The date of manufacture tells very little. Even newer is not better with ssds since newer tlc memory and smaller process nodes have a shorter lifespan.

The big difference is that the Intel 520 is using a sandforce controller and has had issues with it int the past. Liteon is using newer 19nm nand and is faster in sequential writes with incompressible data.

Any recommendations for a cheaper ssd? Looking at Liteon Mu series 256Gb for RM359, S900 for RM380, Transcend 370, Adata SP610.

Thats just the theoretical maximum using the highest capacity SSD of the product line like 1Tb ssds. The 128Gb hyperx will not touch the advertised 500Mb/s speed. For a small cheap drive the v300 is fine.

The 120Gb Fury is still way faster than a harddisk even a raptor. So its worth getting if game loading times are too long on a harddisk. Get the Fury over the v300 since its faster the price difference is slight.

It depends. If you going to be writing alot, the hyper-x savage would be the better choice (>300Tbw vs 75Tbw for 250Gb) because the spec'd write endurance is 4x better. For light usage the 850evo has a longer warranty.

The SSDplus is using TLC not MLC. The performance of the newer cheap TLC drives are all quite poor, around the level or abit above the BX200. Sustained file transfers on those TLC drives will slow down alot once the small write cache is filled up, then it will be slower than a harddisk. But it should be ok for the usual lyn gamer pc.

The PNY CS1311, Adata SP550, Kingston UV400, Sandisk ssdplus, Sony SLW-M are current low end tlc drives. I think the ssdplus model is the slowest of the bunch, the CS1311 the fastest but disk sizes also matter.



See the BX200 and the 120Gb CS1311 being slower in sequential transfers compared to a 7200rpm harddisk and the older Sandisk Ultra ii tlc drive.

http://www.legitreviews.com/kingston-uv400...d-review_182149
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10234/the-pn...s-tlc-at-15nm/7
http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/pn...w-120gb480gb/5/

Some of the bigger brands like Samsung, Sandisk, Intel, Toshiba have access to better nand. Generally the drives using mlc have better durability and performance since tlc is a step backwards when looking at the specs for endurance.

Not true. Harddisks now have automatic head parking technology for at least a decade and therefore will probably have less issues with power failures compared to ssds. Consumer SSDs without power loss protection are more susceptible to extreme data loss/corruption during power failures unlike harddisks unless the user has a UPS.

TLC was just starting to be common years ago, its now the most common nand for consumer ssds.

Casual users who just use their pc's for playing videos and games probably won't notice the drawbacks of tlc. Degraded read speeds from voltage drift is a general problem and there is no real fix except for brute force data overwrites on a regular basis through the firmware which will reduce endurance. Having to rely on more advanced data error correction codes also reduces read speed significantly. There hasn't been much interest in investigating this issue by more mainstream reviewers but someone has documented the heavy drop in read speeds for the BX200 and he mentions the SP550 also has similar issues.
https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=117557

The S900 isn't a plextor just because it just happened to use the same components at the time of the review. The Liteon model could switch to cheaper nand depending on market prices for memory unlike Plextor which is a more premium brand and probably have higher quality specs.

No. Ssd's can hard brick after a power failure if the FTA table gets corrupted due to power loss, even if it is rare which isn't the case with disks even it is mechanical because of what I talked about.
Current cheaper ssd which cut more corners may be even more susceptible to power loss failures.

That doesn't make any sense. Ssds are supposed to be fast otherwise there wouldn't be a point paying the same amount for about 1000 times less storage capacity.

Then you have no idea about what I'm talking about. This is an issue about tlc voltage drift which affect performance in a very short time. Especially when you say that your only experience and knowledge about tlc is with Samsung's v-nand drives.

The 840evo has a 2nd firmware update since the first fix wasn't successful. The 2nd fix is basically a brute force fix by overwriting the same data on the spot alot more frequently to stop performance degradation.

Yes you get it. We are getting a lower quality product for the same price point.

It looks ok. For a home user the 4k random read/write speed is more important than sequential benchmarks.
Results of a 480Gb UV400:

The 4k read/write sucks badly for this TLC ssd.

I found that TLC ssds will usually fail to complete (0Mb/s) the copy-benchmark in AS-benchmark utility which matches up with real world experience; with larger programs/games, the installation process can take very long in comparison with MLC type ssds.
https://www.techspot.com/downloads/6014-as-...-benchmark.html
Try the copy benchmark and see if it works properly.