I've definitely got my money's worth from that HDD purchase, and since the system is usually used for streaming, I haven't really needed anything faster or larger. The only real complaint is the noticeable sound of the older drive's motor and seeking heads.
Since cheap TLC based SSDs are now available for just over $30, I figured I'd take the plunge. Also since reviews for the lower end TLC drives are a lot less common, I'll try to correct that.
I settled on the Mushkin ECO3 120GB. The price was right and the specs were competitive for this segment. Yes I could have doubled the storage for $20 more, or moved to an MLC based drive, but price was king here. I'm replacing a working solution for an already low-power system.
The actual drive is of solid metal construction - it actually has some significant weight to it. Not more so then your average HDD, but definitely more then some of the plastic-enclosed SSDs with small PCBs. Looking at the screw locations on doing my best to peak through the mounting holes shows what appears to be a full size PCB. For warranty reasons I did not dissemble the drive (yet).
The SATA and power connector use the actual drive PCB for the connector, there's no soldered on connector. I’d imagine this was done to cut costs, and seems functional, but may cause issues with frequent connect/disconnect cycles. Likely not an issue.
I could not find any published flash memory endurance numbers (TBW).
From what I can find online, the details are:
Controller: Silicon Motion SM2256
DRAM Cache: 128MB
NAND Flash: TLC (Possibly SandDisk)
There is no dashboard or other software available from Mushkin.
Formatted capacity is 111 GB (120,031,539,200 bytes)
Crystal Disk Info shows a good number of SMART attributes. Firmware version is 01126A.
My drive reported a temp of 11C for the duration of all tests. With ambient being around 21C, either the temp sensor is faulty in my unit, or multiple software tools can't read the temp correctly.
Tests were performed on an AMD 970 chipset (SB950 southbridge with SATA3 6Gb/s ports). A newer platform could have marginally better performance figures.
First order of business is determining the size of the "SLC" cache. Most cheap TLC drives utilize a subset of their TLC flash and write to it at a rate of 1 bit/cell (versus the normal 3 bit/cell) for a performance speed-up. It's assumed that later when things are idle, the SSD will move this data to TLC memory. Writing a lot of data to an empty drive that has been idle for a bit is hopefully a decent method of determining this, but there's some things going on auto-magically behind the scenes - so it's still an estimate.
HD Tune shows the delta in write speed between this SLC cache and the regular TLC memory. The cache appears to be around 2.4 GB in size. The first 2.4 GB is written at what looks to be just over 300 MB/s, peaking at 377 MB/s. Once this is exhausted, write speed will vary between about 53 MB/s and 75 MB/s (averaging closer to 75, with dips to 53).
Text output from CDM w/ IOPS
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 553.452 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 451.892 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 277.322 MB/s [ 67705.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 241.179 MB/s [ 58881.6 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 471.884 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 408.721 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 24.943 MB/s [ 6089.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 51.998 MB/s [ 12694.8 IOPS]
Overall I think this drive will meet my use case well. The only time I expect to overflow the SLC cache would be during OS install, some major software install, or the like. Even then, the source of this data has to be taken into consideration. Short of another SSD, this system won't ever see data throughput of 400+ MB/s outside of benchmarking. It also appears that the TLC write speed (after the SLC cache has been saturated) is still faster then the old HDD's best-case-scenario transfer rate. When you add in access time that's an order of magnitude faster, silent operation, and reduced power usage, it becomes clear that it was the right time to do this upgrade.
