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Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

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Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#41

Post by pkaye »

whitepoplar wrote: post #36
pkaye wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on PLP implementations in the past. Mostly it was the added cost of capacitors. Also things like laptops don't really need them since they have batteries and will shut down gracefully when battery is running low. The capacitors needs to be reliable, small form factor and hold enough charge to keep the controller, DRAM and NAND powered for a minimum of 15-30ms. 10 years ago what was available was not so gr…

Given your work with PLP, which family of SSDs would you recommend most?

I personally use the Samsung PRO SSDs myself these days. I don't go with the latest models because the older NAND technology tends to be more reliable. Also you want a company with many product cycles so that the firmware has time to mature. Just too many edge cases in SSD firmware to catch them in one go.

Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#42

Post by 21 »

nine_k wrote: post #23
whitepoplar wrote: post #17

Do these drives feature power-loss capacitors? I'm still wondering why most manufacturers think it's okay to offer SSDs that lose data on power loss (!!)

I really wonder why a $10 capacitor add-on (a capacitor, a diode, two connectors) plugged in between main board power supply and a disk power receptacle is not a common item. Or maybe it is, but I have no idea?

Desktop power supplies already have that, they can keep the power on for 50-100 ms or so, and they do notify the OS about the imminent power loss. I'm not sure what OSes do with that.

Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#43

Post by mindslight »

whitepoplar wrote: post #35
stefan_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what happens when you have "power-loss capacitors"? Since these things are limited the drive races to empty its buffers onto the SSD and then shuts down. It does not ask the host "are you done writing", so now instead you lose whatever the host had in its buffers. The host is gone anyway when the drive loses power. No. Data loss protection needs to be built into the software itself, fixing that on the SSD level do…

Power-loss capacitors are needed because without them, flush commands issued by the OS return bogus values. Write confirmations are meaningless if the data isn't actually written to disk.

It's actually even worse than this, in that long-ago written data could be in the process of being refreshed/remapped when power is lost. The drive's software should be designed to work atomically to prevent this, but that's a whole lot of edge testing we're hoping a company will do on its closed software.

Which is why things like cheap SD cards are notoriously unreliable, whereas Samsung SSDs are seen as decently reliable. What we really want is to get rid of these controller layers and let the OS directly manage the flash. But top of the line manufacturers are incentivized to decommodify their products to increase margins, and price-competitive manufacturers are inclined to stick to the same interface.

Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#44

Post by quizme2000 »

jerf wrote: post #37

On an only sort-of related note, has anyone found a USB (or anything else external) adapter that can read these yet? I know why it's hard, and I know about the ones that read that form factor but not NVMe drives, and why that is. Just curious if my searches are coming up dry because they don't exist or because they're getting flooded by the results that match the search but don't work. I enjoy the performance of the…

I've used the one made by startech, $30 on Amazon. Speed is always going to be limited, but they do work. I've used it only for general IT work doing data transfer, backups or upgrades where the host system didn't work or support multiple M.2 connections.

Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#45

Post by nfriedly »

21 wrote: post #40
jerf wrote: post #37

On an only sort-of related note, has anyone found a USB (or anything else external) adapter that can read these yet? I know why it's hard, and I know about the ones that read that form factor but not NVMe drives, and why that is. Just curious if my searches are coming up dry because they don't exist or because they're getting flooded by the results that match the search but don't work. I enjoy the performance of the…

If you have a desktop you can buy a $10 PCI express adaptor for it.

Just add a $250 thunderbolt 3 enclosure and ta-da: USB (connector) NVMe reader!

Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#46

Post by eumoria »

jerf wrote: post #37

On an only sort-of related note, has anyone found a USB (or anything else external) adapter that can read these yet? I know why it's hard, and I know about the ones that read that form factor but not NVMe drives, and why that is. Just curious if my searches are coming up dry because they don't exist or because they're getting flooded by the results that match the search but don't work. I enjoy the performance of the…

As another user stated Startech makes one and I use it as a technician. It's not fast at all... it's mainly for recovery when you don't have a motherboard with an available M.2 slot you can still pull the data off it.

For that purpose it does the trick. The drive is capable of speeds 100x above USB 3.0 so there really isn't good to use that bus for anything other than emergency.

- Here is an image of the circuit it uses (ASM1163E Controller) https://i.imgur.com/ZmwppR4.jpg

- I can't find that IC anywhere but here's the closest thing: http://images.100y.com.tw/pdf_file/35-Asmedia-ASM1042A.pdf

PCI-E to USB 3.0 host bridge. Hopefully that helps.

Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#47

Post by baldfat »

copperx wrote: post #5
baldfat wrote: post #2

I just changed my work video editing workstation order. I will have two 970 EVO NVMe for my OS and Project drives. There actually is a bottle next with raw 4K, 5K and 8K Video and playing it in an editor.

I'm curious about the specs required to edit raw 4K video. What's your workstation order like?

Here is a great article for Davinci Resolve (Industry standard for color grading) https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci-Resolve-1...

The issue is after you have done a few processes on the video for color balance and grade things can just grind to a halt.

Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#48

Post by gsich »

21 wrote: post #42
nine_k wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder why a $10 capacitor add-on (a capacitor, a diode, two connectors) plugged in between main board power supply and a disk power receptacle is not a common item. Or maybe it is, but I have no idea?

Desktop power supplies already have that, they can keep the power on for 50-100 ms or so, and they do notify the OS about the imminent power loss. I'm not sure what OSes do with that.

How do they notify?

Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#49

Post by dragontamer »

the8472 wrote: post #28
dragontamer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem like the 970 Evo is much faster than the 960 Evo. They're still faster than all of the competition (aside from super-expensive Intel Optane). So its not a big deal. But there are some reviews that show the 960 Evo winning some performance tests out there.

PCIe SSD cards can provide more bandwidth and IOPS, but for those prices you might as well RAID0 several M.2 sticks.

Your terminology is slightly off, so I'm not entirely sure what you mean. M.2 is a form-factor, which can be NVMe (PCIe-based) or SATA-based. Yeah, a bit confusing but M.2 supports two different protocols.

If you mean RAID0 SATA drives (in the M.2 form factor), well the processor's south-bridge has a lower limit compared to the direct-to-CPU connections most NVMe drives get.

SATA is great for bulk storage: either cheaper SSDs (~$250 for 1TB for MX500) or big hard drives (~5TB Toshiba Hard Drives for $150). But for maximum performance, you have to go NVMe.

After all, RAID0 NVMe drives will simply perform better than RAID0 SATA.

---------------------

Case in point: the Samsung 970 Evo has a specified read bandwidth of 3700 MB/s.

The SATA3 connector has a maximum speed of 600MB/s theoretical (and in practice, SSDs only achieve ~550 MB/s). So you'll need SIX RAID0 SATA drives to keep up with this single Samsung 970 Evo. Assuming your southbridge can even sustain 6x RAID0 (probably not. In my experience, south-bridges seem to slow down dramatically by 3x RAID0).

All you need to do with the 970 Evo is go RAID0 2x 970 Evo to achieve performance that no SATA RAID array will ever touch.

Re: Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB

#50

Post by berg01 »

whitepoplar wrote: post #17

Do these drives feature power-loss capacitors? I'm still wondering why most manufacturers think it's okay to offer SSDs that lose data on power loss (!!)

I guess Samsung is just not at their top of their game in terms of pushing differentiated product lines for their M.2 SSDs. Perhaps (or perhaps not) they should learn from Taiwanese companies. They would jump on this opportunity to sell a premium edition for lots of extra margin profit.

Have a look at this wonderful marketing page for a Gigabyte Z370 motherboard:

https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/Z370-AORUS-Gaming-7-...

It's the most over-the-top glorious thing I've ever seen. Make sure you expand a couple of the sections.

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