Intel SSD 545s Review

[Guest]

Intel's 545s is the first consumer drive with IMFT's new 64-layer 3D NAND. All eyes are on Intel to see if the 545s can run with the 850 EVO.

Intel SSD 545s Review : Read more

 

[hannibal]

Good that other makers Are gaining Samsung! Intel will newer go price war with Samsung because it does not have to. It can always sell a Little bit slover at the same price or even higher, because Intel have very good reputation among users and exspecially corporates. But this means than Sansung does not get everything too easily anymore and other ssd makers will definitely cut down under Samsung, if They just have a chance.
So competition is coming back to SSD Also! Also in higher level not only on very low end.

 

[AgentLozen]

It's a shame that a big, well known company like Intel can't develop an SSD that beats a 2 year old competitor.

What's important to keep in mind is that all modern SSDs are pushing against the SATA bandwidth cap. The benchmarks from this review indicate that every SSD tested performs pretty much the same in real world benchmarks.

The most important variables right now (in SATA drives) are endurance and price. 3D flash memory should provide enough endurance for any mainstream user, but I would like to see the prices go down. I know we're in the middle of a flash shortage, but I was hoping that by 2017 we would have 1TB drives that cost $200.

 

[derekullo]

The Real-World Software Performance must have been exceptionally boring to benchmark.

Wow opened in ... omg 58 seconds again.

 

[nzalog]

It's a shame that a big, well known company like Intel can't develop an SSD that beats a 2 year old competitor.

What's important to keep in mind is that all modern SSDs are pushing against the SATA bandwidth cap. The benchmarks from this review indicate that every SSD tested performs pretty much the same in real world benchmarks.

The most important variables right now (in SATA drives) are endurance and price. 3D flash memory should provide enough endurance for any mainstream user, but I would like to see the prices go down. I know we're in the middle of a flash shortage, but I was hoping that by 2017 we would have 1TB drives that cost $200.

I don't think anyone looking for top performance is going to get a Sata SSD and intel is doing just fine in their NVME PCIE drives. I'd still buy an intel drive over Samsung even if it performed a bit slower.

 

[DerekA_C]

Ya you do that support the Intel agenda that breaks laws all over the world just like Microsucks and gets a slap on the wrist and business for them continues as usual while others struggle to make even a proper market share due to their devilish practices.

 

[DerekA_C]

also if manufacturers pushed for this on motherboards sata would be more then fast enough
SATA revision 3.2 16 Gbit/s 1.97 GB/s[e]
SATA revision 3.0 6 Gbit/s 600 MB/s[72]

 

[sillynilly]

What? Borderline incoherent.

 

[derekullo]

Nothing like a japanese to english google translate bashing.

 

[nzalog]

Ya you do that support the Intel agenda that breaks laws all over the world just like Microsucks and gets a slap on the wrist and business for them continues as usual while others struggle to make even a proper market share due to their devilish practices.

I'm not sure if that was directed towards me but I'm pretty sure Samsung doesn't scores much better on the ethics scale.

 

[jtd871]

"2TB of flash ready to hold a Steam Library" This seems a bit overkill because 1) an Optane cache can reputedly make cheap and reliable "spinning rust" sing and 2) who keeps 2TB of games on local storage just in case they might want to play any random one of them?! (Or is that just Skyrim with all the mods? j/k)

 

[Nintendork]

So the only alternative to 850 EVO is the Kingston Hyper X Savage MLC.

 

[gamebrigada]

@NZALOG I wouldn't buy Intel. As someone that works in a department that has a couple thousand SSD's in service, Samsung can't be touched in reliability. I've got a bunch of dead Intel drives on my desk. I don't have any dead Samsung drives, and we have more of them in service now then any other SSD.

Especially with the recently released endurance test... Samsungs cheapest offering, the 750 EVO's, outlived most of the midrange and prosumer level drives. Their 850 PRO wrote 9.1 Petabytes before it gave up. That's the second wave of endurance tests where Samsung is untouchable. Yet Intel's drives are still plagued by the widely documented, yet still unfixed 8mb bug.

Intel doesn't even make the thing, for this drive, and the 540, they just made the case, and everything else was outsourced. Why are you still loyal to a company that's claim to fame was back when it rivaled OCZ with SLC nand? They've already given up on NAND, stop giving them business and letting them throw shit products at you.

 

[bit_user]

Glad to see the progress over the 540. That was shockingly bad, IMO. I've bought to prior Intel SATA drives and was about to swear off them after seeing its numbers. This has regained my interest.

I would only use Intel SSDs if reliability were my main concern.

Only the ones with end-to-end error correction, IMO.

http://ark.intel.com/Search/FeatureFilter?productType=solidstatedrives&EndToEndDataProtection=true

Also, the 600p seriously had me questioning my loyalty to Intel SSDs. Even just as far as reliability is concerned.

 

[Co BIY]

With all the Real World Performance scores within a few percent of each other I think this chart needs a Value (performance/price) graph.

 

[bit_user]

@NZALOG I wouldn't buy Intel. As someone that works in a department that has a couple thousand SSD's in service, Samsung can't be touched in reliability. I've got a bunch of dead Intel drives on my desk. I don't have any dead Samsung drives, and we have more of them in service now then any other SSD.

That's interesting, but I think it's potentially a mistake to lump together all drives from a manufacturer. Intel makes high-end/professional drives, as well as mainstream and even low-end. If the low-end drives were used where they shouldn't have been, I wouldn't blame Intel for that.

Especially with the recently released endurance test... Samsungs cheapest offering, the 750 EVO's, outlived most of the midrange and prosumer level drives. Their 850 PRO wrote 9.1 Petabytes before it gave up. That's the second wave of endurance tests where Samsung is untouchable.

SSD endurance is a moving target. I wouldn't infer anything about the 850 Pro for drives other than the 850 Pro. It's is a nice feather in their cap.

Intel doesn't even make the thing, for this drive, and the 540, they just made the case, and everything else was outsourced.

I don't care if they didn't design the controller - no different than most drives. They do have custom firmware, no?

 

[bit_user]

also if manufacturers pushed for this on motherboards sata would be more then fast enough
SATA revision 3.2 16 Gbit/s 1.97 GB/s[e]
SATA revision 3.0 6 Gbit/s 600 MB/s[72]

You'd do well to look into the details, rather than just posting up the top-line numbers. That's for SATA Express, and would require two data cables per drive.

Not, that I'd mind the option to have 1 GB/sec per drive, with only one cable. But it hasn't caught on with motherboards (besides AMD) or SSD vendors.

I'd be nice if they updated it for PCIe 4.0 and we got 2 GB/sec with a single cable, as I do like the ability to use a greater number of larger SSDs and mount them in my case (as opposed to having only a couple M.2 drives plugged into my motherboard).

 

[bit_user]

It's a shame that a big, well known company like Intel can't develop an SSD that beats a 2 year old competitor.

You need to account for price per GB, though.

What's important to keep in mind is that all modern SSDs are pushing against the SATA bandwidth cap.

That was true years ago. Starting with the previous generation of SATA SSDs (Crucial MX300, Intel 540, etc.), they actually had lower performance than their predacessors. It's nice to see Intel's 545 regain some ground.

intel is doing just fine in their NVME PCIE drives. I'd still buy an intel drive over Samsung even if it performed a bit slower.

I wouldn't touch Intel's 600p. Go checkout the review & follow-up articles, if you haven't seen them.

 

[nzalog]

intel is doing just fine in their NVME PCIE drives. I'd still buy an intel drive over Samsung even if it performed a bit slower.

I wouldn't touch Intel's 600p. Go checkout the review & follow-up articles, if you haven't seen them.

I actually have a 250GB 600p and yeah it's not the best drive. Part of the issue was how quickly the controller gets saturated with heat and the other part was excremental write speeds. That said, I made a nice home for it in my FreeNAS box as a L2ARC (kind of like read cache). Since for that purpose the writes trickle in slowly while read are most intensive. I also slapped a nice heatsink on it and so far so good.

Either way I'd still take that NVME drive over a sata drive. It's pretty decent for one of the slower NVME drives.

 

[darth_adversor]

Nice review, but the author makes me feel like a piece of crap for still running SATA drives. My desktop is an aging, Z68-based machine that doesn't support NVMe (at least not officially). I've got a 250GB 850 EVO paired with a 1TB WD Black, and I'm pleased with its performance. Battlefront load times are a little longer than I'd prefer (off the mechanical drive), but still twice as fast as a stock PS4's. Windows flies on the SSD, I can't imagine needing anything faster.

Same story with the laptop my wife recently surprised me with. It shipped with a Sandisk X400 128GB. I didn't feel like reinstalling Windows, so I decided to keep the Sandisk installed, and added my 500GB 850 EVO as the secondary storage drive. I'm super pleased with its performance.

If you can afford a 960 Pro, more power to you, but in my opinion, you can still be an "enthusiast" and run SATA drives.

 

[derekullo]

Nice review, but the author makes me feel like a piece of crap for still running SATA drives. My desktop is an aging, Z68-based machine that doesn't support NVMe (at least not officially). I've got a 250GB 850 EVO paired with a 1TB WD Black, and I'm pleased with its performance. Battlefront load times are a little longer than I'd prefer (off the mechanical drive), but still twice as fast as a stock PS4's. Windows flies on the SSD, I can't imagine needing anything faster.

Same story with the laptop my wife recently surprised me with. It shipped with a Sandisk X400 128GB. I didn't feel like reinstalling Windows, so I decided to keep the Sandisk installed, and added my 500GB 850 EVO as the secondary storage drive. I'm super pleased with its performance.

If you can afford a 960 Pro, more power to you, but in my opinion, you can still be an "enthusiast" and run SATA drives.

Your message reminded me of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/weirdalyankovic/itsallaboutthepentiums.html

On a separate note the highest capacity the Samsung 960 Pro comes in is 2 terabytes meaning that with 3 M.2 ports the most capacity your computer could have would be 6 terabytes in a raid 0, with close to 10 gigabytes a second of theoretical read throughput which is ... impressive.

Edit: I believe 3 M.2 is the highest I have seen on any motherboard so far, correct me if I'm wrong.

On the other hand the size of the 850 Evos go up to 4 terabytes and you aren't limited to 3.

So SATA does have at least one advantage over NVME/M.2 if you were trying to store more than 6 terabytes of data.

 

[daglesj]

Nothing wrong with running SATA SSD. I switched over to a NVMe PM961 about 10 days ago. I can't tell the difference. You are not missing ANYTHING. Especially the two hours of farting around it took to get it working properly. How in this day and age stuff still needs a high level of configuration baffles me.

 

[daglesj]

Oh yeah and I was running a Sandisk Extreme Pro SATA SSD before the switch.

 

[jimmysmitty]

It's a shame that a big, well known company like Intel can't develop an SSD that beats a 2 year old competitor.

What's important to keep in mind is that all modern SSDs are pushing against the SATA bandwidth cap. The benchmarks from this review indicate that every SSD tested performs pretty much the same in real world benchmarks.

The most important variables right now (in SATA drives) are endurance and price. 3D flash memory should provide enough endurance for any mainstream user, but I would like to see the prices go down. I know we're in the middle of a flash shortage, but I was hoping that by 2017 we would have 1TB drives that cost $200.

If what matters is endurance then Intel is one of the best, especially since their 3D NAND is no longer going to the smaller nm which causes endurance loss compared to previous versions.
Price is relative but also a factor.

The biggest problem for NVMe right now is density and slot availability. Once there are at least 2 slots and the density per drive increases to HDD levels we can start to push SATA to the background.

 

[bit_user]

If what matters is endurance then Intel is one of the best, especially since their 3D NAND is no longer going to the smaller nm which causes endurance loss compared to previous versions.

Why are you talking in generalities?

The spec is 144 TBW, for this drive (not sure why the article says 288, currently).

http://ark.intel.com/products/125019/Intel-SSD-545s-Series-512GB-2_5in-SATA-6Gbs-3D2-TLC

Endurance is also a function of over-provisioning, block size, amount of embedded DRAM & SLC for write buffering, and how conservative they choose to be, when estimating the typical workload.