Explaining SSDs: The Price/Performance Trade-off 

This man is truly one of the GOAT tech RU-vidrs Thanks for never disappointing, Chris!

These are the aspect of computing that Linus Tech Tips cannot explain. Or if they can, they just gloss over gleefully for the sake of click bait without going in-depth. Good thing we have ExplainingComputers to explain things thoroughly.

This is what I love about this channel, you learn something new every episode. Even if you think you know all there is to know, along comes Chris and says 'Hold my beer...' Top stuff, top creator. Have restful Sunday Chris!

This should be held up as the "Gold Standard" by which all technical explainer videos should be judged. Clear, concise, broad yet detailed coverage of the topic, and lots of "why" mixed in. I tip my hat, sir.

I retired from a nearly 40-year career as a computer and network admin. This has always kept me close to the hardware and how the operating system uses it, especially in the earlier days through the evolution from mainframes and minicomputers to common standards-based ISA and PCI systems with mass produced expansion cards. This particular tutorial is excellent, and has expanded this old dog’s understanding of non-rotating storage devices. I was vaguely aware of the cycle-based limits on lifespan, and now I see the details far more clearly. Thank you..

This should be required viewing for EVERYONE who owns a PC. Mr. Barnatt makes it so simple to understand these concepts!! So many of my computer customers have no clue, and never worry about maintenance of their machine.. all they do is cry when things break and they don't backup. I do my very best to have my best customers watch as many of your instructional videos!! You do more for responsible computing than any youtuber that I have ever seen!! Keep up the great work, and we need to call you DR. BARNATT!!!

This is award winning level education! Thank you Chris for a thorough yet understandable overview of SSD technology. You are an educator extraordinaire! Cheers from Canada!

I once bought a dram-less Sata SSD. Never again. Saving a few coins isn't worth it. Better to buy one with dram.

This is great. Before this video I knew 1) what SSD stands for 2) they wear out 3) they are generally faster than HDDs. Everything else was learning for me. I use an SSD as my system drive but I do store other stuff on there as well so I'll be taking a look at how much it changes and consider wear.

Of course in some laptops like Apple Macbooks, the NAND flash chips are directly soldered to the logic board which means you don't any choice as to upgradeability.

This is by far the best explanation of SSDs I’ve seen. So thank you for that. As a next step, can someone pls create an online spreadsheet for SSDs with columns like Type of NAND (SLC, TLC, QLC) | SLC Cache | Interface | Max expected speed | Measured Max Speed | DRAM-less |. It’ll make buying process so much easier

Well done. Even as someone with 30+ years in IT and therefore tech savvy, albeit rusty as hell for the past few years, this instructional video was easy to absorb and my knowledge for purchasing SSD's is now complete within 15 minutes. Good stuff and you got a subscriber.

Been watching this channel for 5 years and one thing i can say I love about this channel is the very retro, feels like 1987, computer theme song that happens in the opening.

Your ssd explanations are the best on the net.

Thanks for explaining that so clearly Chris. It's very helpful to understand the reasons why certain cheaper ssds might not be as good of a deal as they appear, although for general use they are okay. I have a good quality system nvme drive and a decent larger drive for game storage. I do a little bit of video editing but nothing that requires massive reads/writes. I might see if any good deals pop up before Christmas as drives like the Kingston Fury and Western Digital 850X have been a nice price in recent months. As Samsung recently brought out their 990 Pro drive the 980 Pro has also seen discounts. These cost so much until fairly recently so it's nice to see prices come down. Long may it last! 😁

There is one HUGE negative to D-RAM less drives that Chris didn't mention. They CANNOT be used in external drive enclosures/external drives because they require your pcs RAM to function. I found this out the hard way recently, and it took hours of hair pulling and frustration to figure out WTH was happening. Don't buy D-RAM less drives! The minor savings are not worth it.

I don't know, Chris... SSD's are bulky in size. A 5¼-inch floppy is much more sleek.

Another excellent video, with lots of great information! Here's hoping that SSD size and price will soon be able to compete with HDDs for NAS use. :)

Excellently explained once again. In just under 15 minutes I'm thoroughly and masterfully informed. Life expectancy of SSDs is what really does worry me the most actually. I just don't know what exactly is to expect in terms of practical anticipation defined in years of use. I can see SSDs for starting up the OS but best leaving working data, files and backups on a physical quality platter such as WD, so it seems.

A very thorough and clear explanation. Some time ago when I read EVO 860's slow down when copying a file larger than ~60 GB (I think it was that value) I changed to the Crucial MX500 as that one has a dynamic SLC cache and doesn't appear to slow down.

I think most manufacturers hide most of the info on their SSDs and will only tell you the max read and write speeds and IOPS, and no information about dram or cache or anything 😓

We've come full circle. I subscribed when you last talked about SSD and now, how the landscape has changed.

This was a very useful video Chris. I bought a DRAMless M.2 SSD a couple of years ago to be the system drive in an HP desktop. I knew there were tradeoffs but you explained them well in this video.

Still using the same boot drive 240GB Kingston SSD from 2015 that was slated in reviews on release. Doesn't seem to be any reduction in capacity. A many-times upgraded and updated Windows still up and fully running in

Enjoyed the video. One thing you didn’t talk about with the newer drives is heat. PCIe4 &5 drives generate a lot of it. I tried to use a 4TB WD SN850X in an Orico 10Gbps external enclosure as a backup drive. Over a period of about 30 minutes it overheated and did not throttle, rather it just crashed and needed to be reformatted (MacOS). So best to avoid external enclosures and use these with a heatsink and active airflow.

this is an excellent video dropping legit knowledge on what we use everyday. it’s a refreshing step away from a lot of other youtube pop “tech” channels unboxing buy-this buy-that consumerism videos, which has a time and place… where anyone can open a box but not much knowledge is gained.

I only recently took the plunge and added SSDs to a couple of my computers. They're quicker now. Not crazy fast but definitely snappier.

Clear and concise explanations are why I started watching EC!

Another masterclass from our leading teacher... I've finally understood how the SSD in my DELL laptop behaves during file transfers (the size of the cache memory...). I'm sure many of Christopher's other admirers have gained new knowledge thanks to this update. Definitely material for computer science students! Thank you for this!

I think it's getting close to 10 years since i first started watching your videos Chris. Thankyou so much.

Recently found this channel and he deserves a lot of praise. I came here wanting to learn about DRAM-less, and he definitely covered it. Plus, I learned a couple other things I didn't know about SSDs. The added graphics are really nice. 10/10 channel. Easy upvote from me.

God damn, it's like the fog has cleared. I am now a more savvy consumer. Brilliant!

Sunday Morning Solid EC

Thank you, that was interesting. specifically, the fact that leaving an ssd less than 90% full so it can shuffle data around easier. I already did that because hard disks liked that to prevent fragmentation so it's nice to know that this still holds true but to prevent wear instead.

I've learned modern SSD's HAVE to do internal wear leveling in order to maintain performance. I have a 2TB Samsung EVO that started freezing when doing write operations and even benchmarks showed as low as 100MB sec writes. The drive barely had 5 TBW and only 1/2 capacity was in use. I ran manual windows TRIM operations and nothing helped. After doing lots of research I've learned SSDs do their own internal 'cleanup'. Moving data around and clearing cells to optimize write performance on new operations. It took several weeks and now write speeds are back to normal. Apparently this is all done through the SSD controller and is a 'black box' that we have no control over. This happened after doing a couple hundred GB of write operations. Read speeds were unaffected.

Thank you Chris!

Thanks for more very useful info Chris. It seems that as a rule of thumb in consumer SSDs the TBW figure is roughly half the numerical size of the drive and given should give many years of normal use before failure. Most SSDs also have 3 to 5 year warranties. But as a professional I have seen SSDs fail without warning long before reaching anywhere near their advertised TBW or warranty period. And once they do (unlike with magnetic drives) you can more or less forget about recovering any data from them. Admittedly in the same breath I had a WD 4Tb magnetic drive catastrophically fail two days after buying and partitioning it, and it was completely unrecoverable. So I guess having a good backup strategy is increasingly important these days.

OS running on SSDs has been so much better than disk drives...faster, more reliable, never corrupted or crashed. Disk drives were a constant problem.

Thanks for making sure TBW was in there. It's good to note that TBW is often used to limit warranty (like "1200TBW or 3-years, whichever comes first") but that DOESN'T mean a drive dies when it exceeds rated TBW. It does mean it's less reliable at storing data long-term + power-off. But I have SSDs at 3x their TBW still working with no errors.

You've covered everything one would need to know when in the market for an ssd upgrade or expansion (being already familiar with basics like form factors, etc). Briliantly clear, concise, and devoid of the typical YT faff. Many thanks for your efforts here!

Oh, very good info. Another problem that has occasionally shown up is that if an SSD sits unpowered long enough, it can lose data. So probably not the best choice for long term storage on the shelf.

For someone strongly thinking of getting an SSD for an old HP15, Mac Mini 2012 and my PS5? That was super helpful, truly. Thank you.

Oh look 👀 Chris is in a solid state of excitement driving home his ssd’s!

Thank you for all the hard work you've put in bringing us interesting weekly content. Today I've certainly learnt more about SSD's which I still find quite a fascinating subject, a happy Sunday to you & the crew :)

Have an slc drive in a openbsd firewall and it's been running for over 6 years without issues. But it's not being written to alot. Great explanation!

Great overview. I would add a few things. I prefer to decipher TBW as "Total Bytes Written" rather than Tera Bytes Written for the simple reason that with older drives, manufacturers specified in GB, and now with the big capacity ones we get into PB territory. In the old magnetic platter days, we called the sustained write speed that a drive fell back to once the fast cache is saturated "media speed" and the same concept applies to SSD now, as you explain. A S-ATA III drive with a 6 Gbps (750 MB/s) interface may have a media speed of only 50 MB/s. Especially in the flash memory for high resolution * high speed cameras we see a need for very high media speeds or sustained write speeds. The write speeds on flash memory cards, generally, is burst speed and only valid as long as the cache is not saturated. We also see cards that have higher sustained speeds with increasing capacity and this is not the consequence of more cache - because sustained - but likely something like RAID 0 or dual I/O controller chips inside the card. Over-provisioning - Having worked in enterprise IT, I can add that a way to raise the number of P/E cycles in flash memory devices is to just put more memory in than the user and operating system (host computer) will see. So the usable capacity is what is on the label, but under the hood, for wear levelling, there is, say, 50% more. In the round-robin storage of data in fresh blocks (even after wiping a file from the FAT) the added capacity then results in more P/E cycles or higher TBW. Reduced overprovisioning - we also see capacity numbers now that are outside the standard 2^n (n an integer) numbers. Imagine an SSD that has cheap memory cells but for TBW got 50% more - say it's 512GB on the label but has 256GB overprovisioning - and this SSD is sold for 1.00X. What has happened in recent years is that manufacturers had less complaints about SSD failing too early from consumers, so they shift part of the over-provisioning to usable and label. The 512GB now becomes 640GB with 128GB under the hood and the price now becomes 1.25X - for the same material. The most important most overlooked property of SSD and flash memory is how long data retains integrity when the SSD/card is taken off power. Some cards have data integrity protection and maybe some SSD too. Ask a collective of people with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and quantum physics for a number and you may get 7 to 7,000 hours as an hour. In the light of wear levelling and consumers buying SSD that have low P/E cycles, today's advice to never switch a computer off really makes sense. If you need reliable storage with a high number of P/E cycles (TBW) today, then rather like buying SSD variants, I would buy CFexpress Type B cards from a brand with a very good reputation (such as Delkin Black and Power series). Put these in a Thunderbolt reader/writer and its fast, very fast too.

Now the Samsung 990 PRO 4 TB has been dropped to $299! I bought 4 and made a 16 TB RAID level 0 using the OWC 4M2 Express enclosure . It is a joy! Thanks for this superb article.

Not that this technology existed back then, but I had a flashback to watching Open University as a kid while watching this and I absolutely loved it. Awesome as usual!

And here I thought there was something wrong with the speeds on my new Samsung 970 EVO PLUS SSD as its functioning perfectly normal as demonstrated in this highly informative video. Thanks for the valuable tech lesson Chris! 👍

Chris, I upgraded my SSD to my newly built computer. WD Black NVMe Game Drive 2TB GEN 4 from a Samsung 970 EVO PLUS NVMe 500GB. Corsair 110R Case, Intel Core 12th Gen Inte Core i5-12400, 2500 MHz 6 Core 12 Logical Processor Gigabyte H610M S2H DDR4 H610/Intel LGA 1700/Micro ATX/DDR4/Single M.2/PCie 4.0/USB 3.2 Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 DRAM 3600MHz Desktop Memory Kit. Gen1/Realtek GbE LAN/Motherboard) EVGA 750 GD, 80+ Power supply Thanks for the great content and information on SSDs.

I also noticed that the Custard Pi is far ahead of the Raspberry Pi. I guess not everyone was affected by "supply chain issues."

Excellent job gathering volumes of technical data and presenting it in a short, concise video that the layman can understand!

Excellent video finally I can make sense of all the ssds on sale. Thank you for sharing your knowledge

Thanks for all of the useful information. I still see a large place for physical hard drives, especially for large amount of data that does not need immediate retrieval. I have multiple 10 TB drives and they have been on line for years now with no problems.

One can also buy an enterprise SSD, that will sustain the write speed throughout the whole drive. Also, many of them have a lot more DRAM, like 4gb, absorbing quite quickly more of the OS random write operations (that tend to make a system feel slow if not enough cache is available).

I have a Samsung 980 which is DRAM-less, but it has HMB and in my experience the typical performance is nearly indistinguishable from my Samsung 970 EVO which uses DRAM.

Very good video(short, clear and pretty much all encompassing) except Chris didnt mentioned one aspect of the SDD'd - data retention. All SSD's can retain the data a certain amount of time while not powered, usually around a year, after that it starts to lose the data stored in it. This argument ties well into "No SSD is a permanent data storage" statement at the end of the video.

Love the way you speak and show the examples of the workings. And here we meet again on exciting Sunday 🌞🖥️ Greetings!

Hey Chris. Another great educational video. Even though I have been in the various tech industries for a long time, I still learn something new each time you present what are very relevant subjects.. This tutorial on SSD's is especially relevant, as they seem to change every time I purchase one. I too have always used the old one-two approach to computer storage: SSD's for the operating system, HDD's for data storage. It has always worked well. Thanks for making it clear what to look for when purchasing a new SSD. At least for now! Thanks for all your hard work!

Wonderful. I've kind of picked up a lot of that by reading around over the years, but it is so good to have it all laid out clearly, with good guidance on what matters for which uses. Mostly, for my low intensity uses, it evidently doesn't matter much at all, except that this is one area where bigger really is better.

That was the best lowdown on ssd's i've ever seen or read. Detailed and easy to understand. 👍

I'm going to watch this in full when I get home later.. I'm certain that it will clarify the world of SSDs for me...

My first hard disk was an Apple HD20. 20 Megabytes. Cost about $1200, or more than a 1000 times as much per byte compared to today. Transfer rate of about 60KB/second. And we were perfectly happy.

It would be very interesting to see the computer setup you use as your daily driver, a tour.

No bullshit channel, I love that. Just 1.25x to get rid of awkward silences at the end of the sentences.

Very good, Sir! Now pop down to the local establishment for a well-deserved drink!

An SLC cache serves a useful benefit in data protection on unexpected power loss. The SLC cache can be FIFO do written in a simple loop fashion. Once the data hits the cache it's committed, then the drive can move it to long-term storage at its leisure. If this is interrupted it can just go back through the SLC cache when it's powered up again and recovery anything that hadn't yet been moved to long-term storage. In effect the SLC cache is a huge write journal which includes file data. DRAMless SSDs also benefit in that there's not lots of data in memory that is lost when power is unexpectedly cut. This also makes it easier to recover from such an event, without loss of recent writes.

You explain things so well to the layperson - it’s a talent, I appreciate you.

Thanks for this and all other videos! I always enjoy watching them and learn a lot!

Wow, I never watch any video about SSD that are digestible by my BRAIN. Love your work.

Excellent explainer Chris - I've been banging on about some of this online on forums for ages, now I don't need to bother - I can just link to this video...😁

Chris you are a real treasure. 👏👏👏

Superb update. I'm in the market right now. 4 TB Samsung Qlc for 180€. Incredible. I paid this amount for my very first SSD in 2010. It was 120gb. 40 times the price per GB back then. By the way, this new 870 QLC (the review in video is the 860 model) has a TBW of 2.800, but that is just for the 8TB model. For the 1TB model Samsung states 1.5 Million Hours Reliability (MTBF). Here are the numbers for all sizes from Samsung itself: 360 TBW for 1TB model, 720 TBW for 2TB model, 1,440 TBW for 4TB model, and 2,880 TBW for 8TB model. I am going to use the 4TB as NAS supplement and backup to my new router which has a USB3 port. (Asus ax4200, strongly recommended). So this disk will outlive the TBW limit I'm sure.

wow already sunday"s afternone !! have a good week next all viewers !!!!

Every time a fantastic review of what also we IT technicians must expect from the market... Thanks Christopher, you are the lighthouse in our difficult sailings...

Man the level of explanation, salute.

Good morning from the states I have to say this is one of your best videos in terms of knowledge really liked it...

Well done presentation Chris!

Great video. I think I need to watch it again. I love the subject of storage - and SSDs are of particular interest. I've definitely noticed the "hitting the wall" effect on SSDs. I backup my Hyper=V VHDs to a 4-drive RAID 0 array every week. Some of these VHDs are pretty huge - upwards of 50GB. I get a lot of the files copied into the array pretty fast but then the ultimate crash into the wall occurs. It's kind of fun to watch in the Windows GUI. I used to do this backup using HDDs, which was total agony. It took upwards of an hour and sometimes more to get all the VHDs copied but with the array of SSDs it only takes about 20-minutes for the whole backup routine to execute. SSDs rule.

Fascinating Chris. I wonder what RU-vid uses for storage?

The SLC cells, are actually just using TLC-capable cells for SLC (1-bit). This probably depends (you could have cheaper hardware for just SLC cache) but the vast, vast majority will use random cells as SLC cache for wear leveling.

I have a Kingston SV300S37A60G [SSDnow 60Gb] which I installed in 2015. It's an MLC SSD, with a rated 32 TBW. I use it as a boot/OS drive only, my home directory is on my RAID. Eight years later and it's still going strong, though SMART tells me that the drive has less than half of its remaining life left. I can't really complain about that.

when I saw the title, I thought: yes, I know SSDs. after I saw the video, I now think: okay, I know a lot more about SSDs. which is actually quite nice 🙂

I really needed this video, great timing! TX

I went with a system for buying storage that, at least if I have it right, is somewhat ideal for my situation. I have NVMe for my OS and high end games, lesser games and apps on my SATA SSDs and a hard disk for keeping files that won't be modified and don't require quick access, such as music and video files. I recently retired my second to last hard disk(500GB Samsung from 2012) with a Cruicial MX500 2TB SSD, and am looking to replace my equally old 2TB HD with a more modern HD with 8TB of space. It's amazing to think how much everything has come down in price. When I bought that 2TB HD, it cost more than the 2TB SSD I just bought by some £30, and the 8TB drive I am looking to replace said 2TB HD will cost only a few quid more.

I always consider TBW and DRAM when buying, but I wasn't aware of newer drives ability to access system RAM. I do wonder how the performance differs between the two DRAM methodologies. Thanks, as always, for the clear and concise breakdown of the technology, Chris!

Hi Chris - love your videos. I worked in HDD and SSD storage manufacturing for more years than I care to admit to. A good SSD manufacturer will overprovision the amount of storage on the device and then firmware will declare less than the total to be available to the user - the balance is hidden and used for the wear leveling algorithm in the background, hidden from the user. I wouldn't worry about it filling up your SSD to the brim other than for the usual reasons of never wanting a storage device stuffed. Cheap brand SSDs maybe different and SD cards used on SBC's probably won't use wear leveling at all.

A very succinct, easy to understand explanation.

Fantasticly informational video! Thank you.

Awesome as always Chris - I have always appreciated how you are able to explain very technical concepts in an easily understandable way!

Nicely done. With manufacturers (ahem Samsung) throwing around acronym's like they were candy, you've cut through the technobabble hype and made choosing an appropriate drive easier (even for the lay person). This video should be made mandatory for anyone looking to purchase a SSD drive. i realize this was specifically about SSD drives, a few wise words on the interface's would be helpful, especially on the M.2 format. Perhaps something for the future.

Another great breakdown and explanation, which begs some potential questions. 1. Is there a software utility available that can read all of the relevant information from an SSD for a user to determine exactly what they have, that can be compared with the information given in this video, which could also hopefully include stats of drive usage to allow somebody to gauge how long theirs might realistically last based on their usage to date? 2. When it comes to backups. do we think that mechanical drives still have a long future as more reliable long term back-up devices? 3. How ling can an SSD actually hold onto data, even if it light years away from any normal wear and tear use values? Does it fritter away into the ether if stored away and not used for a long period?

There is so much more to this than I realised. A great explanation. Thank you.

More complications that had escaped my attention until now. It appears that for some applications, though it may be poorly, spinning rust is not totally dead.

I made the mistake of paying extra for the heatsink for M1, not knowing that my motherboard already had one attached. Check first and maybe save some money.

Outstanding video. Very clear as always. Thanks, I never understood the inner workings and why some SSD's seem faster for large writes than others.

Chris does explain computers very well!

Need corection on HMB. 1) Normally Dram cache used for cell translation tables, not data writes 2) Normal Dram cache is 1mb per 1Gb NAND, so its 1GB of Cache for 1 Tb drive. HMB can provide much smaller size, they say its 128Mb on Windows and up to 256 on Linux. 3) Smaller cache do affect performance, but not linear writing (this mostly handled by SLC cache) but random writes and reads since drive cannot contain whole translation table in DRAM.

Thank you for explaining this topic!!

Awesome video. In the real-world for basic computer use, a SATA SSD performs just fine for most of us. This can reduce cost (but with volatile storage prices, that is not always the case).