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  • Teckk - Thursday, July 18, 2019 - link

    I got a Samsung 850 EVO 256 GB SSD ~2 years ago and that was around 100$ at that time. I don't know how it compares to the Samsung drive but wow has the price come down. Samsung EVI 860 is around 60$ now.
  • Teckk - Thursday, July 18, 2019 - link

    Moore's Law is alive and well for storage? The price of SSds will halve every 2 years? (and you'll cry a little inside)
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, July 18, 2019 - link

    I fairly recently purchased a 2.5" SATA 1TB Patriot Burst because the list price was roughly $109 on Amazon. Only time will tell if it will endure, but so far it's been sufficient at not attracting my notice as a performance problem or bottleneck. I'm on the market for another 1TB SSD so given the endurance rating, a P200 is probably going to end up on my list of options given the sub-$90 price.
  • Cullinaire - Thursday, July 18, 2019 - link

    32 bucks? Have we reached the floor of how cheaply SSDs could be sold for? Granted, they have less material overhead compared to mechanical HDDs, but still, wow.
  • eek2121 - Thursday, July 18, 2019 - link

    Not really. Prices could go lower if companies sacrificed performance, reliability, and capacity. You can buy USB sticks for as low as $9.99 for instance.
  • hojnikb - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    Price floor for flash drives is closer to 3$.
  • kaidenshi - Sunday, July 21, 2019 - link

    Yep, and even name brand microSD cards like Samsung and PNY are around $10 or less for 32GB. I thought we'd see the price go up a bit because of the reported shortages, but so far it's been falling steadily.
  • MASSAMKULABOX - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    I think $30 is about as low as they want to go .. possibly they could go lower but the unit profit becomes too low to justify.. they simply drop the lowest capacity eg 60,120,240 . That also works as newer NAND chips are hamstrung when only using one or two rather than four or eight. Glad I'm waiting it out for 1Tb ..prices keep getting lower. YAY.
  • melgross - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    True, but sticks are tiny. There’s not much there. These are much bigger. They have controller chips, which sticks don’t. I think this is about the bottom. A few bucks lower, maybe.
  • hojnikb - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    Actually, you're wrong here. USB flash drives have exactly the same basic components as SSD. You need a nand flash, flash controllers and other passive components (like capacitors, resistors, voltage regulators). The only real difference is that some SSDs also use DRAM (most flash drives don't) and have bit more complex PCBs to accomodate more flash chips.

    But the basic design is the same. Just crack open a typical budget ssd and flash drive and you'll see.
  • hojnikb - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    First; "highend" drive with a jMicron controller ? That must be a first :)

    Also, in my book, Patriot lost all credibility with their drives, when they launched their Blast line of SSDs. Not only they came with defective firmware, that either bricked or froze the drives over time, the information (and firmware files) are completly gone from their website and forums, as the drive never existed.
  • lightningz71 - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    Hmm, that reminds me of a couple of models of EDGE SATA SSD drives. Horribly unreliable. From a lot of 20 that we purchased for our company, all but two failed within 18 months, and the only reason that those two didn't was because they were never actually deployed! The company's website has absolutely no reference to those drives ever having existed, though they were prominently advertised there when they were purchased.
  • ghanz - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    These are most probably DRAM-less Flash controllers (SM2258XT is, not sure about the Maxio MAS0902A).
    Hence the budget prices.
  • ghanz - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    Just confirmed it, both are DRAM-less Flash controllers.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    Good information to know ahead of a purchase. In addition to the performance implications, DRAM can absorb some abuse otherwise passed directly to NAND so I wonder how Patriot is able to go so aggressively on DWPD ratings using what is presumably off-the-shelf TLC.
  • hojnikb - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    DRAM is normally only used for flash translation tables (you can read them much faster from dram than from flash itself) and not much else (data loss implications for one)
  • hojnikb - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    yeah, we deployed like 100 of these blasts, each and every one died within the first few months. Luckly we got replacements for all of them.
  • rocky12345 - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    The prices are great but won't not having a dram buffer hurt performance quite a bit?
  • Rocket321 - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link

    Yes, you lose some performance and also save $10-20 in cost. You can see a review of a SM2258XT drive in the Mushkin Source review on Anandtech.
  • ceisserer - Friday, July 26, 2019 - link

    Too bad Patriot decided to go for the M2258XT - it is a horrible performer for mixed read/write random workload - even the Phison Dram-less S11 is about two times as fast.

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