Sandisk are pretty much at the same level, their 2014 SSD's are competitive with the 850 Pro (almost), and they have caught up in the low end segment as well. I have had a much better experience with my Extreme II, than my 840 Pro.
Actually SanDisk SSDs are pretty good. Both in terms of performance and reliability. I know the 850Pro might be king of the hill but for most people the extra performance can hardly justify the extra cost.
That's why I skipped the 850 generation and decided to use Crucial and SanDisk SSDs for all applications. They're cheaper, they behave very similarly even under server type loads, they appear to be reliable and they certainly have more bang for the buck.
They can't all be Ferraris but then again not everyone needs a Ferrari. That's why your daily drives is more likely to be a Toyota, Ford or Volkswagen not Ferrari or McLaren.
Well come down to if you want 15nm NAND or 30nm V-NAND since performance is pretty close. The one big advantage of VNAND is mostly with TLC sine 30nm means less issues and the EVO line uses it nicely having some of the drive operate as a SLC mode cache
Crucial botched the SLC cahce in their MX200. It's not that easy, not that cheap and honestly most users don't need that. Every increase in speed actually brings less and less extra performance. While going from 100 to 200MB/s was a real boost, going from 500 to 600MB/s is just money out the window for most.
Most benchmarks are designed to show you how you need more performance. Like testing at QD32 when in real life no normal user goes beyond 2 or 3. In normal scenarios most current SSDs do a great job and most times the reason to upgrade is hype or capacity boost. While the latter is understandable, the former not so much. I for one will stick to mainstream devices that have a good reliability record and that's it.
Sandisk has more market share and OEM wins than Samsung, and most people will agree that Sandisk has superior support and reliability to Samsung (who has been losing OEM's to Sandisk for years)
So I think Samsung needs to catch back up to Sandisk who surpassed them in many key areas years ago...it isn't all about raw performance.
However, I had great experience with my Samsung 840 Pro's, and currently use an 850 EVO M2 in my Elitebook because it was the only single-sided 512GB 2280 drive available until the MX200. TLC helps Samsung in form factor capacity and to a lesser extent performance, but I'm still concerned about the reliability of the technology, especially after the 840 EVO problems...
There shouldn't be any technical reasons not to trust the 850 Evo.
The problems of the 840 Evo were caused by "unreliable NAND cells". The Evo 840 used 16nm NAND, the 850 should use 3D NAND with 40nm, which should offer much more persistency DWPD.
From a customer service perspective however, the whole response of Samsung to the 840 bug was very bad.
Its good they are updating their low end. The regular Sandisk SSDs are some of the slowest in real world on the market. Next to the budget corsair, they are screaming fast. The corsairs can virus scan in half the time of a sandisk and the system just felt snappier than sandisk.
I have a Sandisk SSD in my Asus laptop (UX-31) and recently had to replace a spinny drive which failed, so I went with a standard Sandisk 128Gb 2.5 SSD. Both have been sufficiently fast, and the replacement drive was quite affordable and performs quite well. This is the kind of SSD that an IT department could probably deploy without much issue and the bean counters would like it too with the affordable price.
As mentioned, there are Ferarris and Toyotas. Nothing wrong with selling a lot of Toyotas.
Samsung's 850 Pro is a bit better performing than Sandisk's top retail model, but as a auto fan, it's nowhere near the scale of difference between a Ferrari (say, a road car like a 360 Modena) and a Toyota (say, a road car like a Camry). There's a massive difference in class, cost, performance, reliability, etc.
If you want to go the car analogy route, it's more like the Toyota Camry vs Kia Optima or Honda Accord vs Hyundai Elantra.
You took that to literal :). The point was a comparison between a top performer and an excellent daily driver. They both have the same performance when city driving and the only way you'll see some difference is taking them on the track. Which is something very few drivers do and even fewer need.
Also, don't forget Volkswagen and Toyota own the likes of Audi, Bugatti or Lexus (of Audi R8, Bugatti Veyron and Lexus LFA fame :D).
Excerpted from the write-up: "Given that SanDisk is an SSD-only company..."
SanDisk isn't "SSD-only"; it is better to characterize them as a flash memory storage company. They have a bunch of memory cards as storage products in addition to their SSDs. As their Google link says: "SanDisk | Global Leader in Flash Memory Storage Solutions"
Perhaps what you could have said is "Given that SanDisk SSDs are primarily in retail channels..."
Not in the normal sense that most think of when they hear the word "SSD". Even SanDisk themselves don't name their company as such. It's "Flash Memory Storage Solutions".
"The reason why SanDisk isn't offering any higher capacity options is because the average client SSD capacity is still well below 256GB (~180GB according to SanDisk's own research)"
The reason this is true is that SSDs are not big enough to hold all our stuff, so we have OS and applications (that's about 180GB, right?) on the SSD and all of our music, movies, images, etc on a spinning disk. How long will it be until some SSD company gives us a 2TB SSD that doesn't cost more than the entire rest of the computer?
As long as they can make good money selling inbetween capacities, only slowly moving the pricing/capacity scale as time goes by, then we won't see affordable multi-TB SSDs any time soon. Oddly though, SanDisk was the one company which last year said they wanted to move ahead quickly with affordable high capacity mainstream SSDs, but no sign of that so far.
Atm, consumers are happy to pay amount X for capacity Y; companies won't offer 2*Y at price X until either rival products come along or sales slow to the point where reduced pricing is essential. It'd be great if just for once a company could blow past all this money grabbing nonsense and really put the cat among the pidgeons by releasing a 1TB SSD for $100 or something, but the marketing depts. of most companies would never allow such a waste of potential income to occur. Instead, we get drip-fed increments over time.
PS. At least with SSDs there's a degree of reasonable competition. With CPUs there's barely any, and with GPUs there's always misleading product naming, huge performance overlap between old & new product ranges, pricing set to whatever consumers are happy cough up no matter what the products actually cost to make, etc. Lots of people moaned about the cost of the original Titan, but NV sold loads of them.
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Cellar Door - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Slow clap SanDisk... keep innovating like this and you will catch Samsung any day now.olafgarten - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Sandisk are pretty much at the same level, their 2014 SSD's are competitive with the 850 Pro (almost), and they have caught up in the low end segment as well. I have had a much better experience with my Extreme II, than my 840 Pro.close - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Actually SanDisk SSDs are pretty good. Both in terms of performance and reliability. I know the 850Pro might be king of the hill but for most people the extra performance can hardly justify the extra cost.That's why I skipped the 850 generation and decided to use Crucial and SanDisk SSDs for all applications. They're cheaper, they behave very similarly even under server type loads, they appear to be reliable and they certainly have more bang for the buck.
They can't all be Ferraris but then again not everyone needs a Ferrari. That's why your daily drives is more likely to be a Toyota, Ford or Volkswagen not Ferrari or McLaren.
close - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
*drives > driver. Damn this commenting system with no edits.SunLord - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Well come down to if you want 15nm NAND or 30nm V-NAND since performance is pretty close. The one big advantage of VNAND is mostly with TLC sine 30nm means less issues and the EVO line uses it nicely having some of the drive operate as a SLC mode cacheclose - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Crucial botched the SLC cahce in their MX200. It's not that easy, not that cheap and honestly most users don't need that. Every increase in speed actually brings less and less extra performance. While going from 100 to 200MB/s was a real boost, going from 500 to 600MB/s is just money out the window for most.Most benchmarks are designed to show you how you need more performance. Like testing at QD32 when in real life no normal user goes beyond 2 or 3. In normal scenarios most current SSDs do a great job and most times the reason to upgrade is hype or capacity boost. While the latter is understandable, the former not so much. I for one will stick to mainstream devices that have a good reliability record and that's it.
Samus - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Sandisk has more market share and OEM wins than Samsung, and most people will agree that Sandisk has superior support and reliability to Samsung (who has been losing OEM's to Sandisk for years)So I think Samsung needs to catch back up to Sandisk who surpassed them in many key areas years ago...it isn't all about raw performance.
However, I had great experience with my Samsung 840 Pro's, and currently use an 850 EVO M2 in my Elitebook because it was the only single-sided 512GB 2280 drive available until the MX200. TLC helps Samsung in form factor capacity and to a lesser extent performance, but I'm still concerned about the reliability of the technology, especially after the 840 EVO problems...
Adding-Color - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
There shouldn't be any technical reasons not to trust the 850 Evo.The problems of the 840 Evo were caused by "unreliable NAND cells". The Evo 840 used 16nm NAND, the 850 should use 3D NAND with 40nm, which should offer much more persistency DWPD.
From a customer service perspective however, the whole response of Samsung to the 840 bug was very bad.
MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
The point you're making aside, 840 Evo uses 19nm TLC.Byte - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
Its good they are updating their low end. The regular Sandisk SSDs are some of the slowest in real world on the market. Next to the budget corsair, they are screaming fast. The corsairs can virus scan in half the time of a sandisk and the system just felt snappier than sandisk.jjj - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I assume it's TLC?As for the controller, maybe it's the DRAMless Marvell 88NV1120 http://www.marvell.com/storage/assets/Marvell_88NV...
Would be interesting to see how that budget controller does.
jjj - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
guess it's not TLC ,that slide lists it as MLC.bill.rookard - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I have a Sandisk SSD in my Asus laptop (UX-31) and recently had to replace a spinny drive which failed, so I went with a standard Sandisk 128Gb 2.5 SSD. Both have been sufficiently fast, and the replacement drive was quite affordable and performs quite well. This is the kind of SSD that an IT department could probably deploy without much issue and the bean counters would like it too with the affordable price.As mentioned, there are Ferarris and Toyotas. Nothing wrong with selling a lot of Toyotas.
romrunning - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Samsung's 850 Pro is a bit better performing than Sandisk's top retail model, but as a auto fan, it's nowhere near the scale of difference between a Ferrari (say, a road car like a 360 Modena) and a Toyota (say, a road car like a Camry). There's a massive difference in class, cost, performance, reliability, etc.If you want to go the car analogy route, it's more like the Toyota Camry vs Kia Optima or Honda Accord vs Hyundai Elantra.
close - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
You took that to literal :). The point was a comparison between a top performer and an excellent daily driver. They both have the same performance when city driving and the only way you'll see some difference is taking them on the track. Which is something very few drivers do and even fewer need.Also, don't forget Volkswagen and Toyota own the likes of Audi, Bugatti or Lexus (of Audi R8, Bugatti Veyron and Lexus LFA fame :D).
romrunning - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
:) - I know, I just couldn't resist.romrunning - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Excerpted from the write-up: "Given that SanDisk is an SSD-only company..."SanDisk isn't "SSD-only"; it is better to characterize them as a flash memory storage company. They have a bunch of memory cards as storage products in addition to their SSDs. As their Google link says: "SanDisk | Global Leader in Flash Memory Storage Solutions"
Perhaps what you could have said is "Given that SanDisk SSDs are primarily in retail channels..."
TheWrongChristian - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
You wouldn't classify a solid state flash memory card as a Solid State Disk?romrunning - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
Not in the normal sense that most think of when they hear the word "SSD". Even SanDisk themselves don't name their company as such. It's "Flash Memory Storage Solutions".trparky - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
It would be better if they had a 500/512 GB model in the lineup as well for those people who want a little extra space for their installation.ZeDestructor - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
There's the X300s for example, if you need more space.zmeul - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
I'm not convinced by their claims: "price point on par with HDDs"I'd love to see 256Gb SSDs for 50$
mfinn999 - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
"The reason why SanDisk isn't offering any higher capacity options is because the average client SSD capacity is still well below 256GB (~180GB according to SanDisk's own research)"The reason this is true is that SSDs are not big enough to hold all our stuff, so we have OS and applications (that's about 180GB, right?) on the SSD and all of our music, movies, images, etc on a spinning disk. How long will it be until some SSD company gives us a 2TB SSD that doesn't cost more than the entire rest of the computer?
mapesdhs - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
As long as they can make good money selling inbetween capacities, only slowly moving the pricing/capacity scale as time goes by, then we won't see affordable multi-TB SSDs any time soon. Oddly though, SanDisk was the one company which last year said they wanted to move ahead quickly with affordable high capacity mainstream SSDs, but no sign of that so far.Atm, consumers are happy to pay amount X for capacity Y; companies won't offer 2*Y at price X until either rival products come along or sales slow to the point where reduced pricing is essential. It'd be great if just for once a company could blow past all this money grabbing nonsense and really put the cat among the pidgeons by releasing a 1TB SSD for $100 or something, but the marketing depts. of most companies would never allow such a waste of potential income to occur. Instead, we get drip-fed increments over time.
Ian.
mapesdhs - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
PS. At least with SSDs there's a degree of reasonable competition. With CPUs there's barely any, and with GPUs there's always misleading product naming, huge performance overlap between old & new product ranges, pricing set to whatever consumers are happy cough up no matter what the products actually cost to make, etc. Lots of people moaned about the cost of the original Titan, but NV sold loads of them.