SSD Test 2017: These are the best SSD bargains of the year

SSD-Test 2017: The prices of fast memories have fallen dramatically in recent years. 500 GB SSDs are already available at 120 Euro. But what about the quality and performance of the cheap giants? We hunted the bargains through our lab test course.


Good cells, bad cells


In the year 2010 a commercially available SSD with an "affordable" capacity still costs a good 3 euros per Gibibyte. Today we arrived at a price of 30 cents. Within a few years, the cost of this advanced storage technology has shrunk to one-tenth. This is a real bang for the IT industry, even for the IT industry. The production of memory chips has naturally grown and has become a mass product - that helps to reduce costs.


And technological advances in production have also contributed to reducing the manufacturing process to ever smaller sizes - 15 nanometers are now the standard for flash drives. What is most desirable with CPU production - smaller structures mean less heat generation, more space for transistors and thus more power - is not necessarily exclusively associated with advantages with flash memory. A CPU does not need to store data. But an SSD already - and that is the cracking point. Memory cell is not equal to memory cell.


If the market determines the price of a product, then it is only with a great marketing effort, it is possible to enforce this "price dictate". American noble carriages would be the parade example here. In the case of hard disk storage, which migrates into a PC or the laptop, the customer obviously does not care about marketing or image gossip. In other words, if the performance is right, that SSD is bought, which is cheaper. Done. But this inevitably leads to the fact that in all SSDs the cheapest technology migrates. And these are the so-called triple-level cell memories (TLC cells) in flash memories. Samsung's 3D-V-Nand and Intel / Microns X Point are out-of-the-box.


When it comes to the quality of the built-in memory cells, one differentiates generally four types. SLC stands for single level cells, these are the most expensive but also the highest quality memory cells, since only two charge levels are generated in them, which allows the highest number of read / write operations. This is followed by eMLC and MLC, which stands for (enhanced) Multilevel Cell. Four or more voltage levels are generated per cell. The error and failure rates are higher and the access times are slower than with SLC. TLC memory cells are provided with eight voltage levels and can thus store three bits per NAND cell.


This is advantageous for the capacity of the data carrier. However, the service life as well as the failure rate fall to the lowest level of all. Of course, TLC memory cells are installed in all favorable SSD flash memories, with the exception of some 3D NAND variants. However, these low-cost SSD types also deliver high performance when compared to traditional mechanical hard drives - with the exception of a specific case, but later on.