Re:SSD Storage: 2018 in review
by arcticbull on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @04:56AM
(#18909999)
Definitely relative to a hard drive.
Relative to each other what really matters are your 4K random read/write IOPS and some measure of reliability. Back in the day there were in fact huge differences between certain SSDs (Samsung controllers vs. Indilinx Barefoot [1] back in the early '10s). Today it's a non-issue.
SSDs years ago saturated the SATA III bus with respect to peak transfers. We're talking an order of magnitude these days, with SATA capping out at 550-600MB/s burst (my MX500) vs NVMe's 3GB/sec (970 PRO). That doesn't paint the real picture to a large extent because 4K random IO is still <<100MB/s in either case.
Large DRAM buffers vs. unbuffered can make a big difference too. Reliability these days from any of the big players is usually very good, since their NAND only comes from a handful of big players -- ditto for the controllers. I guess if you buy shady "Kingston" knockoff SSDs with recycled NAND that's a different matter.
tl:dr; yep, you're right. Any modern SSD from a big player is a good bet, beyond that it's just gamesmanship.
Relative to each other what really matters are your 4K random read/write IOPS and some measure of reliability. Back in the day there were in fact huge differences between certain SSDs (Samsung controllers vs. Indilinx Barefoot [1] back in the early '10s). Today it's a non-issue.
SSDs years ago saturated the SATA III bus with respect to peak transfers. We're talking an order of magnitude these days, with SATA capping out at 550-600MB/s burst (my MX500) vs NVMe's 3GB/sec (970 PRO). That doesn't paint the real picture to a large extent because 4K random IO is still <<100MB/s in either case.
Large DRAM buffers vs. unbuffered can make a big difference too. Reliability these days from any of the big players is usually very good, since their NAND only comes from a handful of big players -- ditto for the controllers. I guess if you buy shady "Kingston" knockoff SSDs with recycled NAND that's a different matter.
tl:dr; yep, you're right. Any modern SSD from a big player is a good bet, beyond that it's just gamesmanship.