Interesting article from HTG on how some newer SSD drives may not be suitable for use as a boot drive. QLC (Quad Layer Cache) seems to be the culprit. Manufacturers are cramming more space into the same number of cells at the expense of reliability.
Source: Your Next SSD Might Be Slower (Thanks to QLC Flash)
I wonder if this is a reason why my Kingston 120gb and 240gb SSD's will only transfer with read/write speeds of 250mb/s
Dig around and see if you can find your model's Layering Cache protocol. If it's SLC, probably not, MLC or QLC, good chance. Also, if any SSD is connected via USB 3.0/3.1 it's gonna be limited. SATA III, you'll get full up-to 6MBs.
Really interesting article. Buyer beware, because it depends on what your buying ??? I have a Samsung 860 EVO 500gb drive that I have been using for as needed system drive image backups, but have not noticed any lower performance during M.R. backups. Today that's all its being used for, but I have limited it to only using a maximum of 60% of the drive. In fact all of my SSD drives (Including the OS drive) are never near filled. Could be the reason why I have not seen any bad performance ?
I wonder if those new LARGE Capacity Samsung drives @ low price (the Grey ones) are using that technology ?
@storageman
Well, lo and behold!
"If the only thing stopping you from replacing your primary storage drive with a large capacity SSD is price, keep your eyes peeled for new products from Samsung. The company said it has started mass producing the industry's first 4-bit quad-level cell (QLC) 4TB SSD for consumers, and hinted that 1TB capacities will be more affordable as a result."
Samsung is building new high-capacity SSDs to flood the market with 1TB+ drives | PC Gamer
As soon as I am able to build my new PC, I will be moving to M.2 Drives. Regular SSD's are fine, but I read that M.2's are faster and more reliable.
I don't see any reason not to use QLC for storage in most home user situations. If money were no object, sure, go for SLC or MLC. Price is an object for me.
Price check large capacity (at least 1 TB) NVMe SSDs and see what you can find. QLC is a LOT cheaper at the 2 TB size.
At the 250 GB size, the price difference between the fastest and slowest m2 NVMe drives might be 30 bucks (circa 50 versus circa 80), so maybe you spend the extra 30 on the boot drive.
The Samsung 970 Evo and Evo Plus both use MLC.
I think WD SN750 may use TLC?
Intel 760p is TLC
Intel 660p is QLC
You will see complaints about relatively low TBW (total writes in TB) on QLC drives---but if you write say 10 TB per year, why would you be concerned about a TBW of 200?
I've written an average of under 5 TB per year on my boot drive over the last 3 years. And I write under 3 TB per year to my data drive.
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