Benchmarking Five ~$30 USD Solid-State Drives Under Ubuntu Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Benchmarking Five ~$30 USD Solid-State Drives Under Ubuntu Linux

With falling memory prices, there's multiple solid-state drives available for around the $30 USD price point that offer 240~256GB capacities. Here are benchmarks of five such drives, four of which are SATA 3.0 SSDs and even one NVMe SSD. There are also comparison points to more premium SSD products.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=27956

[schmidtbag]

The Samsungs sure offer a lot of performance for the price.

[stormcrow]

The Samsungs sure offer a lot of performance for the price.

Nothing really surprising in those tests to me. You're basically getting what you're paying for. Cheap SSDs perform like an earlier generation, which is what they are internally. SSDs are always going to be faster on access time than spinning rust. It's still true that spinning rust is cheaper for large amounts of data versus SSDs. That's why many mid range laptops and desktops often have both a SSD + a much larger mechanical HDD. The SSD is meant to house the OS and applications while the HDD holds data where access time isn't as important like people's porn collection. For data operations that performs many repetitive writes, you should use RAM based storage as SSDs will quickly get eaten up by the write/erase cycles.

[schmidtbag]

Nothing really surprising in those tests to me. You're basically getting what you're paying for. Cheap SSDs perform like an earlier generation, which is what they are internally. SSDs are always going to be faster on access time than spinning rust. It's still true that spinning rust is cheaper for large amounts of data versus SSDs. That's why many mid range laptops and desktops often have both a SSD + a much larger mechanical HDD. The SSD is meant to house the OS and applications while the HDD holds data where access time isn't as important like people's porn collection. For data operations that performs many repetitive writes, you should use RAM based storage as SSDs will quickly get eaten up by the write/erase cycles.

Actually I wasn't even talking about the HDDs at all; the Samsungs appear to be substantially faster than the other SSDs tested, despite having a similar price.

[Teggs]

This may be the year to write the obituary for hard drives as devices to put an OS or most programs on. SSDs are a lot smaller, and a lot lighter. The performance was always better than hard drives for many things and the gap has only widened over the years, while the price premium has come down. Bulk data storage, especially of large files, remains HDD territory, but for other desktop/laptop uses... I, for one, welcome our new Solid State overlords (while looking out of the corner of my eye at Optane). :P

[Linuxhippy]

awesome, i 've been waiting for a low-end SSD performance comparison for a long time.
thanks for testing!

[Guest]

I've been using a 240GB SP S56 SSD since early 2018 in my most powerful machine, and I'm glad to see that it should be one of the better cheap SSDs. In general, I know one sysadmin who really likes Silicon Power's SSDs because of their reliability, and mine has been rock solid. The funny thing is how fast prices have plummeted, I paid for mine about $100 back in the day.

Too bad my laptop doesn't have m.2, I would be rocking a 970 Pro if it had a slot.

[elatllat]

The SQL results I did not expect...

[moriel5]

I really want to move over to SSDs (in general, not just for me), however their ridiculously short shelf life deters me from recommending them to most average users (true, if all you do is basic browsing and a little editing via MS Word (not me, I use LibreOffice), you don't really need an SSD, this is more about the power consumption).

I wish that there would be low-end SSDs, even with performance as low as mechanical hard drives (but much lower power draw), but with life expectancy like Intel's Optane series.

[bachchain]

however their ridiculously short shelf life deters me from recommending them to most average users

The average user doesn't leave their primary drive sitting on a shelf for months at a time.

if all you do is basic browsing and a little editing via MS Word (not me, I use LibreOffice), you don't really need an SSD

Nobody needs an SSD. The reason people want SSD's is because they're tired of constantly waiting around for their system to catch up.

I wish that there would be low-end SSDs, even with performance as low as mechanical hard drives (but much lower power draw), but with life expectancy like Intel's Optane series.

You mean SD cards?