SanDisk Announces Z410 Client SSD

by Billy Tallis on 4/27/2016 5:05 PM EST
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  • 8steve8 - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link

    non-PCIe SSDs are not interesting anymore, are they?
  • ragenalien - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link

    They are becoming interesting as storage drives. The new 3d-nand from micron should lower prices further, evidenced by the first ssd coming (branded by crucial). It should be around $200 for a 750gb drive. I paid more than that for my 256gb 840 pro when it was first released. That should put TB drives cheaper than ever and finally start edging out mechanical drives.
  • close - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    They are no longer *exciting*. But they are becoming more and more interesting as price per GB decreases and they are more tempting.
  • Michael Bay - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    I wish there was something other than 850evo to consider in >1Gb space, or for it to get lower in price, but the segment is just not that interesting to manufacturers.
    Last rust spinner in my computer!
  • Michael Bay - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    >1Tb of course.
  • junky77 - Friday, April 29, 2016 - link

    Mushkin reactor is pretty nice, no?
  • Michael Bay - Sunday, May 1, 2016 - link

    It`s not yet there, and will go for about 500$, which is quite expensive for my tastes.
  • hlmcompany - Monday, May 2, 2016 - link

    There is, the SanDisk X400.
  • Michael Bay - Monday, May 2, 2016 - link

    >1Tb
    I already use Ultra II and it`s pretty good, but to remove spinning rust completely I`ll need a 2Tb drive.
  • nightbringer57 - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    They are no longer exciting. But to the average customer, and even to the enthusiast, they offer 90% of the apparent performance of pci-express SSDs, and SATA SSDs are still closer to pci-e SSDs than closer to hard drives (in apparent performances)
  • bug77 - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    Interesting to read such opinions even on Anandtech. It means marketing is doing its job.
    PCIe offers nothing to SSD, but higher sequential speeds (it's not the interface's fault, but a limitation of the memory itself and of the controllers used today). Random read/write is the same as for SATA drives. You'd benefit from a PCIe SSD if you are into video editing or something similar, but you couldn't tell it apart from a SATA SSD under typical home usage.
    Oh and PCIe has higher idle power draw than SATA.
  • close - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    The problem with SATA is actually AHCI. It was designed for spinning disks and as such it's not optimal for SSDs. And the real benefit of PCIe SSDs is not really the PCIe interface, it's NVMe.
  • bug77 - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    How can there be a problem with AHCI, when both AHCI and NVMe give you the same performance?
    Sure AHCI is older and sure you can think of a scenario where AHCI would become a bottleneck. But that's not the case today. Today the bottleneck is the flash memory and the controllers.
  • Samus - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    An 8 channel controller can easily saturate PCIe 1x let alone SATA 3. Most NAND is good for 200MB/sec, performance NAND is good for double that.

    Even 4 channel controllers are held back by the SATA interface and AHCI command set. I agree that the bottleneck isn't entirely noticeable from SATA to an NVMe PCIe drive, but it is when doing sequential transfers, in the order of 3x in some cases.

    The problem isn't the NAND or controllers, it's the interface and command set. The NAND itself has been restricted by SATA 3 for years and we've had mainstream PCIe controllers since 2014. Basically "peak" performance on SATA was hit in 2012 with many Sandforce SF2200 drives. Every drive since has had to focus on queue depth performance and consistency.

    This is what people mean by "boring" because a 4 year old SSD isn't much different from today's SATA SSD in real world performance.
  • close - Friday, April 29, 2016 - link

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVM_Express#Comparis...

    Just a rough overview of the differences. If AHCI were good enough for SSDs nobody would have bothered to develop "Non-Volatile Memory" Express (or NVMHCI).
    Peak throughput doesn't really say much unless you're in the business of moving huge chunks of data between two SSDs or benchmarking. It's only when you throw some real life scenarios at them that you really start to appreciate NVMe.
  • Magichands8 - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link

    There is precisely zero chance that I would buy any SSD still hobbled by SATA at this point. There is also precisely zero chance that I would buy an SSD with such low capacity at such a high price.
  • aznronin - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link

    SATA SSDs are perfect for the media industry though, SATA 3 is more than fast enough for 4K and high fps 1080p at 4:2:2. Not sure about 4:4:4 though. What's the price on this thing? I didn't see it in the article or the sandisk site.
  • Magichands8 - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link

    Neither did I. And yet, I already knew that it would be too high for me. I'm not going to be interested much until I start seeing around 10 cents per GB.
  • close - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    And yet even a $50 SATA SSD can breath new life into an old computer. Most people would not rather endure the "shitty" performance a mechanical HDD has to offer when a simple SSD upgrade can fix it.
  • Michael Bay - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    Hear hear. I`m writing this from five-year old Thinkpad with a deadbeat i3-380UM(even Atoms are twice as fast now). Cheap Kingston SSD made it live again.
  • DCide - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link

    Exactly - there are so many cases where SATA SSDs are still a great fit - plus some top PCIe models tend to overheat after a paltry minute or so of constant activity! On top of that, they can be tricky to set up as boot drives. And how many motherboards allow 3 M.2 PCIe drives? And ... and ... and ...
  • beginner99 - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    Exactly. Last 5 years it was SATA SSD with OS + HDDs for games and media. Soon ti will be PCIe SSD for OS and SSD for games and media. HDDs still have a niche as backup.
  • bug77 - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    As I often say: storage tape drives are with us (sort of), even today. It's unrealistic to think HDDs will go the way of the dodo soon.
    It doesn't mean I'm not eager to be able to replace my 3.5TB storage with SSD, it means HDDs will most likely carve themselves a niche somewhere.
  • Michael Bay - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    If WD and Seagate are to be believed, we`ll have something approaching 16-20Tb in 2020. Perfect for storing media.
  • SunLord - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link

    That understandable if your building a new system but upgrading an existing system doesn't always offer the choice of using pci-e storage. While pci-e is nice as a boot/system drive option it's not really necessary for storage drives which sata more then fast enough for be it ssd or hdd for the vast majority of end users.
  • Lolimaster - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link

    Unless you work moving tons of data or video editing, there's no difference between 500MB/s and 2GB/s.

    Even with the NVME + pcie the improvement in most important parts (4k random and access time are pretty much unchanged). The next big improvemente for those thing will be 3D-Xpoint.
  • Notmyusualid - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    Come on, SATA ain't going away any time soon.

    There are many of us with systems unable to accept a PCIe-based drive, like myself.

    And otherwise my system if perfect, so I ain't gonna change it to get faster storage.

    But my next laptop will certainly support it....
  • damianrobertjones - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    I run a few VMs on a nice 850 SSD and, one of them, has Videostudio installed. I have no issues.
  • Samus - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    These are good for the rust spinner upgrades, older laptops, kiosks, and refurbs. You wouldn't but an X or Z series Sandisk in a new PC, there are clearly better drives available for pennies more.

    I am still avoiding this TLC gravy train like the plague. The drives aren't much cheaper and the cons are ridiculous.
  • maofthun - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link

    I thought the Z400s is MLC, not TLC
  • BurntMyBacon - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    @maofthun: "I thought the Z400s is MLC, not TLC"

    Pretty bad endurance rating for MLC. I think I'll pass.
  • ghanz - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    @maofthun: I think you are right. Apparently it's 15nm MLC. I may be wrong but I don't think the Silicon Motion SM2246XT works with TLC NAND.

    Z400s press release on Anandtech
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/9279/sandisk-release...
  • iwod - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    You can get pretty decent performance from SSD drive now, it is now trying to get higher capacity and lower price. Much like 64Gb is fade out, once 256GB overtake 128GB drive as basement we should see the final adoption of SSD.

    Although I dont know what is required for this to happen.
  • BurntMyBacon - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link

    @iwod: "You can get pretty decent performance from SSD drive now, it is now trying to get higher capacity and lower price."

    This is where the focus should be for the moment. However, I'm hesitant to purchase a drive based on flash with sub 2xnm feature size and TLC. I get that error correction has come a long way, but expecting errors as routine and relying on correction for normal operations does not inspire confidence. I'm all for cheaper SSD storage. I'll even sacrifice some performance to get there (as long as I have the option to spend up for more performance). However, I don't think sacrificing reliability is the way to get there. There is still plenty of potential in 3D-NAND and competition is just now starting in this space.
  • SSDlight - Friday, June 10, 2016 - link

    Should we be using SSD wo/DRAM? Seems Dram-Less SSD are beginning to enter the market. This SanDisk z410 and SanDisk SSD Plus seems to be the same exact product and just recently got ripped at tweaktown as the worst SSD ever. This could be JMicron all over again. Hope anandtech will test this drive and other dram-less drives entering the market. Thoughts?

    Tweaktown Quote
    "What we got from the all-plastic enclosed SSD Plus and Z410, was metaphorically speaking all-plastic performance."

    http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7726/sandisk-ssd-...

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