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[rm082e]

I don't think "for gaming" is relevant when asking about cheap ssds vs more expensive brands. It's just down to reliability, which comes down to who made the guts of the drive.

Personally, I can't see myself buying spinning disk drives after about 2020 for any reason. I'm sure we could come up with some obscure IT thing where spinning drives are a requirement. But if it's just about cost, I'd rather spend more money to get SATA SSDs.

I also don't find it useful to have a bunch of games downloaded given how older titles still get updates. Seems like a lot of bandwidth wasted updating a game that's just sitting on a drive not getting played. I try to keep a dozen games or less installed.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

This is similar to what i'm experiencing with my new, cheap drive.

However, it doesn't slow down that much. Even during the slow pace writes, it's still faster than the HDDs i use at least.

The slowdowns only affect write speeds. I only need this SSD for running games from it so i only need fast read speeds.

The slowdowns don't happen if i copy-paste smaller chunks of data. Instead of copying a 100GB folder in it's entirety, i just copy 1/3 of it separately.This way i copied the whole thing at the full, 500MB/s speed. If i did it in 1 go, it would slowdown halfway through at 170MB/s and the total time would be much longer. Not use why it works like that, it seems like taking small breaks help the SSD a lot. I don't think it's heat, the SSD doesn't report temps higher than 39c.

I agree, that works, but you shouldn't have to do that.

 

[Hoddi]

Ok so i bought the first SSD to start the process of replacing the dead hard drive and in time, the rest of the hard drives in my system.

I got a cheap 2TB Teamgroup SSD. It had a ton of positive reviews on the local site i use so i got that. I saw some prof reviews as well and i knew what to expect.

I would like to report the way this SSD performs while writing. I assume this doesn't apply to read speeds, only write.

This drive is meant to fill up to 90% of it's space. For the first 1TB half, the write speed was a steady, near 500MB/sec, which is great. But after that, the write speed would fall to as low as 160MB/sec, which is the speed of a fast HDD.

Then i took a launch break for 15 minutes, (without using the SSD during that time, it was idle for that duration). And when i started to copy the next files, the speed would again climb to 500MB and then drop again to under 200 after about 60-70GB were written.

It seems like when i don't use the drive, the empty space that is left becomes more "write ready" or something. Is it doing something to itself in the background?

All modern SSDs perform this way to different degrees. They will usually allocate some X amount of space as fast SLC cache that performs writes at full speed and then switch the cells to slower MLC/TLC/QLC after the data has been written.

If your drive supports, say, 600GB of SLC then you can write up to 600GB without the write speed dropping. But if you write 700GB then the first 600GB is written at full speed and the remaining 100GB goes directly to the slower cells. Pausing the copy as you did allowed the drive to move data from SLC to the slower cells and then resume at full speed.

The size of this SLC cache also scales according to how full your drive is. An empty drive may have 600GB of SLC available but when 75% full then it might only have 150GB of SLC left, for example. In the latter case, you can only write 150GB before the drive starts slowing down.

 

[nkarafo]

I agree, that works, but you shouldn't have to do that.

Well, i got a cheaper product. I expected it to have some downsides.

And honestly, if that's the only downside this drive has then i'll be more than happy to buy some more of the same and replace the rest of my HDDs.

All modern SSDs perform this way to different degrees. They will usually allocate some X amount of space as fast SLC cache that performs writes at full speed and then switch the cells to slower MLC/TLC/QLC after the data has been written.

If your drive supports, say, 600GB of SLC then you can write up to 600GB without the write speed dropping. But if you write 700GB then the first 600GB is written at full speed and the remaining 100GB goes directly to the slower cells. Pausing the copy as you did allowed the drive to move data from SLC to the slower cells and then resume at full speed.

The size of this SLC cache also scales according to how full your drive is. An empty drive may have 600GB of SLC available but when 75% full then it might only have 150GB of SLC left, for example. In the latter case, you can only write 150GB before the drive starts slowing down.

Thanks for the info. This makes a lot of sense now.

I assume the slower cells don't affect the read speeds though?

 

[Hoddi]

I assume the slower cells don't affect the read speeds though?

Right, it's purely a write speed thing. I only really notice the slower writes happening during large patches on Steam and stuff like that. It's mildly annoying when it happens but it's also so rare that I wouldn't worry about it on a gaming drive.

 

[raduque]

There's not much speed difference between a 2.5" ssd and a mechanical drive.

This is what's known as "confidently incorrect". There are significant differences in speed between a solid-state drive and mechanical spinner, simply due to the inherent latency in the moving heads and the spinning platters.

See below:

Both 4TB drives i have (or had) are 256MB cache drives (WD)

This is their performance:

Most SSDs, even the crappiest ones, hover at 500MB/s read speeds. That's for the sequential reads. Random reads are anywhere between 20 - 40MB/sec. Which is where the "10x faster" claim comes from.

There is no comparison with HDDs.

And it's not only about loading a few seconds faster. I already posted my list of issues.

Spinning drives are S L O W.

I can double this with a 2.5" SSD over USB-3. Internally, it does about 500MB/s, as nkarafo mentioned.

Actually, over USB-3, this PNY XLR8 480gb 2.5" SSD does 429MB/s That's probably about the same as internal SATA speeds.

sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdd

/dev/sdd:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1288 MB in  3.00 seconds = 429.30 MB/sec