I agree, he is a brilliant man and teacher as well. I love the way he illustrates his subject matter in his videos. Helps the persons who are not so 'tech-savy' to grasp what he is trying to explain.
No, defo not happening. They then would not be able to sell tlc drives so easily next to mlc to less knowledgeable person. Mlc means also tlc and qlc realy since multi word in mlc is very wide meaning word lol.
Samsung marketing is already more descriptive than other brands. They've dropped TLC nomenclature completely. Instead they say 2-bit MLC and 3-bit MLC. See newegg, for example. For some reason, though, they still use the Q in the QVO. I'm guessing it's because the drives aren't entirely 4-bit (16-level) per cell in operation, as it will manage them based on usage and available capacity.
@@catsspat right.... 2bit mlc and 3 bit mlc and 4 bit mlc, all are mlc so that the more numbers, the more people buy thing like always lol. tho 2 bit mlc is real mlc, other are tlc and qlc. but marketing team abused word "multi" in mlc word compination and adapted it to tlc and qlc since tlc and qlc do have multi level cells. just plain word play.
I think this "42GB cache" deserves some explaination: Both drives may truly have 42GB cache, but while writing such large sequential files, drives use their much higher IOPS capability to write to TLC/QLC and the SLC cache at the same time... We know QVO's QLC (as seen around 12:26 mark) is barely capable of ~75MB/s without using cache so here is the math: From the start of the video up until it slows down at 1.35 QVO drive had written 75 - 29= ~46GBs... Of which, drive write at its known ~75MB/s speed to as QLC (from the start) for first 95 seconds, approximately storing 4,4GBs worth of data.. Remaning data is 46 - 4,4 = 41,6GBs which couldn't be written to slow QLC, so it has to be written to 42GB SLC cache, filling it and then slowing down transfer to only what QLC is capable of... Since evo does exactly the same and writes to TLC and SLC at the same time, but TLC itself is much faster than QLC (roughly around 200-250MB/s), your 75GB test file probably wasn't enough to fill up its 42GB SLC cache... This is the exact behaviour I've observed from my tests with my own intel 660p... It doesn't "simply" fill up its 76GB cache (when 50% full) and then slow down... If I hammer it with burst 1.5GB/s writes it does just that (technically it probably doesn't but it doesn't make a noticable difference)... But when writing from a slower source at ~340MB/s, drive doesn't slow down even at 120GB file transfers... This dynamic cache behaviour matters a lot more than it would seem in real life use cases.. When transferring large a game for example, it has both large files and small ones.. My reading source is two SATA SSDs in RAID-0 configuration... If the source sends burst of sequential files @1GB/s, 660p caches them.. When source slows down ~60 MB/s to read hundeds of
Great post! You saved me from writing about the same thing. One differing point of view... I wouldn't call older SSDs garbage. They move to their proper position down the food chain. For example, I'm now using inexpensive low end SSDs with Raspberry Pi computers.
Great post. I may add that HLC (hexa level cells) drives are in active development, and PLC (penta level cell) drives are already being produced by Tobisha as an example. This trend will probably continue until OLC (octa level cell) drives at least since all it basically requires is higher grade of material purity in the charge trap layer, and refinement of the ADC read decoder. Writing is done by PWM (pulse width modulation) so that in principle has no upper bounds that are relevant for this purpose. What we will see in the future is even more intelligent controllers that can distinguish between different levels of cell damage because a future octa level cell may get damaged but may still function just fine as a QLC or SLC cell. At the same time controllers will do active data tier levels where data is only moved to persistent higher level cells once it's determined that the data is indeed persistent data.
@@SaturnusDK Speaking of intelligent controllers... In the future, instead of controllers doing all the guesswork, I only wish there would be a lot more user interactivity while setting up the SSDs (in addition to some "auto" mode for less tech-sawwy people, of course).. Users should be able to select his/her movie archive folder an set it to write in QLC always (or whatever highest level device support), and set their, say, temporary render output folder to stay SLC all the time.. Windows already reports actual size and "size on disk" as seperate criteria so it wouldn't be too hard for non tech-sawwy users to understand.. Write MLC instead of QLC and "size on disk" will report twice the actual size. Also, "cache" size should be user adjustable. I have 450GB+ empty space on my 1TB drive, intel says I can only have ~70GB of cache.. Why? I don't care about longevity of cells and I would want to set this entire area as cache. Technically, SLC cache can encompass the entire empty space as data will be read to DRAM and then written as QLC anyway. With very little software tweaks for taking user input (which will be definately easier than developing "smarter" controllers) the difference between a pro drive and a entry level drive would disappear (apart from actual cell/controller quality)... You don't buy xTB drive. You buy X amount of cells. You are free choose to configure it all as 256GB SLC disk, 1TB QLC or 2TB OLC disk... Or somewhere in between, adjust write levels on folder-by-folder basis. Have both high capacity folders, and high speed folders at the same time on the same SSD. If you need more capacity, you sacrifice write speed or viceversa, you just select a folder right-click into some menu and adjust the slider.. This is my dream SSD at least...
what a joy to hear a PERSON explain these things instead of a computer voice bombarding us with useless abbreviations without any explanation whatsoever. Great job, thanks.
you wish all of your teachers would fly over all subjects, telling things, but not practicing anything... well You just didn't undestand the difference between a youtuber and a teacher.
Did you try listening instead of daydreaming and tossing it off? Lol stupid question I know, you were probably tossing it off. Then few years later try to pin the blame on someone else... Like we all invariably do 😇
I agree. I learn the most from this channel myself everytime clearly understanding the "works" behind the hardware knowing what makes the difference in future "better" revisions to consider finding best for the price i want to spend be happy with get most perfomance pout the part for price - thanks to this channel once again
@Cellphone Dave That explains that little guy with the pointed hat that appears on my screen. Got 'WIZZARD' spelled across his hat, calls himself Rincewind...
I came originally planning to skip to the last 5 mins to see which was better, but got my attention and ended up watching the whole thing, actually made it super interesting!
Manufacturers should really make the effort of advertising clearly the differences between both technologies. If you look at these boxes, there is simply no clear mention of the current technology. This is clearly a way for misleading some consumers. Thanks as always for the fantastic video.
I had not thought of this -- you make a very good point indeed. Both the EVO and QVO Samsung SSDs are great drives, but they could be clearer pointing out the differences.
@@ExplainingComputers , I'm constantly explaining to people why QLC drives aren't horrible. There's massive confusion related to the performance drop that only happens after a large, sustained write. But people keep saying "don't buy QLC because the performance just drops off a cliff if you do much" when in reality very, very few people will every write that much data at once. The LOWER PRICE makes a QLC SSD more than ideal for most people... if you're some god-like being who explains computers you may have different needs but for us mere mortals QLC is fine.
@@photonboy999 I totally agree. I think we will see QLC drives become more and more popular with many users. As I said at the end of the video, we did not trust TLC not that many years ago.
It raises a point about marketing and how specs are very much manipulated. There is some what a comparison here to saying it's like buying a car that can do 100mph, but after 5 miles it's limited to 50mph. A bit of a grey area really. For normal daily use I can see that this would be fair enough (at least for the drives, not the car). But if this is not clear it could cause problems in certain usage scenarios.
@@photonboy999 Sadly you are mistaken, QLC Drives are good, the downside is the time it takes that drive to become worn out compared to a TLC or even an MLC drive. QLC Drives wear out faster writing the same amount of Data that a TLC writes, while they are a great cost to performance solution the issue comes down to long term redundancy and it is there that QLC lose their luster. So you wouldn't want to use one say for your system drive, but a steam drive would be applicable or movies and music, basically anything that doesn't constantly have writes, erasures and more writes.
I am still working with a EVO 840 250Gb for 4 years now and i still have no complains about the drive. I am at 1/2 way of its lifetime now. I used 60Tb while its lifetime expects to have in between 120 to 150Tb writing. But my next drive soon will be an EVO 860 1 Tb drive for certain.
Mr.Obaid, I have bad news for you.... they did this kind of shit to HDD also, only it was "laser" etching of bits on HDD disk platters. The same HDD platters accomodate today up to 8 times more data than 10 years ago.
I just installed two 500 GB 860 EVO's. I needed to replace an aging WD 500 GB Blue HHD that is around eight years old. After installation and migrating my PC's windows OS and various other programs, from the HHD to the SSD, I have to say I am very impressed by the performance. From boot up to running DOOM 2016, on ultra settings 1440P 60FPS, it is a huge game changer. Although, I was a bit skeptical at first, my brother had already made the leap a few months before. I am glad he helped in changing my mind. Cheers to you K.
Again - one of the clearest and yet detailed explanation of "tricky" SSD technology - Not all companies are transparent on their SSD designs either - Thanks for clearing this up!
Awesome video... In 17 minutes, all you every wanted to know about SSDs and the difference between EVO and QVO... hundredths of pages and several sellers never actually made it that clear for me. Thanks. Subscribed !
I am a memory expert and I can say you only touched the surface of NAND storage cell technology. I think the biggest thing you missed was that not all substrate dies are equal at a given level; there are SLC that are rated up to 100K writes, but others at 50K or even 10K. One indication is to look at the ECC requirement and see how many bits are expected to be corrected per 512 byte page slice. Therefore, there are MLC chips that are superior to lower quality SLC chips. Further, it should be noted that all NAND cells suffer from unreliability and MUST have a hardware ECC layer implemented, unlike NOR cells which can be rated reliable and require no error correction.
I totally agree with what you say -- I gave a very brief overview of the technology, as I did not want that part to dominate the rest of the video. My challenge in making videos is always deciding what to leave out. :)
Excellent, very descriptive, very well documented and presented comparison and explanation of TLC and QLC technology of SSD drives. Thank you so much for that. Once again, your video is worth more than reading quite a number of different benchmarks. It is so rare to come across such top-notch information presented in impeccable English. I am 63 years old, I have used computers and done extensive programming since 1979 and, yes, I wish I had teachers like you when I was still a student. Thank you so much!
Presumably at the 42gb gigabyte point the TLC drive had (in the background) offloaded much more from the SLC cache to the main drive than the QLC drive had managed to at the same point, and it was able to do so because TLC is faster than QLC. In fact it seems like the SLC cache in the TLC drive was never actually at capacity, where as the SLC cache in the QLC drive hit capacity after about 45gb copied.
You make a great point I didn't think of. Still, I think TLC would still run in capacity limits eventually, it just is able to delay that limit way further than QLC. Otherwise having a SLC cache on a TLC drive wouldn't make sense. Naturally we would need a greater volume of data to write to the TLC to show the same effect as the QLC.
You're not seeing the 42 GB SLC cache on the TLC drive, because it takes more than a 75 GiB transfer to see it. The TLC cells can take writing faster than the QLC cells, so your data is moving through that SLC cache faster.
I was thinking that we wouldn't see the drop at the 42GB point for that reason (for either SSD), but I didn't consider that the difference in TLC and QLC write speeds would be emptying the cache at such significantly different rates. I wonder if this also explains why the QVO also had faster write speeds during the cache phase: The EVO cache was spending more time sending data on permanent storage, and therefore had less time to receive the incoming data compared to the QVO's cache?
@@nekomatafuyu The QVO probably just has faster cache. It's newer technology. It really sucks that SLC drives are nowhere to be found. I bet they could fit a pretty good amount in a 3.5" form factor.
I have been using that 1 TB QVO since May in my laptop and for sure there is no cache like 42 GB not even 4 GB ready all the time. I copy music albums quite often their size hardly hitting 1 GB and the write speeds quickly drop to that shown on this video test (roughly 60 to 80 MB/s) and just in a few seconds. I now sort of regret I did not get Crucial MX500 instead since that was the SSD I was after initially.
@@tommik1283 the buffer may be filled with more than just that file you're trying to copy. Basically the cache is hiding the slow write speed. My guess is that the cache was still busy with previous write operations. Let's say you're copying 1GB at a time. By the time you're copying your 42nd GB your operations will slow down because the previous are still being written to the drive. When it is a boot drive, it might be that by the time you're copying your filea, the buffer is already filled with loads of operations from other programs, like temp files and virtual memory.
Thank you for perfecto explanation!! I been wondering if I done mistake to buying QVO 1 TB instead of EVO.. This video helped me so much!! My worries are gone. Thank you
I still have an old 32GB Lexar Triton USB 3.0 flash drive which uses Intel SLC flash. SSDs usually last much longer than their "guaranteed" endurance (except for some Intel drives which are programmed to die after a certain amount of data is written, regardless of the physical flash state). An 850 Pro 1TB SSD lasted for a whooping 9.1 PB in a torture test. 840 Pro 256GB model lasted for over 2 PB of writes.
For normal use? Actually, no. Unless you move big files around on a very regular basis you are unlikely to notice the caching, and unless you are doing a lot of read-write cycles (e.g. by moving big files around) you are unlikely to hit the limit. These drives have controllers that spread out the wear over the drive, so the lifetime of a drive is much longer than the quoted warranty. Which makes sense, as Samsung probably doesn't like having to pay for the warranty more than they need to. If you want more info and a more nuanced view you can also watch the Linus Tech Tips review of the Intel 660p ("How SSD Technology Keeps Getting WORSE! - Intel 660p Review "). The conclusion there: sure, you have less duty cycles before failure, but you're not going to get there with normal use, and you shouldn't rely on a single drive for critical data anyway (which is also true of a hard drive).
@@mclaine33 You're welcome. And tbh, I prefer TLC as well (or even better: SLC or MLC), but my wallet threatened to give me no food for a year, so I settled for QLC ;)
YESSSS! I made the right decision! Thx for this video, I just bought 2 of these 1TB, and I was wondering if QVO or EVO would be the better choice. I went for EVO and now see I did the right thing because I too have large video files to shovel around. And the result of the comparison made my day. Thx Chris, good video as always.
I bit the bullet and bought a 1TB samsung QVO about 6 months ago and I am over the moon with reliability and speed on my old G62 HP. like you I will never have trusted a SSD over a year ago due to bad experiences with them a few years back..they all failed within a month ! All I will say I am a convert and if you aint got one then you are missing out on that extra oomph ! And I will add that Samsung must be congratulated on finally converting a serious SSD doubter like me , so well done !
As someone who watches many videos in the tech side of RUclips; I have to say this is probably one of the best I've ever watched. Not only is the theory there but also most aspects of practical information I could ever wish to find in a single video. Amongst other useful information there are comparisons between two current market leading SSDs, which is of high value to those buying SSDs right now, and also including current market price to give the viewer a better idea of price to performance, which is a significant concern for the average buyer.
As you know from my previous posts, I have flash memory data expertise in building and designing hardware dating back to 2008 and even further if you consider spinning drives as well as being a contributor for m.2 and other newer open source standards. So I pay particularly close attention to these subjects more than others. That being said, I felt like your presentation was excellent! I have started using your clips occasionally in presentations. So hopefully you get even more followers as a result.
His video proves that solid state drives R just a ridiculous $cam = even slower than regular hard drives, + unreliable = pointless =)) Reminds me of guys chopping off their weenies pretending it turns them into girls HAHA
I watched this video a few months ago, and now I'm really in the market for the 2TB Samsung QVO 860, and I came back here, and I was just so amazingly impressed that you packed so much information in here, and it was exactly what I was looking for! I'm glad that I'm subscribed and that I saw this video before, and now after watching it a second time, I think I'm ready to get the 2TB version. You even noted that Samsung claims that the TurboWrite buffer size for the 2/4 TB versions are 78 GB. I don't think I could get this wealth of information so concisely from anywhere else. Thanks a lot!
@@ExplainingComputers Thanks for the reply! I bought it two days ago, on the same day that I made the comment above, and it is working very well so far!
If anyone is curious, CrystalDiskMark is basically a useful GUI wrapper for the Microsoft DiskSpd command line application which is available on github.
Explaining Computers : Thank you Chris for teachings us the difference between TLC & QLC - SSD’s......Once again your timing is impeccable with today’s lesson , for my upcoming hard drive upgrade on my laptop 💻 from HDD >>> SSD !!! Thanks Scarboro 🇨🇦🍀😎💚
I know very little of computer hardware but try to stay informed when looking to upgrade my PC. This video was very simple and easy to understand. Thank you!
I like all the single board computer demonstrations on this channel, very interesting stuff. However, I found this channel doing research on SSD's. So I love the videos, like this one, that go over all the technologies involved along with tests. Excellent video 👍
That, or the drive itself is one that failed QC as a 2G drive, so got programmed as a 1G drive with only the good blocks allocated, leaving the 2G drive controller ( which would be the same controller per generation) with it's much larger cache in there, but with the reduced main memory capacity. Another is that they ran out of the lower capacity chipsets, so instead ( probably as it is a single pick and place item, with a stacked die inside) simply substituted the larger cache chipsets instead as they are layout compatible, or they have depreciated the older controllers with the new higher capacity cache version, and there is a blend of the different size cache controllers currently in the supply chain, so they are refraining from updating the spec sheet till they are sure all the older versions have been sold off in the supply chain.
In my experience, QLC isn't good for a system drive, but fantastic for the storage\game driver, as a secondary one. My system Crucial 1TB ssd got 5% wear after a year, my 4TB Samsung QVO got just 1%, even though I constantly download new TV shows, movies and on it, save lots of files AND it's most often 3\4 occupied, while also having the pagefile on it. While the system 1TB only stopped to wear out rapidly(I was losing like 1% each 2-3 months) when I freed like half of it. Simply because, a system drive writes data automatically all the time, hence I AT LEAST would recommend TLC memory for a system ssd, MLC ideally if you can afford it.
Or U could use a SPINNING REGULAR HARD DRIVE since they have FASTER transfer rate than SSD (according 2 this test!) & INFINITE re-write cycles = fux sake =)) U talk like a junkie trying 2 decide which poison 2 take. Break the brainwash chains, dood =)
@Propaganda Blitz There's middle ground as well, they realise that we can't afford enterprise so they offer premium SSD. I'm just not short of storage, I think I have, depending on how you count it, about 20TB. Most of that is HDD NAS but I still have a few TB of SSD and about 2TB of fast SSD (although obviously there is always faster). This will only be a consideration for future builds for me and I think I will just go fast small SSD for the Boot drive then one of these for storage. Probably hang on to SATA a bit longer but the writing is on the wall there- if the motherboard has two M.2 slots then you don't need the SATA. Although often enough the 2nd M.2 will only run SATA speeds anyway (or reduced speed). You get that with AMD and their APU.
@@demitsuru It depends on how you value your data, plus look at the slow down on the quad level SSD, if that is going to be a problem for you or not. You can protect your data with back-ups and NAS, on slower HDD, so you can still use SSD even if you don't 100% trust them. My boot drive fails then I lose very little, I have to install W10 and Office plus a few other programs.
Very well done explanation and test. About the only thing I could have hoped for more was seeing you test how full the fast write on the EVO could go and what it would throttle down to for comparison. Regardless, thanks a lot. I'm adding this video to a personal reference playlist. Cheers. 👍
I use Samsung EVO's they last longer and perform better than the other SSD's I have tried. When you have a working solution its very hard to move away from it. I use SSD's for OS, Programs and some very limited data storage. I use Mechanical Drives for storing all my data and my servers are setup the same way.
Oh Lord! Thanks for such a valuable information a always you do Prof. Barnett. And by the way we are talking about endurance and speeds and so on, I wanted to ask you about something I was told by the technician of my enterprise-environment machines recently upgraded with fancy Toshiba and Samsung SSDs (MLC) regards to how in certain way "to help to extend out" the life expectancy and reduce the erase cycles {which I understand are the ones taking "ssd life away"} He suggested to create a Virtual drive in a high quality SD card (preferable over microSDs) or a "linked Folder (I do not even know what that is)" and since the VHD will be taken as an internal device this way Win10 software like OneDrive for instance could be moved off to that location OR the default download folders which we very often as it is intended of course we download and then delete most of the files we put in our PCs. additionally in these VHD contained in the microsd/sd/USBs can serve as "cold storage" or something alike. and in this way we are not hurting the SSDs blocks by deleting a couple of pictures we do not want or that piece of software we downloaded and then we regretted doing it. the whole idea is that save write/erase cycles. ---- SO WOULD YOU MAKE IN THE NEAR FUTURE A VIDEO EXPLAINING TO US HOW TO MAKE IT PROPERLY --- (My assistant's MS-Surface shall appreciate INDEED!). I am polyglot and I swear I cannot even find a moderately well spoken or educated person explaining this topic. I understand that since this once is done there are additional considerations to be done in Registry editor such as booting scripts to mount automatically the drive (the virtual one from the SD card) well thank you very much again for your formidable and HIGHLY VALUABLE INFORMATION IN YOUR CHANNEL. (BY THE WAY WATCH OUT I HEARD YOU SAYING "GONNA, WANNA" THAT IS UNFORGIVABLE FOR AN ACADEMIC PERSON LIKE YOU ;-D)
Awesome video once again. I would have liked to see you adding another 75Gb and see if the TLC would have dropped down at 78Gb or if it would just have kept on going strong and see how big the cache really is, since it wasn't 42Gb. Thanks again...
This is vital information for me and I appreciate that you do the research and share it all so clearly and concisely. Explaining Computers is my most favorite RUclips channel bar none. Please keep up the great work. And Thank You! :-)
Most online reviews i have seen put too much emphasis on the reduced endurance of QLC SSD's. I have owned my Samsung 850 EVO drive for just over two and a half years. At this point the drive has only reached 17 terabytes written, so the 860 QVO's 360TBW is far more endurance than the average user will ever need.
This is the best explained video of QLC drives I've found. I've tried to explain to people the differences but they often just don't understand. I will be sharing this video for sure.
With the drop in price of QLC I finally ditched spinning HDDs in my main system. I keep 2x2TB drives in a NAS for movies but my main PC now has 2x1TB Kingston A400 drives for game storage and a 512GB M.2 drive for windows and programs. I think we'll see this become the norm in desktop computing in the next 3-5 years, the only reason I have the NAS is becasue of the reduced life-cycle of QLC.
@@gabcenz I use an NVMe Intel 660p drive, 512GB. Read/Writes at about 1.7gbps (about 2-3x as fast as a sata drive) and it was only $60 for the 512GB. My case is the Fractal Design Focus G and I have 6 fans in it so I've never had problems with temps (FX 8350+ GTX 1660ti for reference)
@@DaxtonAnderson Thanks. Looks like a good option to consider. I'm looking for a new SSD to boot Windows and installing programs. I was a bit worried because I've heard that some m.2 (NVMe or Sata, not sure) may overheat and in some cases cause thermal throttling. Well personally I have a good case and good ventilation too, so I hope I should be ok with any m.2 drive.
The Evo SLC cache is likely not specced wrong, but you forgot to take into account that the cache also continuously gets flushed to the bulk zone while the transfer is happening. Since that bulk storage is faster you'll need more data transferred before it can't keep up. You'd probably have seen a dip if your data set was larger.
Either way all it proves is that hard drives are infinitely superior. If U really need 'fast random access', just get more RAM =P U can also locate cache files & things into RAM with other programs, like web browsers 2 a 'RAM disc' folter, etc.
Another excellent video Chris , I was a skeptic and very scared of life expectancy and now love my Samsung EVO 860 ! Thanks for this fine video and your excellent and unique style it’s simply the best !
Samsung make everyone elses SSD- well not literally but they make others product (like Apple's). Samsung generally keep the best for their own brand, Apple pay them to be nice as well so Apple get great product from Samsung. Thing is things aren't great for Samsung just now. Apple told them they were going to sell a lot of $1000 phones, so Samsung should build a very expensive factory to make those very good screens. Then nobody bought the phones nad Samsung lost a very large amount of money- suggestions are Apple will have to put its hand in its (deep) pocket. The price crash on DDR has hit Samsung, and some of their emerging memory (for servers) hadn't been taken up- worse Samsung came up with some cheaper memory which was supposed to be for consumer. Basically higher densities so we can all have 32GB for the price of 16GB. But the enterprise sector just bought it all up so we didn't get it and Samsung lost out on the massive premium server memory commands. There's talk of Samsung stopping DDR4 production, it has with some already (the 'legendary' B sticks which few will know of a fewer care about). That could upset our hopes of cheap DDR4 which we have got used to. Good time to buy, certainly keep an eye on prices. On top of this as we are moving to DDR5 there will be a reduction on DDR4 anyway as manufacturers build stock. I plan to buy at least another 32GB of DDR4, ideally 64GB- which is overkill but I will probably never do a DDR5 upgrade because of the cancer. And just like DDR3 which lives on DDR4 isn't going away overnight.
remember the 840 evo disaster, where they dared to not have a free upgrade to 850 evo or any other working ssd? screw samsung, but it's not like there are that many good options especially at 2 TB+ there's the 2 TB crucial mx500 and the samsung tlc drives, at 4 tb+ it's literally just samsung and the new wd blue, quite annoying, the little or no choice.
The reasons are: - Brand value - They have various caches in their drives like DRAM cache and SLC cache. The cheaper drives don't have either of these so that's why they can sell at a lower price.
Hey Chris! I think it would be great if you could also test data retention of SSDs, when they're unpowered. It would probably require a fair bit of time (or maybe not...), but would be worth it.
I have both drives in a build, but neither is used for booting Windows. The QVO is used for temporary work, while the EVO is mainly storage. I have 512GB Samsung 970 PRO NVMe, which is the boot drive and another 1TB which is used for video encoding. I don't think it was mistake buying these drives, and your wonderful video confirms that.
Why not? Okay, I'm using EVO, but I can recommend QVO to someone who want to save some money and use it for typical customer needs. I actually seen some TLC SSDs that worse than QVO in most of aspects.
@@A64632 For the current pricing, it makes more sense to spend a little extra and get a piece of hardware thats going to be a faster over time and last longer.
@@joem3115 At my opinion the theoretical lifetime for 860 EVO's memory chips is around 200 years in common home/office/game use, but for 860 QVO - something like 50 years. I guess practically it will die much faster cause of corrosion, or something like this. So... not too much difference in expected lifetime. Speed - they have almost the same read speed, and almost the same write speed for the first 42Gb. The only home\office\game scenario when you will be limited with write speed is installing modern game. So.. if you are doing it quite often - than writing speed after first 42Gb matters. Otherwise not. Btw, it's may be probably better for you to look for Samsung 970 EVO Plus to get better speeds. So.. I prefer 860 EVO, but I can recommend 860 QVO for someone who have to save some money. It's also quite good thing I think. At my personal opinion 860 QVO better than many other SSD's based on TLC memory (WD Blue for example), even a little cheaper some of them.
@@A64632 don't get me wrong, they're both good drives but for around $20 more it just seems like a no brainer but for the people still trying to build the rest of their PC, then perhaps the QVO will be fine. As for the 970 EVO Plus goes I actually have that as a boot drive and it's speeds are incredible.
12:34 "Slightly bewildered by..." I am not. I have the 840 Evo. This drive was known to have an issue. It was sold as a software issue. But it was never resolved. It was described by reviewers as a "crazy drop in performance", eventually after the problem manifested itself. Essentially, the "fix" was to buy an 850. I will never buy a Samsung SSD again based on Samsung's reputation alone. So videos like Chris's is valuable to me. We run backups that exceed the sizes in Chris's video, so....no QVO's for us for the time being.
with all the SSD's prices going down and new models coming out, this video really explained very well what you should be looking for, i Know quite alot of people that would just go for the cheapest ssd since they believe they are all the same.
Samuel Schwager My assumption is that the turbo cache is acting as a FIFO and the TLC drive never fully filled the FIFO since it could offload the data faster than the QLC drive. The two drives probably have the same amount of cache. I’m guessing if you transferred more data you would eventually hit a point where you fill the FIFO and reveal the true write speed of the TLC.
RAM disk isn't going to speed up the SATA interface. NVME is already tons faster than SATA 3, so it's just the EVO's actual performance. Could just be that is the write speed for the TLC even without the SLC buffer.
QLC is cheaper. it's like how people are complaining that super car companies are pushing small engines with turbos instead of the big v8's of the past. it's all about maintaining similar performance for less price. Yes, small engines with turbos (QLC) may not be as reliable as the big old engines (TLC), but it won't matter since even newer technology will be available by the time the current tech (QLC) dies.
That's because V-NAND have boosted the reliability and speed of flash memory. So you can have TLC V-NAND that is faster and more reliable than older MLC NAND. I'd trust TLC V-NAND for my system drive and be okay with QLC for my media storage drive.
Hey PoPe, what do you make of MiCRoN's 5100/5200 MaX series? They are supposed to be better than their PRo & eCo counterparts, but are they the same as a PRO version from SaMSuNG??
Thanks, this was a very well made and thought out video with a very interesting topic that has caught my interest. Thank you so much for all your hard work and the effort that you put into these videos that have both an educational value and entertainment one for the mind.
Amazing to see the ultra-fast evolution of SSDs, when you consider that it was almost a luxury item a few years ago! Their current price-quality ratio makes them almost a must for any basic computer use now. Thank you for this presentation of the technological advances of these mass storage devices!
It's still 360TBW, that's filling up the drive completely 360 times. My oldest SSD's aren't even close to those numbers, and that's a good.. 5-6 years. Of the older drives, my 500GB >850< EVO has 686 days on it (power on hours), it's had ~15.000 GB written to it, so 15 TBW, out of the 150 TBW endurance it came with. It's been well used over the years, and was my OS drive for a year or two (release date: 2014). I get wanting 5 years though, but if those 3 years is based entirely on some idea of you using some 328GB/day, then eh.. yeah. It also does come with a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rating at 1.500.000 hours across the entire range (1-2-4TB) - that's equal to ~171 years. Even if that's not exactly what it means, but it can be googled if curious :)
Some higher capacity drives with a certain number of bad cells are sold as lower capacity drives but still retain the larger cache. This might explain the discrepancy.
You didn't give an explanation for the difference in write speed after the 42 GB cache was filled. The difference is due to the different inherent write speeds of the TLC and QLC cells. If I remember correctl(from nvme drive reviews, maybe the tech deals channel), the TLC sequential write speed is limited to something like 1500 MB/S, so you're still bottlenecked by the SATA interface. I bet they only put in SLC cache for sustainability or scaling (in the production process) reasons. My hypothesis is that you saw a little dip in writing speed after the SLC cache was filled because the internal controller needed to switch to writing directly to the TLC cells. The inherent write speed of QLC is a lot lower as you clearly demonstrated! Great video anyway! Really like your channel!
Great video that clearly shows how efficient an SSD drive really is. I just replaced my 500g Samsung 850 EVO with a 500g Samsung 860 EVO to transfer over to Windows 10 and I'm very happy with Samsung. Their software is the easiest to use and the price for the 860 was less then what I had paid for the 850! I remember back in 1990 when I built my 486-66 I decided to spend an extra $50 for a 250 MB hd instead of a 200 MB! By the late 90s hard drives were less then 50c a mb and I thought that was wonderful, and now we've seen the same drop in prices per gigabyte SSDs and now we see prices for terabyte SSD drives dropping. Isn't technology wonderful?
Chris, its not that SLCs are different capacity. the SLC is filling up AND being dumped at the same time. Because SLC is moving out its data faster onto TLC than QLC, it will also take longer to fill up.
I'm sure this explains things to a point. But seeing no fall off from the EVO is very strange. I suspect others here are right in saying that the 1TB EVO drive was probably manufactured as a 2TB, failed quality checks, and was reset as a 1TB, if retaining the larger cache.
Many thanks for this lucid explanation. I now feel better informed, although I'm still a bit nervous about those two Kingson SSDs hanging off the side of my computer. I've never got round to closing up the case, as there's something makes me think it's going to go wrong at any moment -- but so far, so good. I must do a speed check, as I suspect they are rather slow. But they sure are quiet!!!
![Natanael Cano - Amor Eterno [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EO4prCs6WpM/mqdefault.jpg)
You explain everything so clearly. Keep up the great work!
I want the EVO.
EVO's are cool
I know :-) He makes understanding this sooo clear!
I agree, he is a brilliant man and teacher as well. I love the way he illustrates his subject matter in his videos. Helps the persons who are not so 'tech-savy' to grasp what he is trying to explain.
I agree.
I really wish they change MLC to DLC (Dual Level cell ) , but that may result a copyright infringement lawsuit from EA 🤔🤔.
And change _"level"_ to _"bit"_ (as the number of *_levels_* are 2, 4, 8 and 16, respectively).
No, defo not happening. They then would not be able to sell tlc drives so easily next to mlc to less knowledgeable person. Mlc means also tlc and qlc realy since multi word in mlc is very wide meaning word lol.
Samsung marketing is already more descriptive than other brands. They've dropped TLC nomenclature completely. Instead they say 2-bit MLC and 3-bit MLC. See newegg, for example. For some reason, though, they still use the Q in the QVO. I'm guessing it's because the drives aren't entirely 4-bit (16-level) per cell in operation, as it will manage them based on usage and available capacity.
@@catsspat right.... 2bit mlc and 3 bit mlc and 4 bit mlc, all are mlc so that the more numbers, the more people buy thing like always lol. tho 2 bit mlc is real mlc, other are tlc and qlc. but marketing team abused word "multi" in mlc word compination and adapted it to tlc and qlc since tlc and qlc do have multi level cells. just plain word play.
Your average Joe thinks bigger numbers are better so they'll likely buy QLC thinking it is better than TLC or MLC.
I think this "42GB cache" deserves some explaination: Both drives may truly have 42GB cache, but while writing such large sequential files, drives use their much higher IOPS capability to write to TLC/QLC and the SLC cache at the same time... We know QVO's QLC (as seen around 12:26 mark) is barely capable of ~75MB/s without using cache so here is the math:
From the start of the video up until it slows down at 1.35 QVO drive had written 75 - 29= ~46GBs... Of which, drive write at its known ~75MB/s speed to as QLC (from the start) for first 95 seconds, approximately storing 4,4GBs worth of data.. Remaning data is 46 - 4,4 = 41,6GBs which couldn't be written to slow QLC, so it has to be written to 42GB SLC cache, filling it and then slowing down transfer to only what QLC is capable of... Since evo does exactly the same and writes to TLC and SLC at the same time, but TLC itself is much faster than QLC (roughly around 200-250MB/s), your 75GB test file probably wasn't enough to fill up its 42GB SLC cache...
This is the exact behaviour I've observed from my tests with my own intel 660p... It doesn't "simply" fill up its 76GB cache (when 50% full) and then slow down... If I hammer it with burst 1.5GB/s writes it does just that (technically it probably doesn't but it doesn't make a noticable difference)... But when writing from a slower source at ~340MB/s, drive doesn't slow down even at 120GB file transfers...
This dynamic cache behaviour matters a lot more than it would seem in real life use cases.. When transferring large a game for example, it has both large files and small ones.. My reading source is two SATA SSDs in RAID-0 configuration... If the source sends burst of sequential files @1GB/s, 660p caches them.. When source slows down ~60 MB/s to read hundeds of
Great post.
Great post! You saved me from writing about the same thing. One differing point of view... I wouldn't call older SSDs garbage. They move to their proper position down the food chain. For example, I'm now using inexpensive low end SSDs with Raspberry Pi computers.
Great post. I may add that HLC (hexa level cells) drives are in active development, and PLC (penta level cell) drives are already being produced by Tobisha as an example. This trend will probably continue until OLC (octa level cell) drives at least since all it basically requires is higher grade of material purity in the charge trap layer, and refinement of the ADC read decoder. Writing is done by PWM (pulse width modulation) so that in principle has no upper bounds that are relevant for this purpose.
What we will see in the future is even more intelligent controllers that can distinguish between different levels of cell damage because a future octa level cell may get damaged but may still function just fine as a QLC or SLC cell. At the same time controllers will do active data tier levels where data is only moved to persistent higher level cells once it's determined that the data is indeed persistent data.
@@SaturnusDK Speaking of intelligent controllers... In the future, instead of controllers doing all the guesswork, I only wish there would be a lot more user interactivity while setting up the SSDs (in addition to some "auto" mode for less tech-sawwy people, of course).. Users should be able to select his/her movie archive folder an set it to write in QLC always (or whatever highest level device support), and set their, say, temporary render output folder to stay SLC all the time.. Windows already reports actual size and "size on disk" as seperate criteria so it wouldn't be too hard for non tech-sawwy users to understand.. Write MLC instead of QLC and "size on disk" will report twice the actual size. Also, "cache" size should be user adjustable. I have 450GB+ empty space on my 1TB drive, intel says I can only have ~70GB of cache.. Why? I don't care about longevity of cells and I would want to set this entire area as cache. Technically, SLC cache can encompass the entire empty space as data will be read to DRAM and then written as QLC anyway.
With very little software tweaks for taking user input (which will be definately easier than developing "smarter" controllers) the difference between a pro drive and a entry level drive would disappear (apart from actual cell/controller quality)... You don't buy xTB drive. You buy X amount of cells. You are free choose to configure it all as 256GB SLC disk, 1TB QLC or 2TB OLC disk... Or somewhere in between, adjust write levels on folder-by-folder basis. Have both high capacity folders, and high speed folders at the same time on the same SSD. If you need more capacity, you sacrifice write speed or viceversa, you just select a folder right-click into some menu and adjust the slider.. This is my dream SSD at least...
What you just described will likely someday be referred to as "overclocking" your SSD.
Custom firmware and give it hell.
what a joy to hear a PERSON explain these things instead of a computer voice bombarding us with useless abbreviations without any explanation whatsoever. Great job, thanks.
i wish all of my teachers were like this guy, i would've actually learned something.
true!
you wish all of your teachers would fly over all subjects, telling things, but not practicing anything... well You just didn't undestand the difference between a youtuber and a teacher.
Did you try listening instead of daydreaming and tossing it off? Lol stupid question I know, you were probably tossing it off. Then few years later try to pin the blame on someone else... Like we all invariably do 😇
I agree. I learn the most from this channel myself everytime clearly understanding the "works" behind the hardware knowing what makes the difference in future "better" revisions to consider finding best for the price i want to spend be happy with get most perfomance pout the part for price - thanks to this channel once again
QLC needs some TLC to feel better.
:)
@@ExplainingComputers
I love how you just know your stuff so well.
Keith Kuhn
Hah! love it! Would never have spotted that pun!
Great pun. More seriously though, both drives have that SLC cache.
@Gea Sih PLC is in works 🤪😈
What a lucid explanation. Clearly stated, no waffle - exactly what I was looking for!
So you're saying SSD's work off of some form of wizardry.
That's reassuring, all those years I was thinking it was witchcraft.
@Cellphone Dave That explains that little guy with the pointed hat that appears on my screen. Got 'WIZZARD' spelled across his hat, calls himself Rincewind...
@@brianm6337 I do wish these Wizard's would pop up a message when their about to die, as all Wizard's know when they are going to die :)
@Cellphone Dave Don't forget all the pixies which do the wizard's bidding by moving the electrons up into the traps and back again.
lol
I came originally planning to skip to the last 5 mins to see which was better, but got my attention and ended up watching the whole thing, actually made it super interesting!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Hello Sir Your channel is the best channel on RUclips. No ad no background music. Only the good subject. I appreciate it. Keep it up.
Thanks. :)
😀
Samsung engineer: we made a drive that stores data on it
Samsung marketing: we made a drive that makes a difference
lol
Nice.
Nice.
Correction: Samsung's marketing makes people pay same GB price as higher up drive of other makers.
I understood the SSD makes a difference compared to other hardware upgrades in a system.
Manufacturers should really make the effort of advertising clearly the differences between both technologies. If you look at these boxes, there is simply no clear mention of the current technology.
This is clearly a way for misleading some consumers.
Thanks as always for the fantastic video.
I had not thought of this -- you make a very good point indeed. Both the EVO and QVO Samsung SSDs are great drives, but they could be clearer pointing out the differences.
@@ExplainingComputers ,
I'm constantly explaining to people why QLC drives aren't horrible. There's massive confusion related to the performance drop that only happens after a large, sustained write. But people keep saying "don't buy QLC because the performance just drops off a cliff if you do much" when in reality very, very few people will every write that much data at once. The LOWER PRICE makes a QLC SSD more than ideal for most people... if you're some god-like being who explains computers you may have different needs but for us mere mortals QLC is fine.
@@photonboy999 I totally agree. I think we will see QLC drives become more and more popular with many users. As I said at the end of the video, we did not trust TLC not that many years ago.
It raises a point about marketing and how specs are very much manipulated. There is some what a comparison here to saying it's like buying a car that can do 100mph, but after 5 miles it's limited to 50mph. A bit of a grey area really. For normal daily use I can see that this would be fair enough (at least for the drives, not the car). But if this is not clear it could cause problems in certain usage scenarios.
@@photonboy999 Sadly you are mistaken, QLC Drives are good, the downside is the time it takes that drive to become worn out compared to a TLC or even an MLC drive. QLC Drives wear out faster writing the same amount of Data that a TLC writes, while they are a great cost to performance solution the issue comes down to long term redundancy and it is there that QLC lose their luster. So you wouldn't want to use one say for your system drive, but a steam drive would be applicable or movies and music, basically anything that doesn't constantly have writes, erasures and more writes.
I am still working with a EVO 840 250Gb for 4 years now and i still have no complains about the drive. I am at 1/2 way of its lifetime now. I used 60Tb while its lifetime expects to have in between 120 to 150Tb writing. But my next drive soon will be an EVO 860 1 Tb drive for certain.
I know that so many people here use EVO drives. They are great SSDs.
I'm sorry fellas but I'm a HDD guy, it allows me to take shit break while the game loading 👍🏻
Mr. Obaid on god something I didn’t dnt appreciate enough before getting SSDs
That explains why the long waits after your PC is finished loading it.
SToP eating around the clock!!
Smort xD
Mr.Obaid, I have bad news for you.... they did this kind of shit to HDD also, only it was "laser" etching of bits on HDD disk platters. The same HDD platters accomodate today up to 8 times more data than 10 years ago.
I just installed two 500 GB 860 EVO's. I needed to replace an aging WD 500 GB Blue HHD that is around eight years old. After installation and migrating my PC's windows OS and various other programs, from the HHD to the SSD, I have to say I am very impressed by the performance. From boot up to running DOOM 2016, on ultra settings 1440P 60FPS, it is a huge game changer. Although, I was a bit skeptical at first, my brother had already made the leap a few months before. I am glad he helped in changing my mind. Cheers to you K.
Fascinating, you keep me up to date with new technology. Thanks from an old computer engineer.
Egad ... VAX 11/780 ... back to paper tape reader days!
Thanks for the many videos you make and all the information you pass on .
Again - one of the clearest and yet detailed explanation of "tricky" SSD technology - Not all companies are transparent on their SSD designs either - Thanks for clearing this up!
Awesome video... In 17 minutes, all you every wanted to know about SSDs and the difference between EVO and QVO... hundredths of pages and several sellers never actually made it that clear for me. Thanks. Subscribed !
Welcome aboard.
most thorough exposure of the drawbacks of these QLC drives that i have seen, great video
Your video contains lot of technical information. Keep posting this kind of videos. Really appreciate your work. Thank you.
As always, short and concise. Thanks for explaining!
This channels has legendary quality content. It is extremely concise and well produced.
I am a memory expert and I can say you only touched the surface of NAND storage cell technology. I think the biggest thing you missed was that not all substrate dies are equal at a given level; there are SLC that are rated up to 100K writes, but others at 50K or even 10K. One indication is to look at the ECC requirement and see how many bits are expected to be corrected per 512 byte page slice. Therefore, there are MLC chips that are superior to lower quality SLC chips. Further, it should be noted that all NAND cells suffer from unreliability and MUST have a hardware ECC layer implemented, unlike NOR cells which can be rated reliable and require no error correction.
I totally agree with what you say -- I gave a very brief overview of the technology, as I did not want that part to dominate the rest of the video. My challenge in making videos is always deciding what to leave out. :)
Excellent, very descriptive, very well documented and presented comparison and explanation of TLC and QLC technology of SSD drives.
Thank you so much for that. Once again, your video is worth more than reading quite a number of different benchmarks.
It is so rare to come across such top-notch information presented in impeccable English.
I am 63 years old, I have used computers and done extensive programming since 1979 and, yes, I wish I had teachers like you when I was still a student. Thank you so much!
Thanks for your kind feedback, most appreciated.
Brilliant! I was looking at Samsung SSDs this morning and wondered what this meant! Perfect timing.
Presumably at the 42gb gigabyte point the TLC drive had (in the background) offloaded much more from the SLC cache to the main drive than the QLC drive had managed to at the same point, and it was able to do so because TLC is faster than QLC. In fact it seems like the SLC cache in the TLC drive was never actually at capacity, where as the SLC cache in the QLC drive hit capacity after about 45gb copied.
You make a great point I didn't think of. Still, I think TLC would still run in capacity limits eventually, it just is able to delay that limit way further than QLC. Otherwise having a SLC cache on a TLC drive wouldn't make sense. Naturally we would need a greater volume of data to write to the TLC to show the same effect as the QLC.
You're not seeing the 42 GB SLC cache on the TLC drive, because it takes more than a 75 GiB transfer to see it. The TLC cells can take writing faster than the QLC cells, so your data is moving through that SLC cache faster.
Since that was topic of the video, I would liked to have seen that point reached.
I was thinking that we wouldn't see the drop at the 42GB point for that reason (for either SSD), but I didn't consider that the difference in TLC and QLC write speeds would be emptying the cache at such significantly different rates.
I wonder if this also explains why the QVO also had faster write speeds during the cache phase: The EVO cache was spending more time sending data on permanent storage, and therefore had less time to receive the incoming data compared to the QVO's cache?
@@nekomatafuyu The QVO probably just has faster cache. It's newer technology. It really sucks that SLC drives are nowhere to be found. I bet they could fit a pretty good amount in a 3.5" form factor.
I have been using that 1 TB QVO since May in my laptop and for sure there is no cache like 42 GB not even 4 GB ready all the time. I copy music albums quite often their size hardly hitting 1 GB and the write speeds quickly drop to that shown on this video test (roughly 60 to 80 MB/s) and just in a few seconds. I now sort of regret I did not get Crucial MX500 instead since that was the SSD I was after initially.
@@tommik1283 the buffer may be filled with more than just that file you're trying to copy. Basically the cache is hiding the slow write speed. My guess is that the cache was still busy with previous write operations.
Let's say you're copying 1GB at a time. By the time you're copying your 42nd GB your operations will slow down because the previous are still being written to the drive.
When it is a boot drive, it might be that by the time you're copying your filea, the buffer is already filled with loads of operations from other programs, like temp files and virtual memory.
Thank you for perfecto explanation!!
I been wondering if I done mistake to buying QVO 1 TB instead of EVO..
This video helped me so much!!
My worries are gone.
Thank you
So do you think you still made the right choice by buying QVO?
I still have an old 32GB Lexar Triton USB 3.0 flash drive which uses Intel SLC flash.
SSDs usually last much longer than their "guaranteed" endurance (except for some Intel drives which are programmed to die after a certain amount of data is written, regardless of the physical flash state). An 850 Pro 1TB SSD lasted for a whooping 9.1 PB in a torture test. 840 Pro 256GB model lasted for over 2 PB of writes.
So basically TLC is better and worth the extra money for several reasons. Nice. Thank you and great video!
For normal use? Actually, no. Unless you move big files around on a very regular basis you are unlikely to notice the caching, and unless you are doing a lot of read-write cycles (e.g. by moving big files around) you are unlikely to hit the limit.
These drives have controllers that spread out the wear over the drive, so the lifetime of a drive is much longer than the quoted warranty. Which makes sense, as Samsung probably doesn't like having to pay for the warranty more than they need to.
If you want more info and a more nuanced view you can also watch the Linus Tech Tips review of the Intel 660p ("How SSD Technology Keeps Getting WORSE! - Intel 660p Review
"). The conclusion there: sure, you have less duty cycles before failure, but you're not going to get there with normal use, and you shouldn't rely on a single drive for critical data anyway (which is also true of a hard drive).
@@rikwisselink-bijker I just saw the Linus video and yea, you're right. But I still would prefer TLC over QLC for now. Thanks.
@@mclaine33 You're welcome. And tbh, I prefer TLC as well (or even better: SLC or MLC), but my wallet threatened to give me no food for a year, so I settled for QLC ;)
@@mclaine33 ,
Huh? He's right but you still prefer TLC?
YESSSS! I made the right decision! Thx for this video, I just bought 2 of these 1TB, and I was wondering if QVO or EVO would be the better choice. I went for EVO and now see I did the right thing because I too have large video files to shovel around. And the result of the comparison made my day. Thx Chris, good video as always.
I only have samsung TLC SSD, never had a problem so far, they work great.
You were the first person who explained this so well.
I bit the bullet and bought a 1TB samsung QVO about 6 months ago and I am over the moon with reliability and speed on my old G62 HP. like you I will never have trusted a SSD over a year ago due to bad experiences with them a few years back..they all failed within a month !
All I will say I am a convert and if you aint got one then you are missing out on that extra oomph !
And I will add that Samsung must be congratulated on finally converting a serious SSD doubter like me , so well done !
This is great to hear. :)
As someone who watches many videos in the tech side of RUclips; I have to say this is probably one of the best I've ever watched. Not only is the theory there but also most aspects of practical information I could ever wish to find in a single video. Amongst other useful information there are comparisons between two current market leading SSDs, which is of high value to those buying SSDs right now, and also including current market price to give the viewer a better idea of price to performance, which is a significant concern for the average buyer.
As you know from my previous posts, I have flash memory data expertise in building and designing hardware dating back to 2008 and even further if you consider spinning drives as well as being a contributor for m.2 and other newer open source standards. So I pay particularly close attention to these subjects more than others. That being said, I felt like your presentation was excellent! I have started using your clips occasionally in presentations. So hopefully you get even more followers as a result.
His video proves that solid state drives R just a ridiculous $cam = even slower than regular hard drives, + unreliable = pointless =)) Reminds me of guys chopping off their weenies pretending it turns them into girls HAHA
This was the perfect level of complexity about SSDs for me. Very well explained, thank you
Great video. I did not know that SSD’s came in different “flavors”. I saw the cost differences, but did not understand why. Now I do! THANKS!
I watched this video a few months ago, and now I'm really in the market for the 2TB Samsung QVO 860, and I came back here, and I was just so amazingly impressed that you packed so much information in here, and it was exactly what I was looking for! I'm glad that I'm subscribed and that I saw this video before, and now after watching it a second time, I think I'm ready to get the 2TB version. You even noted that Samsung claims that the TurboWrite buffer size for the 2/4 TB versions are 78 GB. I don't think I could get this wealth of information so concisely from anywhere else. Thanks a lot!
Great to hear this. The 2TB QVO offers a great price/performance ratio. I've had no problems running Linux Mint from my 1TB QVO.
@@ExplainingComputers Thanks for the reply! I bought it two days ago, on the same day that I made the comment above, and it is working very well so far!
If anyone is curious, CrystalDiskMark is basically a useful GUI wrapper for the Microsoft DiskSpd command line application which is available on github.
Explaining Computers : Thank you Chris for teachings us the difference between TLC & QLC - SSD’s......Once again your timing is impeccable with today’s lesson , for my upcoming hard drive upgrade on my laptop 💻 from HDD >>> SSD !!! Thanks Scarboro 🇨🇦🍀😎💚
now i understand why my friend said to avoid the samsung QVO. very glad i subscribed to this channel.
QVO works well when you always save data without making many changes to stored data.
The way he speaks brings me back to my childhood. It's like ASMR.. It's making me fall a sleep, and i love it..
I know very little of computer hardware but try to stay informed when looking to upgrade my PC. This video was very simple and easy to understand. Thank you!
I like all the single board computer demonstrations on this channel, very interesting stuff. However, I found this channel doing research on SSD's. So I love the videos, like this one, that go over all the technologies involved along with tests. Excellent video 👍
Thanks for watching.
15:38
I think you have guessed the prices right [as of 2021 04]
12:32 I think the SLC cache content could just be written to the TLC memory faster than to the QLC memory.
Good point.
That, or the drive itself is one that failed QC as a 2G drive, so got programmed as a 1G drive with only the good blocks allocated, leaving the 2G drive controller ( which would be the same controller per generation) with it's much larger cache in there, but with the reduced main memory capacity.
Another is that they ran out of the lower capacity chipsets, so instead ( probably as it is a single pick and place item, with a stacked die inside) simply substituted the larger cache chipsets instead as they are layout compatible, or they have depreciated the older controllers with the new higher capacity cache version, and there is a blend of the different size cache controllers currently in the supply chain, so they are refraining from updating the spec sheet till they are sure all the older versions have been sold off in the supply chain.
@SeanBZA An extremely good point -- I can believe this is the explanation. :)
ExplainingComputers would be maybe good to test with more than 78gb, too.
Thanks for a very clear explanation of the differences between these two types of drive.
Clearly presented, no hype, no waffle. Thank you.
In my experience, QLC isn't good for a system drive, but fantastic for the storage\game driver, as a secondary one.
My system Crucial 1TB ssd got 5% wear after a year, my 4TB Samsung QVO got just 1%, even though I constantly download new TV shows, movies and on it, save lots of files AND it's most often 3\4 occupied, while also having the pagefile on it. While the system 1TB only stopped to wear out rapidly(I was losing like 1% each 2-3 months) when I freed like half of it. Simply because, a system drive writes data automatically all the time, hence I AT LEAST would recommend TLC memory for a system ssd, MLC ideally if you can afford it.
Or U could use a SPINNING REGULAR HARD DRIVE since they have FASTER transfer rate than SSD (according 2 this test!) & INFINITE re-write cycles = fux sake =)) U talk like a junkie trying 2 decide which poison 2 take. Break the brainwash chains, dood =)
Wanders off to buy a Pro MLC drive instead. lol ;-)
Maybe another comparison between all of them would be a good video 😉
Better buy a enterprise slc ssd :P
@Propaganda Blitz There's middle ground as well, they realise that we can't afford enterprise so they offer premium SSD. I'm just not short of storage, I think I have, depending on how you count it, about 20TB. Most of that is HDD NAS but I still have a few TB of SSD and about 2TB of fast SSD (although obviously there is always faster).
This will only be a consideration for future builds for me and I think I will just go fast small SSD for the Boot drive then one of these for storage. Probably hang on to SATA a bit longer but the writing is on the wall there- if the motherboard has two M.2 slots then you don't need the SATA. Although often enough the 2nd M.2 will only run SATA speeds anyway (or reduced speed). You get that with AMD and their APU.
its your money... waste it where you want to.
@@demitsuru It depends on how you value your data, plus look at the slow down on the quad level SSD, if that is going to be a problem for you or not. You can protect your data with back-ups and NAS, on slower HDD, so you can still use SSD even if you don't 100% trust them. My boot drive fails then I lose very little, I have to install W10 and Office plus a few other programs.
Another impressive well defined video. You sir, are invaluable to RUclips and to all of your subscribers.
Very well done explanation and test. About the only thing I could have hoped for more was seeing you test how full the fast write on the EVO could go and what it would throttle down to for comparison. Regardless, thanks a lot. I'm adding this video to a personal reference playlist. Cheers. 👍
I use Samsung EVO's they last longer and perform better than the other SSD's I have tried. When you have a working solution its very hard to move away from it. I use SSD's for OS, Programs and some very limited data storage. I use Mechanical Drives for storing all my data and my servers are setup the same way.
You are not alone! Many people find that EVOs work and work well -- I see that time and time again in the comments on this channel.
Oh Lord! Thanks for such a valuable information a always you do Prof. Barnett.
And by the way we are talking about endurance and speeds and so on, I wanted to ask you about something I was told by the technician of my enterprise-environment machines recently upgraded with fancy Toshiba and Samsung SSDs (MLC) regards to how in certain way "to help to extend out" the life expectancy and reduce the erase cycles {which I understand are the ones taking "ssd life away"}
He suggested to create a Virtual drive in a high quality SD card (preferable over microSDs) or a "linked Folder (I do not even know what that is)" and since the VHD will be taken as an internal device this way Win10 software like OneDrive for instance could be moved off to that location OR the default download folders which we very often as it is intended of course we download and then delete most of the files we put in our PCs.
additionally in these VHD contained in the microsd/sd/USBs can serve as "cold storage" or something alike. and in this way we are not hurting the SSDs blocks by deleting a couple of pictures we do not want or that piece of software we downloaded and then we regretted doing it.
the whole idea is that save write/erase cycles.
---- SO WOULD YOU MAKE IN THE NEAR FUTURE A VIDEO EXPLAINING TO US HOW TO MAKE IT PROPERLY --- (My assistant's MS-Surface shall appreciate INDEED!).
I am polyglot and I swear I cannot even find a moderately well spoken or educated person explaining this topic.
I understand that since this once is done there are additional considerations to be done in Registry editor such as booting scripts to mount automatically the drive (the virtual one from the SD card)
well thank you very much again for your formidable and HIGHLY VALUABLE INFORMATION IN YOUR CHANNEL.
(BY THE WAY WATCH OUT I HEARD YOU SAYING "GONNA, WANNA" THAT IS UNFORGIVABLE FOR AN ACADEMIC PERSON LIKE YOU ;-D)
Awesome video once again. I would have liked to see you adding another 75Gb and see if the TLC would have dropped down at 78Gb or if it would just have kept on going strong and see how big the cache really is, since it wasn't 42Gb. Thanks again...
I like.... how you present..... your videos.... and give the correct..... technical information........ of the drives that...... you tested
THANK YOU!!!!
I understood their differrences clearly.
Great work kind sir :D
This is vital information for me and I appreciate that you do the research and share it all so clearly and concisely. Explaining Computers is my most favorite RUclips channel bar none. Please keep up the great work. And Thank You! :-)
Never trust ANY drive. Always do backups, as much as you can.
Like always a very well done presentation with all the relevant info!
Most online reviews i have seen put too much emphasis on the reduced endurance of QLC SSD's. I have owned my Samsung 850 EVO drive for just over two and a half years. At this point the drive has only reached 17 terabytes written, so the 860 QVO's 360TBW is far more endurance than the average user will ever need.
This is the best explained video of QLC drives I've found. I've tried to explain to people the differences but they often just don't understand. I will be sharing this video for sure.
I really do love your channel. Got me into tinkering on computers. Keep up the good work man.
Thanks for this. Great to hear that you are tinkering, always cool. :)
Excellent comparison. Would be great to see results for the Samsung Pro series alongside these 2!
With the drop in price of QLC I finally ditched spinning HDDs in my main system. I keep 2x2TB drives in a NAS for movies but my main PC now has 2x1TB Kingston A400 drives for game storage and a 512GB M.2 drive for windows and programs.
I think we'll see this become the norm in desktop computing in the next 3-5 years, the only reason I have the NAS is becasue of the reduced life-cycle of QLC.
Which M.2 drive do you use? And is it Sata or NVMe? Got any temps problems? Thanks.
@@gabcenz I use an NVMe Intel 660p drive, 512GB. Read/Writes at about 1.7gbps (about 2-3x as fast as a sata drive) and it was only $60 for the 512GB. My case is the Fractal Design Focus G and I have 6 fans in it so I've never had problems with temps (FX 8350+ GTX 1660ti for reference)
@@DaxtonAnderson Thanks. Looks like a good option to consider. I'm looking for a new SSD to boot Windows and installing programs. I was a bit worried because I've heard that some m.2 (NVMe or Sata, not sure) may overheat and in some cases cause thermal throttling. Well personally I have a good case and good ventilation too, so I hope I should be ok with any m.2 drive.
The Evo SLC cache is likely not specced wrong, but you forgot to take into account that the cache also continuously gets flushed to the bulk zone while the transfer is happening. Since that bulk storage is faster you'll need more data transferred before it can't keep up. You'd probably have seen a dip if your data set was larger.
Either way all it proves is that hard drives are infinitely superior. If U really need 'fast random access', just get more RAM =P U can also locate cache files & things into RAM with other programs, like web browsers 2 a 'RAM disc' folter, etc.
Another excellent video Chris , I was a skeptic and very scared of life expectancy and now love my Samsung EVO 860 ! Thanks for this fine video and your excellent and unique style it’s simply the best !
Oooh, I just bought a couple of 860 EVOs this week. Haven't unwrapped them yet. Watching with interest...
Awesome Video Chris, Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
so that is why samsung cost more than their competitor
wonder why not everyone show their cache size
samsung also has great controllers in their ssds
Samsung make everyone elses SSD- well not literally but they make others product (like Apple's). Samsung generally keep the best for their own brand, Apple pay them to be nice as well so Apple get great product from Samsung. Thing is things aren't great for Samsung just now. Apple told them they were going to sell a lot of $1000 phones, so Samsung should build a very expensive factory to make those very good screens. Then nobody bought the phones nad Samsung lost a very large amount of money- suggestions are Apple will have to put its hand in its (deep) pocket. The price crash on DDR has hit Samsung, and some of their emerging memory (for servers) hadn't been taken up- worse Samsung came up with some cheaper memory which was supposed to be for consumer. Basically higher densities so we can all have 32GB for the price of 16GB. But the enterprise sector just bought it all up so we didn't get it and Samsung lost out on the massive premium server memory commands. There's talk of Samsung stopping DDR4 production, it has with some already (the 'legendary' B sticks which few will know of a fewer care about). That could upset our hopes of cheap DDR4 which we have got used to. Good time to buy, certainly keep an eye on prices. On top of this as we are moving to DDR5 there will be a reduction on DDR4 anyway as manufacturers build stock. I plan to buy at least another 32GB of DDR4, ideally 64GB- which is overkill but I will probably never do a DDR5 upgrade because of the cancer. And just like DDR3 which lives on DDR4 isn't going away overnight.
gary totally agree with you
remember the 840 evo disaster, where they dared to not have a free upgrade to 850 evo or any other working ssd?
screw samsung, but it's not like there are that many good options especially at 2 TB+ there's the 2 TB crucial mx500 and the samsung tlc drives, at 4 tb+ it's literally just samsung and the new wd blue, quite annoying, the little or no choice.
The reasons are:
- Brand value
- They have various caches in their drives like DRAM cache and SLC cache. The cheaper drives don't have either of these so that's why they can sell at a lower price.
Hey Chris!
I think it would be great if you could also test data retention of SSDs, when they're unpowered. It would probably require a fair bit of time (or maybe not...), but would be worth it.
I have both drives in a build, but neither is used for booting Windows. The QVO is used for temporary work, while the EVO is mainly storage. I have 512GB Samsung 970 PRO NVMe, which is the boot drive and another 1TB which is used for video encoding. I don't think it was mistake buying these drives, and your wonderful video confirms that.
I love the fact that this channel keep its classic appeal and I'm very much appreciate the clear explanation.
Extraordinary well explained! Thank you sir - subscribed and liked!
Welcome aboard!
Good test, and to think i was about to recommend that QVO to a friend, wow not going to happen after this test.
I oredered the QVO and then request a return label and ordered the EVO instead
Why not? Okay, I'm using EVO, but I can recommend QVO to someone who want to save some money and use it for typical customer needs. I actually seen some TLC SSDs that worse than QVO in most of aspects.
@@A64632 For the current pricing, it makes more sense to spend a little extra and get a piece of hardware thats going to be a faster over time and last longer.
@@joem3115 At my opinion the theoretical lifetime for 860 EVO's memory chips is around 200 years in common home/office/game use, but for 860 QVO - something like 50 years. I guess practically it will die much faster cause of corrosion, or something like this. So... not too much difference in expected lifetime.
Speed - they have almost the same read speed, and almost the same write speed for the first 42Gb. The only home\office\game scenario when you will be limited with write speed is installing modern game. So.. if you are doing it quite often - than writing speed after first 42Gb matters. Otherwise not. Btw, it's may be probably better for you to look for Samsung 970 EVO Plus to get better speeds.
So.. I prefer 860 EVO, but I can recommend 860 QVO for someone who have to save some money. It's also quite good thing I think. At my personal opinion 860 QVO better than many other SSD's based on TLC memory (WD Blue for example), even a little cheaper some of them.
@@A64632 don't get me wrong, they're both good drives but for around $20 more it just seems like a no brainer but for the people still trying to build the rest of their PC, then perhaps the QVO will be fine. As for the 970 EVO Plus goes I actually have that as a boot drive and it's speeds are incredible.
12:34 "Slightly bewildered by..."
I am not. I have the 840 Evo. This drive was known to have an issue. It was sold as a software issue. But it was never resolved. It was described by reviewers as a "crazy drop in performance", eventually after the problem manifested itself.
Essentially, the "fix" was to buy an 850.
I will never buy a Samsung SSD again based on Samsung's reputation alone. So videos like Chris's is valuable to me. We run backups that exceed the sizes in Chris's video, so....no QVO's for us for the time being.
with all the SSD's prices going down and new models coming out, this video really explained very well what you should be looking for, i Know quite alot of people that would just go for the cheapest ssd since they believe they are all the same.
That's a relief.... My qvo is about to be delivered tomorrow 😅. Thanks for the detailed comparison.
Enjoy your new SSD. :)
@@ExplainingComputers thank you.
Nice to see that the EVO is better than specs. Nice guy Samsung :)
Samuel Schwager
My assumption is that the turbo cache is acting as a FIFO and the TLC drive never fully filled the FIFO since it could offload the data faster than the QLC drive. The two drives probably have the same amount of cache.
I’m guessing if you transferred more data you would eventually hit a point where you fill the FIFO and reveal the true write speed of the TLC.
@@sloth4urluv Might be. Reading > 100GB from a RAM disk and writing it to the EVO might work to test that.
RAM disk isn't going to speed up the SATA interface. NVME is already tons faster than SATA 3, so it's just the EVO's actual performance.
Could just be that is the write speed for the TLC even without the SLC buffer.
I still remember the day when we say “ewwww” to the TLC nand flash. Now companies are pushing the less good QLC.
QLC is cheaper. it's like how people are complaining that super car companies are pushing small engines with turbos instead of the big v8's of the past. it's all about maintaining similar performance for less price. Yes, small engines with turbos (QLC) may not be as reliable as the big old engines (TLC), but it won't matter since even newer technology will be available by the time the current tech (QLC) dies.
PLC is coming next. more ewww
That's because V-NAND have boosted the reliability and speed of flash memory. So you can have TLC V-NAND that is faster and more reliable than older MLC NAND. I'd trust TLC V-NAND for my system drive and be okay with QLC for my media storage drive.
Hey PoPe, what do you make of MiCRoN's 5100/5200 MaX series?
They are supposed to be better than their PRo & eCo counterparts, but are they the same as a PRO version from SaMSuNG??
@@angrysocialjusticewarrior Good analogy
Thanks, this was a very well made and thought out video with a very interesting topic that has caught my interest.
Thank you so much for all your hard work and the effort that you put into these videos that have both an educational value and entertainment one for the mind.
Everything clearly explained and simplified as I struggle to understand technical terms and or phases. Awesome channel.
A great explanation for the difference between Qvo and Evo. I wish I had watched before purchasing QV0 :(
Amazing to see the ultra-fast evolution of SSDs, when you consider that it was almost a luxury item a few years ago! Their current price-quality ratio makes them almost a must for any basic computer use now. Thank you for this presentation of the technological advances of these mass storage devices!
Lovely video as always! But I'm still paranoid so I'll stick to MLC (SLC if I can) and back it all up on HDD.
3 year warranty on a storage device? no thank you... thanks you the info! I was totally unaware of qlc
Other manufacturers are very cheap, I guess it's good for storing games/not much writes...and use tlc for system drive
It's still 360TBW, that's filling up the drive completely 360 times.
My oldest SSD's aren't even close to those numbers, and that's a good.. 5-6 years.
Of the older drives, my 500GB >850< EVO has 686 days on it (power on hours), it's had ~15.000 GB written to it, so 15 TBW, out of the 150 TBW endurance it came with. It's been well used over the years, and was my OS drive for a year or two (release date: 2014).
I get wanting 5 years though, but if those 3 years is based entirely on some idea of you using some 328GB/day, then eh.. yeah.
It also does come with a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rating at 1.500.000 hours across the entire range (1-2-4TB) - that's equal to ~171 years. Even if that's not exactly what it means, but it can be googled if curious :)
I transfer by the 100GB and occasionally by the TB. These demos are helpful.
Some higher capacity drives with a certain number of bad cells are sold as lower capacity drives but still retain the larger cache. This might explain the discrepancy.
A very good point. This may well be the case here.
You didn't give an explanation for the difference in write speed after the 42 GB cache was filled. The difference is due to the different inherent write speeds of the TLC and QLC cells. If I remember correctl(from nvme drive reviews, maybe the tech deals channel), the TLC sequential write speed is limited to something like 1500 MB/S, so you're still bottlenecked by the SATA interface. I bet they only put in SLC cache for sustainability or scaling (in the production process) reasons. My hypothesis is that you saw a little dip in writing speed after the SLC cache was filled because the internal controller needed to switch to writing directly to the TLC cells. The inherent write speed of QLC is a lot lower as you clearly demonstrated!
Great video anyway! Really like your channel!
Great video, informative indeed, I wish we had bank holiday Monday specials.
So now when you procure Latitude laptops from Dell for your company, when the 3 year warranty expires you should take it seriously.
These videos must take a lot of time, research, shooting, editing, etc. I really appreciate the effort, and learn a lot from them.
Thanks.
Thanks. This particular video did seem like it was in production forever!
Great video that clearly shows how efficient an SSD drive really is. I just replaced my 500g Samsung 850 EVO with a 500g Samsung 860 EVO to transfer over to Windows 10 and I'm very happy with Samsung. Their software is the easiest to use and the price for the 860 was less then what I had paid for the 850! I remember back in 1990 when I built my 486-66 I decided to spend an extra $50 for a 250 MB hd instead of a 200 MB! By the late 90s hard drives were less then 50c a mb and I thought that was wonderful, and now we've seen the same drop in prices per gigabyte SSDs and now we see prices for terabyte SSD drives dropping. Isn't technology wonderful?
WoW :) very informative video.... I personally did not know about the difference :)
Thanks so much, it was very informative and something I need to take note of.
Interesting video ExplainingComputers, I suppose not all SSDs are created equal.
"All SSDs are equal, but some SSDs are more equal than others.” (freely adapted from Orwell)
Chris, its not that SLCs are different capacity.
the SLC is filling up AND being dumped at the same time.
Because SLC is moving out its data faster onto TLC than QLC, it will also take longer to fill up.
I'm sure this explains things to a point. But seeing no fall off from the EVO is very strange. I suspect others here are right in saying that the 1TB EVO drive was probably manufactured as a 2TB, failed quality checks, and was reset as a 1TB, if retaining the larger cache.
Many thanks for this lucid explanation. I now feel better informed, although I'm still a bit nervous about those two Kingson SSDs hanging off the side of my computer. I've never got round to closing up the case, as there's something makes me think it's going to go wrong at any moment -- but so far, so good. I must do a speed check, as I suspect they are rather slow. But they sure are quiet!!!