.375x

    better performance than this drive, what's the point of QLC? We're not getting better prices given the performance and endurance gap.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Prices will drop once QLC production and controller adoption ramps up.
  • mga318 - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link

    True. In the meantime, there isn't much consumer value.
  • Kamgusta - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link

    QLC drives should cost roughly a little more than half of the TLC ones with the same size.
    Expect the P.1 1TB to hit 99$ and lower on 2019.
  • MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    I find it amusing that the sticker says 3.3V 1.7A (5.61W) while the specifications state maximum power consumption is 8W.
  • nobozos - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Typo: It's unlikely the 500GB drive has 512GB of DRAM.
  • hojnikb - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link

    Not, it's prefectly fine, because for each megabyte of storage, there needs to be around 1KB of DRAM to store FTL.
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - link

    @anandtech - When you guys get around to testing this drive, could you please test how full the drive is when performance drops off? Thanks

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