Review Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite 4TB SSD review: Capacity at a cost

[Admin]

The Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite is a popular budget drive, but the 4TB version leaves us disappointed by its swap to QLC flash. It still performs pretty well where it counts, but can suffer with sustained workloads and when mostly full.

Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite 4TB SSD review: Capacity at a cost : Read more

 

[stuff and nonesense]

100,000
10,000
3,000
1,000
Program/erase cycles per cell. Samsung pro ssds were at the sweet spot. Cost a little more but with 2 bit MLC they had endurance way beyond any realistic needs.
TLC is tolerable, as the most common implementation it has been proven to work.
QLC is an abomination half the life of TLC, not that much cheaper I wouldn’t touch with a long stick.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

100,000
10,000
3,000
1,000
Program/erase cycles per cell. Samsung pro ssds were at the sweet spot. Cost a little more but with 2 bit MLC they had endurance way beyond any realistic needs.
TLC is tolerable, as the most common implementation it has been proven to work.
QLC is an abomination half the life of TLC, not that much cheaper I wouldn’t touch with a long stick.

"Half the life of TLC" may be correct (one third the endurance, if we're being precise), but in reality most people aren't writing all that much data to their drives. I have a 2TB SSD from mid-2015. So, it's now nine years old and I've used it basically that whole time, reading and writing various data files to it on a regular basis. (I put videos on it and then erase them when I'm done watching.)

Do you know how much data I've written to the drive in nine years? According to SMART: 162TB. Entertainingly, the drive is only rated for 300 TBW (different era, different NAND, different wear leveling algorithms), but I'm barely over half that right now.

And I'm sure I'll stop using the drive in the coming years because it is getting to be somewhat sluggish. It's fine for doing 1Gb Ethernet transfers, but not so great if I'm copying a big file from it. Nine years is a LONG time for PC hardware these days, especially storage.

I'm not saying I love QLC, mind you, but the endurance is the least of my worries. There are certainly people that are using their storage in such a way that the writes will be much higher than what I do, but if that's the case they already know they need something with higher endurance. I'm at the point now where the chance of a drive failing due to writing too much data is far lower than the chance that the drive fails from some other hardware error. My power on hours for the 2TB drive is currently 57,145... that means the SSD has been powered on for 6.5 years (out of about 9 years total — this is my main PC that I almost never put to sleep).

 

[stuff and nonesense]

There was an experiment in about 2016/17, basically how much can be written to a drive..

Techreport conducted it

“We have lots of data to write to this initial batch of drives, so it’s time to stop talking and start testing. We’ve outlined our plans, configured our test rigs, and taken our initial SMART readings. Let the onslaught of writes begin! We’ll see you in 22TB.

Update: The 22TB results are in. So far, so good.

Update: After 200TB, we’re starting to see the first signs of weakness.

Update: The drives have passed the 300TB mark, and we’ve added an unpowered retention test to see how well they retain data when unplugged.

Update: Our subjects have crossed the half-petabyte threshold, and they’re still going strong.

Update: All is well after 600TB of writes—and after a longer-term data retention test.

Update: We’ve now written one petabyte of data, and half the drives are dead.

Update: The SSDs are now up to 1.5PB—or two of them are, anyway. The last 500TB claimed another victim.

Update: The experiment has reached two freaking petabytes of writes. Amazingly, our remaining survivors are still standing.

Update: They’re all dead! Read the experiment’s final chapter right here.”

SSDs can be incredibly resilient .. I just don’t trust QLC.

 

[evdjj3j]

100,000
10,000
3,000
1,000
Program/erase cycles per cell. Samsung pro ssds were at the sweet spot. Cost a little more but with 2 bit MLC they had endurance way beyond any realistic needs.
TLC is tolerable, as the most common implementation it has been proven to work.
QLC is an abomination half the life of TLC, not that much cheaper I wouldn’t touch with a long stick.

I'm still using an Intel 660p purchased in 2018 with no issues at all. That drive has been written to and erased quite a bit. Username checks out.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

I’m still using a 2015 Samsung 850 pro. It runs out of warranty next year.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I’m still using a 2015 Samsung 850 pro. It runs out of warranty next year.

LOL, what's funny is that the 2TB drive I referenced is also an 850 Pro... I just totally forgot that it had a 10-year warranty, which is sort of silly. Sure, it's fast enough as far as SATA drives go, but it pales in comparison to even a modest PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive. Most of the time, it just sits around as a data drive where all of my downloads end up.