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movax
Aug 30, 2008

Looks like a solid 'meh'... interesting to see AnandTech toss in the PM1725 though! I have one intended to my D:\ drive for games and such because... 6.4 TB of fast storage in a U.2 is nice and dense. Didn't realize how poorly it fared compared to some of the smaller drives.

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sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Didn't we already learn that the Rocket 4.0 Plus is faster than the 980 Pro, at least theoretically?

VorpalFish
Mar 22, 2007
reasonably awesometm

At least on paper they're claiming higher peak sequential transfer rates. Doesn't necessarily mean much of anything though.

Pricing is the more interesting thing I think. Samsung seems to like charging like 50% more regardless of whether they have the best performance.

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Samsung costs more generally, but they do have the smaller 250GB option while most of the others start at 500.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Pro models always had a large markup vs. Evo/Evo Plus models, but Samsung also has a general "people remember we used to be the best SSD so we just charge more for the same poo poo" thing going on top of that.

FuturePastNow posted:

Samsung costs more generally, but they do have the smaller 250GB option while most of the others start at 500.

I'm not sure why anybody would want a 250 GB SSD in 2020. That made sense when every SSD was like $1/GB, but now?

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002

by Fluffdaddy
I was playing with an old 120GB Samsung 840 (non evo). drat those things are slow. I don't know if it got worse over the years but man, not great right now.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

sean10mm posted:

I'm not sure why anybody would want a 250 GB SSD in 2020. That made sense when every SSD was like $1/GB, but now?

They're useful as cache drives. My NAS doesn't really have enough different use patterns to fill even a 100GB cache drive, so if I can save $40 by getting a 250 instead of a 500, cool.

That said I wouldn't get a 250GB Samsung because I can get a 250GB ADATA for even less, so....

Maybe they have OEM deals, where the real point of a 250GB drive is to get you to spend $200 to upgrade to a 500?

Palladium
May 8, 2012

Very Good
✔️✔️✔️✔️

sean10mm posted:

I'm not sure why anybody would want a 250 GB SSD in 2020. That made sense when every SSD was like $1/GB, but now?

In this age of overkill SSD performance, $90 for 250GB SSD is a complete joke, especially when the 4K random performance is so meh.

Mindblast
Jun 28, 2006

Moving at the speed of death.


I have a second nvme m2 slot on the mb that I'm looking to fill up as a second drive for games. Are the 2tb intel p-series drives decent for this?

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Mindblast posted:

I have a second nvme m2 slot on the mb that I'm looking to fill up as a second drive for games. Are the 2tb intel p-series drives decent for this?

yup

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
im putting together a b550 build. I want some help picking a 1tb nvme. Looking at specs they all seem pretty fast at sequential read which as i understand it doesnt really indicate gaming performance.
My budget is around $200 so the sabrent rocket 4 and 970 evo are both options. Is there anything better to look at?

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Fauxtool posted:

im putting together a b550 build. I want some help picking a 1tb nvme. Looking at specs they all seem pretty fast at sequential read which as i understand it doesnt really indicate gaming performance.
My budget is around $200 so the sabrent rocket 4 and 970 evo are both options. Is there anything better to look at?

https://smile.amazon.com/XPG-SX8200-Gen3x4-3000MB-ASX8200PNP-1TT-C/ $115 after coupon for a long-time thread favorite. It may not be the flat-out fastest drive anymore, but you'll never notice that in games these days. IIRC it's also actually faster than the 970 Evo in some cases. If you're price-sensitive, the extra $60 or so for the Sabrent is unlikely to be worth it.

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

DrDork posted:

https://smile.amazon.com/XPG-SX8200-Gen3x4-3000MB-ASX8200PNP-1TT-C/ $115 after coupon for a long-time thread favorite. It may not be the flat-out fastest drive anymore, but you'll never notice that in games these days. IIRC it's also actually faster than the 970 Evo in some cases. If you're price-sensitive, the extra $60 or so for the Sabrent is unlikely to be worth it.

I have that in my laptop and its great. At that price I might as well spend the extra $20 and get the 2tb.

Struensee
Nov 9, 2011
I've just noticed that M.2 slot SSD's are way down in price from when I bought my samsung 850 EVO MZ-75E50 which I think is on a SATA connection. I'm looking to upgrade to 1 or 2 TB storage on my M2 slot. What are the thread reccomendations?

My mobo is an MSI Z370A Pro. Looks like PCI-E 3.0 x4

Struensee fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Sep 29, 2020

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week

Struensee posted:

I've just noticed that M.2 slot SSD's are way down in price from when I bought my samsung 850 EVO MZ-75E50 which I think is on a SATA connection. I'm looking to upgrade to 1 or 2 TB storage on my M2 slot. What are the thread reccomendations?

For a desktop apps & games user: the WD SN550 in 1TB size, and the Adata XPG SX8200 or HP EX950 in 2TB.

For someone has higher performance storage needs (databases, ML, high-end video editing, etc): the SN550 is dramless which is a negative for more intense workloads. In which case you should get the Adata, HP, or a WD SN750 at 1TB.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
SK Hynix P31 gold looks really good too.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Klyith posted:

For someone has higher performance storage needs (databases, ML, high-end video editing, etc): the SN550 is dramless which is a negative for more intense workloads. In which case you should get the Adata, HP, or a WD SN750 at 1TB.

DRAMless drives also shouldn't be used for an OS drive, if that's what you mean by "upgrading" your drive. So go ADATA or HP for your OS drive, SN550 is fine if you're using it as a secondary / gaming drive.

Struensee
Nov 9, 2011
Thank you!

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week

DrDork posted:

DRAMless drives also shouldn't be used for an OS drive, if that's what you mean by "upgrading" your drive. So go ADATA or HP for your OS drive, SN550 is fine if you're using it as a secondary / gaming drive.

I used to have that opinion too, but after reading some more in-depth stuff about it the dram on NVMe drives is really not that important for average desktop user performance. It's not a R/W cache like a HDD, in SSDs the dram is important because it stores the nand mapping table. NVMe drives can omit the DRAM because the NVMe spec has an option for host memory buffer -- the drive grabs a chunk of system memory and can directly manage it through DMA. PCIe is fast enough that this isn't a major loss though it's slower than on-board, plus large drives don't get enough to store a complete map.

Dram has major benefits in workloads that are some combo of write-heavy, highly random, and high IOps. The more read-focused, sequential, and predictable the job is, the less of a penalty it is. The average PC user of desktop apps, internet, and video games is very much in the latter category.

I'm still negative about QLC as a main drive for this type of enthusiast, because the drawbacks when you fill the drive are pretty major and I've seen way too many people with full drives. They're more ok for non-gamers, because games are the main thing that's expanding to fill every more drive space these days.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Klyith posted:

I used to have that opinion too, but after reading some more in-depth stuff about it the dram on NVMe drives is really not that important for average desktop user performance.

You're right that it's not a night and day difference, but given that DRAM vs not is usually like a $10 difference, it seems like a worthwhile grab unless you're very price sensitive.

With you 100% about QLC, though, unless people are buying it on the grounds that they can get a considerably larger drive for the price and then just format it for 90% of the size to avoid the fill issues. Depending on prices at the time, it's possible to still come out ahead in size-for-your-dollar.

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week

DrDork posted:

You're right that it's not a night and day difference, but given that DRAM vs not is usually like a $10 difference, it seems like a worthwhile grab unless you're very price sensitive.
Dunno if you've seen prices recently but WD has been very aggressive with pricing for the SN550. It's $20-30 less than the Adata SX8200 / HP EX950 most of the time, which is real money especially as a % increase in cost. There's an in-between option of the Inland Premium, which has dram but not as fast a controller as the adata/HP.

quote:

With you 100% about QLC, though, unless people are buying it on the grounds that they can get a considerably larger drive for the price and then just format it for 90% of the size to avoid the fill issues. Depending on prices at the time, it's possible to still come out ahead in size-for-your-dollar.
Yeah when intel was selling the 660P cheap it was like, buying one and short-stroking it was ahead on GB/$. But they're not undercutting TLC drives that mush these days. That may come back into play with PCIe 4 drives, though honestly I'd still rather just have the PCIe 4 QLC drive as a dedicated games dump and have a smaller TLC OS drive.

fletcher
Jun 27, 2003

ken park is my favorite movie

Cybernetic Crumb
How should I go about wiping a 850 EVO and 840 EVO before selling them? I see the Samsung Magician software lists support for the 850 but not the 840

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

fletcher posted:

How should I go about wiping a 850 EVO and 840 EVO before selling them? I see the Samsung Magician software lists support for the 850 but not the 840

Copy a folder of MP3’s or something to it

Keep making copies of that folder until drive is full

Then format the drive

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week

fletcher posted:

How should I go about wiping a 850 EVO and 840 EVO before selling them? I see the Samsung Magician software lists support for the 850 but not the 840

I think it'll still do the 840. The secure erase tool makes a bootable USB stick, as you can't do the ATA secure erase from inside windows.

And yes, ata secure erase as done by the samsung tool, or linux hdparm, is the best / fastest way to wipe a SSD. Overwriting the drive the way old-school HDD utils did, or filling the drive with mp3s like Bob suggests, is not 100% secure on a SSD. (Though it's good enough for most purposes.)

The great thing about secure erase is that on SSDs it's real fast, while writing zeros / copying mp3s takes a while even at SSD speed.

fletcher
Jun 27, 2003

ken park is my favorite movie

Cybernetic Crumb

Klyith posted:

I think it'll still do the 840. The secure erase tool makes a bootable USB stick, as you can't do the ATA secure erase from inside windows.

And yes, ata secure erase as done by the samsung tool, or linux hdparm, is the best / fastest way to wipe a SSD. Overwriting the drive the way old-school HDD utils did, or filling the drive with mp3s like Bob suggests, is not 100% secure on a SSD. (Though it's good enough for most purposes.)

The great thing about secure erase is that on SSDs it's real fast, while writing zeros / copying mp3s takes a while even at SSD speed.

Hey it worked! Only took a few seconds to run. How is it so fast?? I had to enable the Compatibility Support Module on my motherboard in order to boot from the USB drive that Samsung Magician created.

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009



Secure erasing an SSD is extremely fast because it actually just needs to wipe some bookkeeping data about how the actual data is stored. This actually includes an encryption key, because encryption is a good way to make sure the bit patterns appear as random noise, and flash memory cells are work better (in some way) when storing "noise". Without that encryption key, recovering data from the flash memory is effectively impossible.

endlessmonotony
Nov 4, 2009

by Fritz the Horse

nielsm posted:

Secure erasing an SSD is extremely fast because it actually just needs to wipe some bookkeeping data about how the actual data is stored. This actually includes an encryption key, because encryption is a good way to make sure the bit patterns appear as random noise, and flash memory cells are work better (in some way) when storing "noise". Without that encryption key, recovering data from the flash memory is effectively impossible.

Except for some devices...

... didn't the list of devices include the 840?

Filling the device with effectively random data improves your chances of not getting owned a lot.

BobHoward
Feb 13, 2012

The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull
There is another option for surprisingly fast ATA Secure Erase, and it's literally erasing everything. When the SSD's controller does this, it doesn't have to actually write or move any data. Instead, it sends block erase commands to its NAND chips. A block is a large subsection of a NAND chip (on the order of megabytes iirc). The chip closes a single switch which connects all cells in the block to a high voltage source, erasing them.

Since every memory cell in the block gets erased in parallel, block erase is massively higher throughput than reading or writing data, which are serial operations. There's still a form of serialization in that each plane of a NAND flash die can probably only erase one block at a time, but there aren't that many blocks to erase since the blocks are so huge.

I've secure erased both 840 Pro and 850 Pro drives, and based on what I observed, Samsung used the actually-erase-everything approach on 840 Pro, but switched to encryption key destruction on 850 Pro. A 256GB 840 Pro takes about 20 seconds to perform a Secure Erase, and if you do before-and-after SMART data dumps, you can see that it advances the drive's wear by one entire drive write. A 256GB 850 Pro takes maybe 2 seconds, with next to no wear.

(I don't know what a plain 840 does, didn't have any of those to test.)

True erase is better from a security standpoint because the data is actually wiped. Destroying the encryption key is fast, but leaves you vulnerable to unlikely but possible events, like somebody cracking the drive's encryption algorithm or implementation.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

BobHoward posted:

True erase is better from a security standpoint because the data is actually wiped. Destroying the encryption key is fast, but leaves you vulnerable to unlikely but possible events, like somebody cracking the drive's encryption algorithm or implementation.

If a nation-state is interested in your data, you probably just want to shred the drive and not resell it on eBay to begin with.

Subjunctive
Sep 12, 2006

✨sparkle and shine✨

nielsm posted:

Secure erasing an SSD is extremely fast because it actually just needs to wipe some bookkeeping data about how the actual data is stored.

My understanding is that Secure Erase actually zeroes (or 0xFFs) the cells, as described here:

https://superuser.com/a/936360

The excerpt from Samsung’s FAQ:

quote:

Secure Erase permanently destroys all data stored on the SSD by erasing the data in all cells (by changing them to FF status).

In addition, Secure Erase provides a way to reset the SSD to its factory default state if there is a problem with the performance or operation of the SSD.

Malcolm XML
Aug 8, 2009

I always knew it would end like this.
debating making an all flash array off of micron 5210 ion's

8tb for $900 * 6 = 48TB at 3GB/sec over ethernet

should be good enough I guess

endlessmonotony
Nov 4, 2009

by Fritz the Horse

DrDork posted:

If a nation-state is interested in your data, you probably just want to shred the drive and not resell it on eBay to begin with.

Ah, yes, what a good argument to make about drives like 840 and 850 that have massive publicly known encryption flaws.

fletcher
Jun 27, 2003

ken park is my favorite movie

Cybernetic Crumb

endlessmonotony posted:

Except for some devices...

... didn't the list of devices include the 840?

Filling the device with effectively random data improves your chances of not getting owned a lot.

I figured since Samsung Magician listed the 840 in the app and let me select it for secure erase then it was supported?

After the secure erase it showed up as an unformatted drive in Windows, so at least that part seemed like it made it work.

endlessmonotony
Nov 4, 2009

by Fritz the Horse

fletcher posted:

I figured since Samsung Magician listed the 840 in the app and let me select it for secure erase then it was supported?

After the secure erase it showed up as an unformatted drive in Windows, so at least that part seemed like it made it work.

I wouldn't trust secure erase further than I can throw the drive with 840 and 850. Those things are security disasters.

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week

endlessmonotony posted:

Ah, yes, what a good argument to make about drives like 840 and 850 that have massive publicly known encryption flaws.

The secure erase isn't affected by that though.

The encryption flaw is that the key is not adequately protected and, with sophisticated equipment, you can extract it from the controller and decrypt the contents. Secure erase deletes the key and generates a new one. No key to extract, no way to recover the old data.

And that's not even considering whether a drive blanks the NAND during the process as well.

Secure erase is more secure than formatting the drive and overwriting it with junk data, because you don't know if all old data got overwritten. SSDs have more internal memory than their listed capacity, so filling your 500GB drive with Cher mp3s leaves 12GB that hasn't been touched.

endlessmonotony
Nov 4, 2009

by Fritz the Horse

Klyith posted:

The secure erase isn't affected by that though.

The encryption flaw is that the key is not adequately protected and, with sophisticated equipment, you can extract it from the controller and decrypt the contents. Secure erase deletes the key and generates a new one. No key to extract, no way to recover the old data.

And that's not even considering whether a drive blanks the NAND during the process as well.

Secure erase is more secure than formatting the drive and overwriting it with junk data, because you don't know if all old data got overwritten. SSDs have more internal memory than their listed capacity, so filling your 500GB drive with Cher mp3s leaves 12GB that hasn't been touched.

Which is why I do both, except with actual random data because gently caress, dd will run in the background without me doing poo poo.

I ain't trusting Samsung to implement poo poo sanely after their repeated failures to do that very thing.

Do not do it with dd unless you know what you're doing though, it can easily wreck flash memory if you're careless.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

endlessmonotony posted:

Ah, yes, what a good argument to make about drives like 840 and 850 that have massive publicly known encryption flaws.

That encryption flaw was specific to their Opal implementation of hardware whole-disk encryption, and turned on the fact that there was no cryptographic binding between the password to unlock the drive and the encryption key. The 840 EVO had an additional vulnerability that also allowed key access via exploiting a portion of the wear-leveling function. No one has actually cracked AES-256.

I mean, yeah, maybe don't sell those drives on eBay with data still fully intact on the assumption that you have whole disk encryption enabled and password-protected and therefore whoever buys it would have to format it before they could use it, so your data is safe.

The encryption flaw doesn't impact the efficacy of deleting the key in the first place, though, with the possible exception of the 840 EVO. Even then you're talking a considerable amount of effort and technical knowledge to attempt recovery. Bob the random eBay drive-buyer isn't gonna bother. Most people considerably overestimate the effort criminals are willing to go through to try to recover your data unless you are being specifically targeted for some reason.

Secure Erase 0xFF is more of a compliance thing in most cases than a meaningful increase in actual security. But it's a one-click option, so there's no real reason not to use it.

Wiggly Wayne DDS
Sep 11, 2010



i'll just note for the thread that sending the secure erase instruction to a hard drive/ssd makes it run its own implementation internally and it will persist after power cycles until it is finished

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


One cannot presume faithful implementation

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Gobbeldygook
May 13, 2009
Hates Native American people and tries to justify their genocides.

Put this racist on ignore immediately!
I bought this SSD from Newegg. I was a bit suspicious that it was $25 less than any other seller, but went for it anyway. I just checked the seller's feedback and they have zero feedback, positive or negative. I'm going to record myself opening the package. Assuming there is an m2 SSD in there, what do I need to do to the SSD to be certain I'm not being scammed somehow, ie it's actually 128gb not 1tb, it's used, etc?

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