Ssds diary: The SSD Diaries: Crucial’s RealSSD C300

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The DriveRandom Read/Write SpeedSequential Read/Write SpeedOverall System Performance using PCMark VantageSYSMark 2007AnandTech Storage BenchPower ConsumptionTRIM and Performance over TimeFinal Words

Life just isn’t fair. When I met with Crucial at CES to talk about its first foray into the high performance SSD market I was given very high expectations for reliability and the testing that Crucial would put the drive through. We talked about the failure of other controller vendors to do adequate testing. Even Intel’s own follies. Crucial assured me that validation testing was high on the priority list.

The company already tests hundreds if not thousands of configurations for its memory. Slotting SSDs into the mix wouldn’t be difficult. In contrast, most of the vendors who ship Indilinx and SandForce drives don’t have nearly the validation experience or infrastructure in place to gain it.

Then, just weeks after I got my C300, the drive stopped working. Crucial sent me another drive which didn’t die, but let me discover that the C300 had serious issues when it came to worst case scenario performance. Similar to the original X25-M firmware when given a random enough workload, the RealSSD C300 could be backed into a corner that it would never get out of.

I dropped the C300 from my list of even potential recommendations while Crucial worked on a fix. Meanwhile SandForce’s partners had been shipping drives, with relatively few problems. To make matters worse? The majority of SandForce drives that shipped while Crucial suffered used release candidate firmware. Mass production firmware wasn’t distributed until later. And SandForce did nothing to stop it.

The moral of this story is that entering the storage market is still new territory for everyone. Company size, whether small or large, doesn’t dictate whether you’ll face a failure from a new product. The only guarantee you have is the experience of others who’ve used the drives in configurations similar to your own.

Which brings me to todays topic. I’ve been testing Crucial’s fixed firmware and so far things look good. The situation has improved enough to warrant another look at the C300, including its more affordable 128GB version. And that’s exactly what we’ll do today.

The Drive

I’ve explained how SSDs work in great detail here and here, if you’re a newcomer to all of this I’d suggest looking over those articles.

Like most SSD vendors, Crucial turned to a third party to supply a controller for its SSD — Marvell. Inside Marvell’s controller is a pair of ARM9 CPUs that work in parallel. One core handles SATA requests while the other handles NAND requests.

On the SATA side is a 6Gbps interface, a significant upgrade from the 3Gbps controllers found on all other SSDs we’ve reviewed. If you’ve followed our SSD coverage you’ll know that sequential read speed is one area where SSDs are traditionally limited by 3Gbps SATA. The C300 should fix that. To feed the controller Crucial uses ONFI 2.0 NAND with higher max transfer rates.

While the controller is made by Marvell, the firmware is entirely Crucial’s design. As we’ve seen in the past, as long as the controller’s CPU is fast enough the biggest influence on SSD performance is the architecture of the firmware.

Paired with the controller is an absolutely massive 256MB DRAM. The Marvell controller has a smaller cache than what Intel outfits its X25-M G2 with and rather than demand a more expensive controller with a larger cache, Crucial uses a very large external DRAM to store mapping tables and access history. Micron, Crucial’s parent company, being a DRAM manufacturer probably played a role in making that decision.

The RealSSD C300 is available in three capacity points, two of which I’ll be looking at today: 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. The Crucial controller has 8 channels to its NAND. Both the 128GB and 256GB versions have all 8 channels populated, however the 256GB drive physically has more die per NAND package which allows for greater parallelism and potentially higher performance.

Like the Intel and Indilinx drives, Crucial dedicates around 7% of the drive’s capacity to spare area. This non user-addressable NAND is used as a pool of clean blocks to replace dirty ones during normal use, and to replace any bad blocks.

Pricing Comparison
Drive	NAND Capacity	User Capacity	Drive Cost	Cost per GB of NAND	Cost per Usable GB
Corsair Nova V128	128GB	119. 2GB	$319	$2.492	$2.676
Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB	128GB	119.2GB	$369	$2.883	$3.096
Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB	256GB	238.4GB	$660	$2.578	$2.768
Intel X25-M G2 160GB	160GB	149. 0GB	$405	$2.531	$2.718
Intel X25-M G2 80GB	80GB	74.5GB	$215	$2.688	$2.886
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB	128GB	111.8GB	$329	$2.570	$2.943
OCZ Vertex 2 240GB	256GB	223. 6GB	$640	$2.500	$2.862

High end SSDs have dropped in price considerably over the past couple of months. While 100GB SandForce drives were once at or above $400, these days you can get 120GB extended capacity versions for $330. In fact, the price of SandForce drives have dropped so much that there’s pretty much no reason to buy an Indilinx drive at this point. Note that there’s no tangible performance difference between the extended capacity SandForce drives and the older versions with more spare area for any of the workloads we’ll be talking about today.

Crucial’s C300 is priced competitively with the market, but it does command a price premium over the equivalent capacity SandForce drive. While OCZ will sell you 128GB of NAND on its Vertex 2 for $2.57/GB, Crucial asks for $2. 883/GB on its C300.

The Test

CPU	Intel Core i7 965 running at 3.2GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled)
Motherboard:	Intel DX58SO (Intel X58)
Chipset:	Intel X58 + Marvell SATA 6Gbps PCIe
Chipset Drivers:	Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel IMSM 8.9
Memory:	Qimonda DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20)
Video Card:	eVGA GeForce GTX 285
Video Drivers:	NVIDIA ForceWare 190. 38 64-bit
Desktop Resolution:	1920 x 1200
OS:	Windows 7 x64

Random Read/Write Speed
The DriveRandom Read/Write SpeedSequential Read/Write SpeedOverall System Performance using PCMark VantageSYSMark 2007AnandTech Storage BenchPower ConsumptionTRIM and Performance over TimeFinal Words

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SSDs Have a Heart of Darkness and You’d Better Not Ignore It – EEJournal

September 19, 2022

by Steven Leibson

Many years ago, I ordered my first hard drive for my original IBM PC. It was a 5.25-inch Seagate ST-225 half-high, 20Mbyte hard disk drive (HDD). That’s a capacity of 20 MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes. The ST-225 could barely hold one of today’s shortest compressed video files for YouTube but it represented enormous capacity back then, when IBM PC double-sided floppy disks stored only 720Kbytes. Unfortunately, that Seagate drive failed after just one or two months. Although such an early failure was somewhat unusual back then, reliability was a problem. Hard drives became increasingly reliable over time. They still fail, just not as often.

An HDD is essentially a stack of rapidly spinning, rust-covered (iron oxide coated) platters made initially of aluminum and then later of glass. (Actually, the magnetic coating material these days is cobalt, but the phrase “rust-covered” has stuck with me over the decades.) Read/write heads fly perilously close to the surfaces of these platters. The heads are mounted on a swing arm controlled by a servo motor. With two motors and several heads barely separated from a fast-moving surface, there’s plenty of room for mechanical failure. And failures do happen, catastrophically and without warning.

These days, I no longer have PCs with HDDs. Over the past several years, Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) have supplanted HDDs as SSD costs have fallen. SSDs have many advantages over HDDs including faster performance, lower operating power, and better reliability. The improved reliability is welcome, but that does not mean that SSDs don’t fail. They do. However, because they’re not mechanical devices and because the wearout mechanisms of Flash memory are so well studied, because they’re endowed with wearout-protection mechanisms, and because they’re so well instrumented, SSDs generally have the good manners to fail on a schedule.

In fact, with the right software, you can query an SSD and find out exactly where it is in its life cycle. I use a program called CrystalDiskInfo. It gives me a comprehensive report on my SSD’s health. The report on the SSD in my work laptop PC looks like this:

The report tells me that I have a 1Tbyte Crucial MX500 SSD in my laptop and that it thinks it’s in good health, with 99% life left in it. As I write this article, Amazon sells this SSD for less than $100. That’s much less than I paid for my Seagate ST225 nearly 40 years ago. The statistics in the CrystalDiskInfo report come from the SSD’s S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data, which is generated by firmware that the manufacturer created for and installed in the specific SSD. The CrystalDiskInfo program merely extracts these statistics from the SSD and formats them into a report. (HDDs also generate S.M.A.R.T. data tables.)

The S.M.A.R.T. report shown above looks great. However, I buy my laptops as used computers. Take a look at a report from the Intel 1.6Tbyte SSD that was originally installed in another used laptop that I purchased.

This SSD thinks it’s not very healthy. You can tell from the big yellow rectangle labeled “Caution.” The reason that the SSD doesn’t feel healthy appears in the reporting box labeled “Total Host Writes.” That box says that a host wrote 4,208,322 Gbytes to the drive. That’s more than 4000 Tbytes of data written to a 1.6Tbyte drive, which means that, on average, every Flash memory location on this SSD has been overwritten more than 2600 times. The SSD reports that it’s been powered on for 28156 hours. That’s more than three years of continuous operation, yet this SSD has gone through only 32 power cycles since it was manufactured. Even so, the SSD seems to be performing very well based on the other statistics in the CrystalDiskInfo report. There are no reallocated sectors, no erase failures, no CRC errors, and no end-to-end errors detected. I take that as a testament to the excellent hardware design and the ruggedness of the Intel SSD’s Flash memory. (Note: Intel completed the sale of its NAND Flash and SSD business to SK Hynix late last year, and the assets will move from Intel to SK Hynix over the next few years. Meanwhile, SK Hynix is putting the SSD assets from Intel into a new company named Solidigm.)

Nevertheless, the SSD itself reports that it thinks it has reached the end of its life. I suspect that warning is based far more on statistical assumptions built into the SSD’s firmware than on the failure indicators, which all look excellent. This SSD thinks that it has been written to death and so I replaced it immediately, because the replacement cost for the drive is far less than the replacement cost for the data.

Like any electronic subsystem, SSDs can fail for many reasons. Electronic components do fail. But the failure mechanism of interest here is the wearout failure that NAND Flash memory experiences after many writes. Flash memory chips can be rated for anywhere between 500 and 100,000 writes, or more, before wearout becomes a problem. That number, whatever it is, helps to determine the amount of data that you can write to an SSD before wearing out the SSD’s internal Flash memory. In addition, the SSD’s temperature over time also affects the wearout rate, so that, too, is accounted for.

SSD vendors employ many error-correction mechanisms to ameliorate the effects of NAND Flash wearout failures. Like HDDs, SSDs rely on CRC (cyclic redundancy checking) and ECC (error-correcting codes) to bring down the SSD’s error rates. SSDs employ wear leveling to ensure that write/erase cycles are evenly distributed across the NAND Flash chips in the SSDs and in the individual cells in each NAND Flash chip. If you’re really interested in this topic, you can read a paper that my friend Jim Handy (“The Memory Guy”) wrote for SNIA (the Storage Networking Industry Association) nearly ten years ago titled “How Controllers Maximize SSD Life.”

Because of these failure countermeasures, SSDs tend to fail gracefully after getting past their initial infant mortality stage. HDDs, on the other hand, tend to fail suddenly and catastrophically from mechanical failures such as bearing failures and head crashes. However, I have to say that the jury is still out on SSD versus HDD reliability because of a recent report from Backblaze, a company that runs large data centers. Backblaze published a report in 2021 titled “Are SSDs Really More Reliable Than Hard Drives?” that looked at failure rates for HDDs and SSDs used in its data centers and concluded that SSDs were too new to determine the relative reliability. The report’s final conclusion:

“Given what we know to date, using the failure rate as a factor in your decision is questionable. Once we controlled for age and drive days, the two drive types were similar and the difference was certainly not enough by itself to justify the extra cost of purchasing an SSD versus an HDD. At this point, you are better off deciding based on other factors: cost, speed required, electricity, form factor requirements, and so on.”

(Note: Backblaze published an update to this report days before this article appeared. Their new conclusion about SSDs: “At this point we can reasonably claim that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, at least when used as boot drives in our environment. This supports the anecdotal stories and educated guesses made by our readers over the past year or so. Well done.”)

Finally, I asked Jim Handy if he’d updated his 2013 SNIA paper. He answered, “Thanks for asking, but no… The biggest change in all that time is that Data Center admins understand their workloads a lot better than they used to, and PC software has eliminated a ton of unnecessary writes. PC software got a lot more SSD-friendly too.  For example, iOS used to defrag frequently. That made it perform better than Windows, but it was very tough on SSD write workloads. I heard that Windows started to notice whether storage was an SSD or HDD and eliminated excessive writes, too. All this changed the industry so that high write-load SSDs became less interesting to both applications.”

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5 successful models for laptop, PC, games, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series

Mikhail Polyarus

wants more space on PS5

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A computer with an SSD turns on faster, launches programs and opens large files.

If your old PC or laptop is running slow, replacing your hard drive with a fast SSD is the best way to save the day without a major upgrade. When assembling a new home computer, such a disk is also indispensable in order to work comfortably. nine0003

SSD prices range from R850 for very budget options to R359,000 for high-capacity professional models. I chose five optimal models for different tasks.

All SSDs in the article are presented in the 1TB version. But what is written is true for other options: most modern drives are sold in several versions ranging from 256 GB to 2 TB.

But we do not distort or embellish reviews, and the choice of specific devices for the test does not depend on whether we receive a commission. nine0003

Equipment reviews in Tinkoff Magazine are independent. The verdict depends only on how the devices performed during the tests.

For reviews, we either request equipment from the manufacturer for a test, or purchase it ourselves. Our reviews are subjective, but honest and expert — opinions are written by authors who have more than one technical review behind them. The editorial team of Tinkoff Magazine double-checks the texts, proofreads them and conducts a fact check.

All prices are at the time of publication of the material, but we update them periodically to keep the reviews up to date. nine0003

Our recommendations

• The best of the best
• for medium -sized PC
• For the old laptop and budget PC
• The best for PS5
• The best for Xbox SERIES X and S

how to choose SSD

on sale on sale. find many different types of SSD with different characteristics. We have collected and explained the main ones, so that when choosing on your own, it would be easier to understand what’s what.

Volume. The amount of information that can be recorded and stored on modern drives is calculated in gigabytes. Due to the peculiarities of the technology, the actual capacity of the SSD is usually lower than what is stated on the packaging: out of 500 GB, approximately 480 GB can be available to the user. Disks can be divided into the following categories by volume:

1. 128-256 GB. A small drive on which you can install the operating system, the main work programs and one or two games, the speed of which is most important. But movies, music and most games will have to be stored on an auxiliary hard drive, a second SSD, on an external drive or in the cloud.
2. 512-1000 GB. Optimal size for a computer with one drive. There is enough space for programs and for several modern large games. In the article, we consider models with 1 TB, that is, a volume of about 1000 GB. nine0028
3. 2-4 TB. Enlarged storage units. They are less common and cost much more than models up to 1 TB. Most often, such discs are bought for a home media server or for professional video work.

Speed. SSD speed is measured in megabytes per second — MB/s. The read speed is usually faster than the write speed, as the complexity of these processes varies.

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To fully boot Windows in less than 30-40 seconds, a drive with a read speed of 500 MB / s is enough, and anything faster will be appreciated mainly by professional editors or demanding gamers:

1. Hard drive of an old PC — 60 -80 Mbps.
2. Modern fast hard drive — 150-200 Mb/s.
3. Low cost SATA SSD — up to 560 MB/s.
4. entry-level NVMe SSD — up to 1500 Mbps.
5. Midrange NVMe SSD — up to 3500 Mb/s. nine0028
6. Flagship NVMe Gen4 SSD — up to 7500 MB/s.

Format. SSDs are available in four common form factors that differ in size, shape, and connection method:

1. 2.5 inch. Outwardly, they are almost indistinguishable from small traditional hard drives, therefore they are most compatible with older computers. But due to the nature of the connection, it is much slower than the others.
2. M.2. Modern SSDs are inserted directly into a special slot on the motherboard: neither wires nor additional power are needed. Modules come in different lengths, from 42 to 80 mm, but they are all interchangeable if there is free space in the case. nine0028
3. PCI-E. Technologically, it does not differ from M.2 drives, but is inserted not into a special slot, but into a universal PCIe. Laptops and consoles do not have such a slot, but every desktop PC has it — a video card is usually inserted into this.
4. U.2. A rare enough format for professional use that combines the speed of M.2 and the versatility of 2.5″ drives. Designed mainly for servers and stationary workstations.

Interface. Drive interface is a standard that is used to transfer drive data. There are two of them:

1. SATA. The latest version at the time of writing is SATA 3, speed up to 600 Mb/s. This interface is found in M.2 and 2.5-inch drives.
2. NVMe. This interface is much faster and is considered optimal for powerful computers and laptops. Throughput reaches 16,000 Mb / s, but such fast SSDs do not yet exist. Used in M.2, PCIe and U.2 drives. nine0028

Memory type. Inside the SSD, information is stored on chips divided into cells. One, two, three or four bits of information can be simultaneously written to one cell. The fewer bits in one cell, the more durable, faster and more expensive the drive.

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In most cases, you can ignore the type of memory and choose a drive based on the ratio of volume, speed and price. But if you need to choose between two similar models, the type of chips will help you better determine their quality. nine0003

There are four types of memory, listed below from best to worst:

1. SLC — one bit per cell. The fastest, most energy efficient and longest lasting memory, but chip capacity is severely limited. SLC drives are almost never found, mainly this type of memory is used as a fast cache on SSDs with other types of chips.
2. MLC — two bits per cell, significantly inferior to SLC in terms of speed and reliability. It is found in many top models, if possible, it is better to choose just such drives. nine0028
3. TLC — three bits per cell, considered worse than MLC. But now it is found even in flagship models due to the fact that the technology is being improved every year and the gap is narrowing.
4. QLC is the cheapest type of memory with the lowest reliability and speed. But on the other hand, SSDs with QLC memory can reach 8 TB, and the price-to-volume ratio is much lower than that of MLC. Such drives are good for storing files instead of traditional hard drives, and it is better to install the system and programs on faster ones. nine0028

Resource. This parameter is calculated by the time between failures or the number of data rewrite cycles, aka TBW.

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MTBF does not correlate much with real life, so this parameter in the SSD description can be ignored. It is worth paying attention to the TBW indicator. Typically, for 1 TB drives, TBW is between 360 and 1000 TB. Please note that this parameter differs for drives of different sizes, and small SSDs «live» less. nine0003

My home PC has been running a cheap 100 TBW SSD for four years now, of which I only used 36.8. By the time the resource runs out, I will have upgraded my computer and bought a new drive.

From £12,151

The best of the best — Samsung 980 PRO 1TB M.2

The Samsung 980 Pro is designed for large file editing, 4K video editing, architectural and engineering design, 3D modeling and graphics. Thanks to him, heavy projects will be opened and saved in seconds or minutes, not hours. nine0003

In new generation games, such a drive will allow you to completely refuse to load levels and quickly travel through highly detailed locations. But so far, such technologies are only used in games for PlayStation 5 like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and on computers they will begin to appear only in 2023 or later.

This drive is one of the fastest and most reliable drives in the world. It is up to 15 times faster than the low cost SSD found in most PCs and laptops. But when you start Windows, in popular games or when working with a browser, it is almost impossible to feel the difference, since even on a “slow” SSD everything works quite quickly. nine0003

Samsung 980 Pro is based on high quality and durable MLC V-NAND memory chips. The manufacturer claims up to 600 complete overwrite cycles: it will take most people decades to exhaust this margin of durability. However, the real guarantee of reliability is the flagship controller. This is a small chip that coordinates the writing and reading of files on the disk: for budget SSDs, it is he who most often breaks down, after which the entire drive has to be replaced.

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The data read speed of this SSD reaches 7000 Mb / s, and the write speed is 5000 Mb / s. For comparison, top HDDs barely reach 150 Mb / s, while old and budget ones work even more slowly.

This SSD is not compatible with all computers. It requires a special latest generation M.2 connector — in the specifications of a laptop or motherboard it is indicated as PCIe 4.0 or NVMe Gen4. Most devices released in the last five to seven years will only have an M.2 slot of the third generation. If you insert Samsung 9 into it80 Pro, it will work, but not at maximum speed.

How much:

• in DNS — 15 499 R;
• on Yandex Market — from 11 914 R.

Alternative. The 1TB Kingston Fury Renegade is comparable in speed to the Samsung 980 Pro, but has a 40% longer life span of up to 1000 full write cycles. At the same time, it costs less: on Yandex Market, prices start at 11,150 R, but in other stores the difference exceeds 3,000 R.

But Kingston’s controller is worse. The drive gets hotter during operation and needs additional cooling to keep up the speed. At the same time, there is no metal radiator in the kit — you will have to buy it separately or use the cooling provided by the motherboard manufacturer.

From £7000

Best for mid-range PC — WD Blue SN570 1TB

SSD for a typical home computer should be reliable and fast with small amounts of data: when loading the OS, installing and launching programs, copying folders with photos. With these tasks, the inexpensive WD Blue SN570 does an excellent job. nine0003

The declared read speed is 3500 Mb/s, and the write speed is 3000 Mb/s. When opening, copying and saving files of about 12 GB, the drive works very quickly, a few seconds are enough. This is a great option for gaming, office work, entertainment, amateur photo editing and small video editing.

It copes worse with files larger than 10-12 GB: the speed drops to 600 Mb/s, copying can take minutes. It’s still four to five times faster than a regular HDD, but you can feel the slowdown. nine0003

The fact is that each SSD has a so-called cache: this is a small reserve of very fast memory, into which the disk first writes all the necessary data, and then, slowly, distributes them among the main long-term storage cells. Inexpensive drives have a small cache — here its size is only 12 GB. And the “professional” Samsung 980 Pro has ten times more cache, as much as 118 GB. Therefore, it copes with the transfer of large files faster.

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But on the other hand, WD Blue is as reliable as the flagships: up to 600 full overwrite cycles and a five-year manufacturer’s warranty. You rarely see this with inexpensive drives.

The WD Blue SN570 requires an M.2 slot, but the drive itself is not as demanding as the top models. The most common PCIe 3.0 or NVMe Gen3 standard, which has been in use for about a decade, is enough for him.

How much it costs:

• in DNS — 10 999 R;
• on Yandex Market — from 6900 R.

From 6400 R

Best for old PCs — Crucial MX500 1TB SATA

MX500 is cheaper than most other models of major brands and at the same time quite reliable.

For a budget home computer or reanimation of an old laptop, it makes no sense to buy a fast and expensive SSD. Even an inexpensive SSD will make the system much faster and more responsive than the most advanced traditional hard drive.

The Crucial MX500 is shaped like a compact «laptop» hard drive, also known as the 2.5-inch format. It is connected in the same way — with a standard cable to the SATA III port, which is in every computer. This is not the most modern, but a universal solution, such an SSD is compatible even with computers released 10-15 years ago. It can be installed directly in place of an old hard drive using the same cable. nine0003

Due to an outdated SATA connection, the speed of the drive does not exceed 560 MB/s. Even so, it’s up to five times faster than «conventional» hard drives. This is not a record among SSDs, but for most computers and tasks it is the best solution.

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The Crucial MX500 can be fully rewritten about 360 times. Its resource is less than that of more expensive models, but for most people this will last for many years — in two years of using my laptop, I did not even fill a whole terabyte. nine0003

How much:

• in DNS — 8199 ;
• on Yandex Market — from 6400 R.

Alternative. The Samsung 870 EVO 1TB SATA features a much better controller, modern memory, and a larger supply of faster cache.

In practice, this is expressed in the fact that Samsung has almost twice the resource, and the read and write speed is more stable. But at the same time, it is noticeably more expensive, from 8490 R on Yandex Market. nine0003

This drive is suitable for those who want to use it for many years and transfer from one computer to another. Or those who choose an auxiliary SSD for file storage in addition to the main fast M.2.

From £193.99

For PlayStation 5 — Western Digital SN850 1TB M. 2

The PlayStation 5 comes with a non-replaceable SSD, but there is space inside the case to install an additional one. It is not difficult to open the prefix and insert the drive yourself, but first you should look at the instructions on YouTube. nine0003

Sony is making tough demands on PS5 SSDs: only the fastest latest generation M.2 models with NVMe Gen4 PCI-e 4.0 and speeds above 5500MB/s will fit.

WD SN850 is the best among PS5 discs. It is officially certified by Sony and comes with a good size heatsink right out of the box.

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Speed ​​7000 Mb/s read and 5300 Mb/s write — in most respects it is better than Samsung nine80 Pro from the same collection. For example, the cache size here is 277 GB, that is, twice as much. But in real use, both drives work equally fast, so in the main nomination, the decisive factor was that Samsung is cheaper and easier to find on sale.

How much it costs:

• in DNS — 18 799 R;
• on Yandex Market — from 20 990 R.

Alternative. The Samsung 980 Pro and Best of the Best Kingston Fury Renegade also work well on PS5. But during operation, such fast drives get very hot, and these models do not have a radiator in the kit. Of course, you can buy and install it separately, but you will have to look for one that fits in PS5, for example, Bequiet MC1 for 1200 R.

An external SSD can also be considered to expand the console’s memory. It can only store PS4 games that are compatible with PS5, but this will still free up several tens of gigabytes of internal memory.

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One of the simple and versatile options is the Samsung T5 with USB-C. The price for it starts from 12,237 R on Yandex Market.

But it will be much cheaper to buy an external case for about 1000 R and insert an inexpensive SSD like the Crucial MX500 into it yourself — it will work just as well. nine0003

From Rs. Instead, Microsoft is releasing special expansion cards in collaboration with Seagate.

The same SSD is installed inside the Seagate card as inside the Xbox Series X and S, so the console treats it as equivalent to internal. In addition, it is easy to install: you just need to insert the card into a special slot on the back of the console, you will not get confused. nine0003

In Russia, these cards are very rare and very expensive. But there are no official alternatives.

How much it costs:

• on Yandex Market — 15,990 R for 512 GB;
• on Yandex Market — from 24,990 R per 1 TB;
• from abroad through «SDEK-shopping» — 36,000 R for 2 TB.

Alternatives. For about 1500 R you can find a Chinese adapter adapter. They are sold mainly on foreign marketplaces or from small sellers on Ozone. Adapters are not certified by Microsoft, so their reliability and safety is confirmed only by the manufacturer’s words. nine0003

Separately, for the adapter, you will need to buy the SSD itself, the WD PC SN530 NVMe is best — the same one is installed in the Xbox Series itself. An ordinary fast SSD is not suitable, because a shortened format model is needed, and even the console itself may not “make friends” with a drive of an unfamiliar brand. Compatible SSD prices start at Rs 7332 for the 512 GB version and Rs 12928 for the 1 TB.

If you don’t want to bother with searching for components and assembling, Aliexpress has a ready-made unofficial solution. Such a disk is larger and will stick out strongly from the back of the console. But, judging by the reviews, it works properly. Prices start from 11 000 R.

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Prices are valid for the Moscow region at the time of publication, but we update them periodically.

Our recommendation

Best for PS5	Best for Xbox Series S — X
Western Digital SN850 1TB M. 2	Seagate Storage Expansion Card
Sony certified, high speed and out of the box heatsink for a fifth curling iron	The only expansion option for Xbox, if you do not resort to dubious Chinese counterparts
In DNS — from 18,799 R; on Yandex Market — 20 990	On Yandex Market — 15,990 R for 512 GB

Best of the Best

Samsung 980 PRO 1TB M.2

One-stop solution for both PS5 and gaming PC, just need to install heatsink

V DNS — from 15499 R;
on Yandex Market — from 11,914 R

Best for old PCs

Crucial MX500 1 TB SATA

Despite the outdated form factor, it will significantly speed up the work of the old PC

In DNS — from 8199 ;
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WD Blue SN570 1TB

Slower than Samsung 980 Pro, but cheaper, and the declared resource is the same

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Best for PS5

Western Digital SN850 1TB M. 2

Sony certified, has high speed and a heatsink out of the box — just what you need for the fifth curling iron

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Best for Xbox Series S — X

Seagate Storage Expansion Card

The only expansion option for Xbox, if you do not resort to dubious Chinese analogues

On Yandex Market — 15,990 R for 512 GB

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Insomniac Games talk about SSD, DualSense and 3D sound for PS5 | 06/21/2020

https://glas.ru/technology/45312-v-insomniac-games-rasskazali-ob-ssd-dualsense-3d-zvuke-dlja-ps5/

Insomniac Games talks about SSD, DualSense and 3D sound for PS5

Insomniac Games talks about SSD, DualSense and 3D sound for PS5 | 06/21/2020 | GLAS.RU

In «Insomniac Games» they talked about SSD, DualSense and 3D-sound for PS5

Most appreciated the high speed of switching between worlds, laying the merits on SSD. Representatives later confirmed the use of ray tracing. Insomniac Games has released a diary in video format, talking about the features and details of the new game. The diary was kept by Marcus Smith, the creative director of the company. As Markus explains, this time around, players are in for an epic thrilling storyline. According to the scenario, the fabric of the temporary […]

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Most people appreciate the high speed of switching between worlds, laying the blame on the SSD. Representatives later confirmed the use of ray tracing. Insomniac Games has released a diary in video format, talking about the features and details of the new game. The diary was kept by Marcus Smith, the creative director of the company. As Markus explains, this time around, players are in for an epic thrilling storyline. According to the scenario, the fabric of the temporary […] Most appreciated the high speed of switching between worlds, putting credit on the SSD. Representatives later confirmed the use of ray tracing.
Insomniac Games has released a diary in video format, talking about the features and details of the new game.
The diary was kept by Marcus Smith, the creative director of the company. As Markus explains, this time around, players are in for an epic thrilling storyline. According to the scenario, the fabric of temporary space has become damaged, which affects the appearance of rifts and takes players to where they have never been. More enemies, items and objects will appear in the gameplay. Markus thanked SONY for giving us the opportunity to take the game to the next level.
The bridge is out? A minor inconvenience with the Rift Tether. #RatchetPS5 #RiftApart pic.twitter.com/sx4eNNs8xL — Insomniac Games (@insomniacgames) June 20, 2020
It was the PS5 that made it possible to implement the idea of ​​a break in time, the proprietary SSD will make it possible to create worlds at lightning speed and transfer users to them.
Visit never-before-seen planets and alternate dimension versions of old favorites.