# SSD Wisdom?



## DocMidi657 (Oct 29, 2018)

Hi Everyone,

Looking to purchase a 2TB ssd for one of the internal bays of my Mac Pro Cheesegrator (for some of my sample libs).
When looking online I see prices for this size from $289 for Micron and then I see also $349 for a Samsung Evo Then I see Samsung 860 Pro $597. 
Can I just get the Micron or is their some benefit to the more expensive drives I need to consider?
Thanks!


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 29, 2018)

In my opinion there's no reason to spend so much more for a Samsung, even though (not counting the $600 one) the disparity isn't as high as it used to be.

I don't know Micron, but as long as the warranty is okay, I'd say it's okay. The ones I do know to be good - that is, the ones that have been on my machine for a couple of years or more - are SanDisk, Crucial, and Mushkin.


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## EvilDragon (Oct 29, 2018)

10 year warranty on a Pro is very nice... Although performance-wise it's damn near identical to Evo, more or less.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 29, 2018)

I'd argue that you won't notice the difference in performance between any of them in the real world.

And a 10-year warranty is nice because it suggests the drive is less likely to fail. But if it does fail after, say, three years, chances are good that a 4TB drive will cost less than the difference in price after the warranty expires. 

The main thing as far as I'm concerned is to stay away from Seagate. Any company can have a few bad manufacturing runs, but that company was hostile to me. To hell with them.


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## ironbut (Oct 29, 2018)

If you can wait a month, the Black Friday prices on the better drives could be stunning (check out the other SSD thread)!


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## steveo42 (Oct 29, 2018)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> I'd argue that you won't notice the difference in performance between any of them in the real world.
> 
> And a 10-year warranty is nice because it suggests the drive is less likely to fail. But if it does fail after, say, three years, chances are good that a 4TB drive will cost less than the difference in price after the warranty expires.
> 
> The main thing as far as I'm concerned is to stay away from Seagate. Any company can have a few bad manufacturing runs, but that company was hostile to me. To hell with them.



Same here.. I had 2 of their best spinners go bad within a month of each other. Both had manufacturing dates within a month of each other as well. I contacted Seagate and was basically told "too bad"... Moved to WD Black and never looked back.. These were spinners.


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## DocMidi657 (Oct 29, 2018)

Thanks Nick, EvilDragon, Ironbut and Steveo42 for all the excellent advice on the SSD's, will definitely stay away from Seagate!


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## composerguy78 (Oct 30, 2018)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> I'd argue that you won't notice the difference in performance between any of them in the real world.
> 
> And a 10-year warranty is nice because it suggests the drive is less likely to fail. But if it does fail after, say, three years, chances are good that a 4TB drive will cost less than the difference in price after the warranty expires.
> 
> The main thing as far as I'm concerned is to stay away from Seagate. Any company can have a few bad manufacturing runs, but that company was hostile to me. To hell with them.


Funny you write this. I would have thought the same too. However I DID notice a huge difference when I upgraded my system drive from a from Mushkin Kronos (admittedly a brand I had never heard of - but I was recommended) to a Samsung Evo 850 (not Pro I don’t think). The difference was huge. I used to have click and pop issues when my buffer was set to 512. Now I can play at 256 or 128 with no issues. It is a 6 year old machine but I am amazed at the difference.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 30, 2018)

composerguy78 said:


> Funny you write this. I would have thought the same too. However I DID notice a huge difference when I upgraded my system drive from a from Mushkin Kronos (admittedly a brand I had never heard of - but I was recommended) to a Samsung Evo 850 (not Pro I don’t think). The difference was huge. I used to have click and pop issues when my buffer was set to 512. Now I can play at 256 or 128 with no issues. It is a 6 year old machine but I am amazed at the difference.



Hm. It sounds to me like something was screwed up before, or maybe old, incompatible... something. 

SSD models can't possibly make *that* much difference. It's not totally implausible that you could measure - as opposed to notice - a small difference, but if so it would be orders of magnitude tinier than what you'd need to reduce your buffer size by 75%.

Mushkin is a "name" brand, by the way.


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## composerguy78 (Oct 30, 2018)

It could also be that I was replacing a six year old SSD! Would that explain anything?


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 30, 2018)

composerguy78 said:


> It could also be that I was replacing a six year old SSD! Would that explain anything?



Could well be.

I'm still skeptical that the faster SSD alone is enough to account for that much of an improvement. But I'm happy for you that it did, however you got there!


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## DocMidi657 (Oct 30, 2018)

If this was a Mac....Did you do a clean install or migration assistant when you replaced the SSD? Just a guess but if it was a clean install maybe that improved corruption in your system possibly present on your 6 year old SSD?


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## tack (Oct 30, 2018)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> SSD models can't possibly make *that* much difference. It's not totally implausible that you could measure - as opposed to notice - a small difference, but if so it would be orders of magnitude tinier than what you'd need to reduce your buffer size by 75%.


They really can vary, especially in terms of durability over time.

Here's my 850 EVO SATA. You can see here the performance is pretty consistent at around 425MB/s as we scan across the entire 2TB range of the drive, notwithstanding a slight dip around the 500GB range, but not too serious.







Now here's my Sandisk X400 SATA. Here were see a the thing completely shit the bed between the 500GB and 600GB range, and it's not exactly stellar in the first 200GB. Access times are also an order of magnitude worse on average than the Samsung. This benchmark is repeatable.






And just for comparison, here's my 960 PRO NVMe (whereas the above two were SATA):






Tangentially, here's some work I did testing patch load times comparing SATA and NVMe SSDs.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 30, 2018)

Do you notice a difference when you're actually using it, Tack? Bandwidth only comes into play when you're saturating the bus, which is pretty hard to do without making really shitty music. 

I have a 6 meg bus on a PCI card and a 3 meg internal one. Damned if I can tell a difference.


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## tack (Oct 30, 2018)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Do you notice a difference when you're actually using it, Tack? Bandwidth only comes into play when you're saturating the bus, which is pretty hard to do without making really shitty music.


I noticed it because a couple libraries I had on that drive took _forever_ to load. Which is no surprise given the ranges that could scarcely deliver more than 50MB/s (an order lower than the bus saturation point). During this time DFD streaming was impossible (at least it would manifest as dropouts). I believe at the time it was Sable that had the unfortunate privilege of being located across that particularly bad range. 

In the good ranges, the X400 was perfectly cromulent when compared to my Samsung drives. It's just the Samsungs delivered substantially more _consistent_ performance.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 30, 2018)

Okay. There has to be a reason your drive takes forever to load that's not because of its specs when it's firing on all cylinders.

My biggest template, which includes a lot of Hollywood Strings, takes no time to load 40GB of samples. 1-1/2 or 2 minutes? That's with SSDs on a SATA 2 bus.

It makes no sense that the Samsungs with comparable specs would be that much better.


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## babylonwaves (Oct 31, 2018)

DocMidi657 said:


> When looking online I see prices for this size from $289 for Micron and then I see also $349 for a Samsung Evo Then I see Samsung 860 Pro $597.


i have a couple of EVOs and also Crucial/Micron 2TB SSDs. In performance I don't really see a difference (loading Kontakt instruments with a 12kb DFD buffer size) but the Microns get a lot hotter over time. Depending on where you are located and which housing you're using this might be a consideration.


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## tack (Oct 31, 2018)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> It makes no sense that the Samsungs with comparable specs would be that much better.


What I'm trying to say is that specs aren't everything. They tend not to talk about about performance consistency, robustness, durability, particularly as the drive is worn over time. And in some cases the delta between specs and actual results can get pretty bad.

I'm not saying we all need to run out and buy Optanes or even NVMes, but just because that cheap KingSpec (or whatever you're looking at) has similar specs to a reputable and widely benchmarked Samsung doesn't mean you're going to get comparable quality.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 31, 2018)

I'm still skeptical, Tack.


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## tack (Oct 31, 2018)

Related to SSDs of wildly different price ranges, you said that "you won't notice the difference in performance between any of them in the real world" and I just wanted to provide a couple contrary examples backed by measurements. Beyond that, it's ok by me if we leave it at an impasse.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 31, 2018)

Tack, the un-Samsung drive appears to be broken. Something doesn't make sense.


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## steveo42 (Oct 31, 2018)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Hm. It sounds to me like something was screwed up before, or maybe old, incompatible... something.
> 
> SSD models can't possibly make *that* much difference. It's not totally implausible that you could measure - as opposed to notice - a small difference, but if so it would be orders of magnitude tinier than what you'd need to reduce your buffer size by 75%.
> 
> Mushkin is a "name" brand, by the way.



I agree. Sure benchmarks are out there that show some differences, some significant, but in real life I've used the cheap PNY brand type drives and the expensive Samsung drives and with streaming VSTi I have not experienced any noticeable difference. What the extra money buys is longevity and a better warranty, at least from what I understand. That's cool but I back up critical data anyway so when the SSD dies, I replace, restore and I'm rocking and rolling once again. What I can say is replacing Seagate top of the line (forget the model) spinners with WD Black drives made a noticeable difference in speed for streaming VSTi even though the Seagate's had larger cache and overall better specs. My suspicion is the WD firmware is more efficient.


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## ptram (Nov 1, 2018)

Crucial (Micron/Intel) SSDs are very common in the Apple world. I have four of them, and the older ones have been hard-working flawlessly for years.

They use(d?) to offer a short warranty than Samsung, but the expected lifespan of their memory is longer than Samsung's equivalents. And the capacitors inserted in all their memories offer that increased data integrity protection that only the Samsung's Pro series offers.

So, until Crucial will not gain a higher price for increased general popularity, I would say they are a real bargain.

Paolo


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## Michael Antrum (Nov 1, 2018)

I've had SanDisk, Crucial and Samsung, and not noticed any real world difference between them. One thing I would say, however, is that if you are putting libraries on the disks, you are not going to hammer them.

The problem with SSD's is when you are constantly writing to them - it eventually breaks down the drive. 

But with libraries - well I've only ever written to my SSD's when installing (or on the odd occasion moving the libraries from one SSD to another to facilitate maximum usage of disk space). So I've written to them very few times. Nearly all the time they are being read from rather than written to - which is much easier on the SSD drive.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 2, 2018)

mikeybabes said:


> The problem with SSD's is when you are constantly writing to them - it eventually breaks down the drive.



It does?

We write to system drives all the time. I hope that's not a problem!


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## Michael Antrum (Nov 2, 2018)

You might find this article of interest...

https://www.howtogeek.com/165472/6-things-you-shouldnt-do-with-solid-state-drives/


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 2, 2018)

Mikey, that's from 2013. They've come a long way since then - I think!

But they are designed to use, and writing is part of that.


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## Ninth Lion (Nov 11, 2018)

tack said:


> Here's my 850 EVO SATA. You can see here the performance is pretty consistent at around 425MB/s as we scan across the entire 2TB range of the drive, notwithstanding a slight dip around the 500GB range, but not too serious.



That's one fine looking SSD.

Why doesn't mine look like that?


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