TOP 5 affordable and bulky SSD as an alternative to a hard drive

The Kingston A400 is one of the cheapest SSDs you can find on the market. Naturally, this fact left an imprint on the production of the drive and a potential buyer will have to come to terms with some nuances in the work.

Unlike its predecessor, the UV400 drive, the updated A400 uses a Phison PS3111-S11 instead of a Marvell controller. On the one hand, this gave full compatibility with Apple laptops. On the other hand, due to the limited cache (only 32 MB), the A400 can simultaneously process fewer small files than its competitors. The record IOPS indicator is only 35 thousand, against the standard 50 - 60 thousand. And the SLC array of the A400, like other SSDs on the Phison S11, is limited to 8 GB, so when copying large files like 1080p movies and game images, the speed will sag from the declared 450 MB / s to 140 - 150 MB / s. The reading speed is consistently high, which is kept at a consistently high rate of 500 MB / s.

Given all of the above, first of all, we would recommend this model for undemanding users who want to get the basic benefits of moving from HDD to SSD: low file access time, high speed of loading programs and the operating system. If the system requirements are high, then it would be better to pay extra for a conditional Samsung Evo 860.

Due to the combination of low price and high quality manufacturing , Patriot SSDs are in high demand among low-cost-conscious users. In 2019, the company decided to update its lineup and, in addition to the popular Burst model, released a new low-cost SSD based on 3D NAND TLC memory and a Silicon Motion SM2258XT controller.

The novelty stands out for its record-breaking low dollar per gigabyte, good speed performance (460 MB / s for writing, 530 MB / s for reading), comfortable operating temperature under load (no more than 40 ° C) and competent work of SLC caching. By the way, the capacity of the SLC cache is about 35%, and the speed during long-term copying of large files drops to 240 MB / s, and not 70 - 100 MB / s, like some other models. If we compare the new product with its predecessor in the person of Burst, then it has a 30% increase in the total number of I / O operations per second (90 thousand IOPS versus 60 when reading, and 80 thousand IOPS versus 60 while writing), but at the same time, the resource of work is failure dropped to 320 TB. Although, even in this case, this is one of the highest rates among all low-cost SSDs.

As a result, for relatively little money, you will get a large solid-state drive that is suitable for installing the OS, necessary programs, several large games and a small multimedia library. This is really a great option for replacing the HDD, and the SLC cache is not a hindrance in this case.

ADATA seems to have followed in the footsteps of Corsair 's multi-stationers and has been releasing dozens of drives of various classes and types in recent years. On the company's website, you can now find almost two dozen diverse SSDs, which allows you to respect the brand's products.

Specifically, the A-Data SU650 model is a rather interesting option for a low-cost SSD with excellent value for money. This drive uses the proven low-cost Silicon Motion SM2258XT controller, which boasts TLC direct write mode, low heat and affordable price. The amount of 3D TLC NAND memory is 480 GB.

According to the passport, the drive provides a write speed of 450 MB / s and a read speed of up to 520 MB / s. Pretty good for a $55 price tag. If we forget about the price tag and look for cons, then perhaps the only weakness of the disk will be the low reading speed of 4K blocks of 20 thousand IOPS. Because of this, the speed will decrease when copying archives and various kinds of databases consisting of many small files.

For the past year and a half, the Crucial BX500 has consistently been in the top 5 best-selling SSD drives in 90% of all online stores. Thanks here it is worth saying a combination of high speed, reliability and low price - it is actually sold at the price of Chinese SSDs from little-known brands. Only unlike them, Crucial is a subsidiary of Micron, so it values its reputation and takes quality control seriously. True, this applies more to the 120 and 240 GB options. For some reason, the price of 480 GB turns out to be slightly higher, and, accordingly, there are more competitors.

According to the manufacturer, the main emphasis in the production of the BX500 was on performance. So, according to the passport, the “straightforward” write and read speed is not at all the budgetary 500 and 540 MB / s. What is even cooler, the real indicators were not only not lower, but also slightly higher than the passport ones. For example, the popular benchmark Crystal Disk Info shows 499 MB / s for linear writes and all 560 MB / s for reading files.

However, it's too early to get excited. The engineers of the American company had to slightly cut off the fat for the sake of a tasty price tag, and they sacrificed the low-cost single-core controller SM2258XT, which is devoid of buffer RAM. Therefore, streaming recording and, in general, active write operations are not the forte of this model. When copying a large number of files of different sizes, the recording speed drops quite quickly and then fluctuates between 125 - 366 Mb / s. If you don’t have the task of driving 30-40 GB back and forth every day, then you can safely take it.

For a long time, the Evo 850 drive from Samsung was considered almost the benchmark of a solid state drive. By the onset of a new round of price wars, the company approached fully armed and launched the ideological heir to the 860 EVO, which became a little cheaper and got rid of most of the ancestor's shortcomings.

Firstly, the declared write resource in the new drives has doubled, which is perfectly combined with the high practical endurance of the Samsung TLC 3D V-NAND and allows you not to lose the warranty with fairly intensive use of the SSD. At the same time, the warranty here is 5 years, and not 3 like most inexpensive SSDs. Secondly, 64-layer 3D TLC NAND with doubled capacity crystals provides approximately 20 percent more storage density. Thirdly, problems with the TRIM command in Linux OS have disappeared. With all this, a high read / write speed and a high IOPS, which indicates the total number of input / output operations per second, have been preserved. And the speed drawdown when copying large amounts of data is 15 - 20% lower than most inexpensive SSDs.

All this leads us to the following conclusion: from the point of view of an ordinary user who is unlikely to need to “drive” hundreds of gigabytes of data there daily, clogging the SLC cache, the performance of the Samsung 860 EVO is enough for the eyes. If we talk about options for 1 TB and more, then thanks to the parallelism of flash memory arrays, we get faster performance than the 850 EVO in absolutely all scenarios. In other words, it is very difficult to claim performance of the 860 EVO.