Aurora R8, Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2, compatibility

That drive will work fine.  It's advisable however to perform a clean install of Windows rather than cloning.  If doing a clean install, please ensure that you switch BIOS drive settings from RAID to AHCI. Also, the Samsung drives come with proprietary IO drivers; you don't need them for the drive to function but if you do install them, it optimizes read, write, and cache operations resulting in a small performance boost.

Oh gosh, I never even realized the marketing terminology used until @prix57 posted this question. I don't think this is very relevant but if you are in the market for a true MLC SSD, this isn't it. 3-bit MLC is really TLC.

@GTS81 

LOL... the best analogy I've ever seen on the interwebs for the different types of nand flash is the following:

SLC SSD is like single payer health care whereas MLC SSD is like Romneycare/Obamacare with TLC being more like Ryancare. The more you pack into one block, the more conflicts, latency, unreliability, uncertainty, and risks are increased going from SLC to MLC to TLC.

What would be a preferred SLC m.2 hard drive to get vs this one?

As far as I know, there is no viable option to buy a consumer SLC SSD drive. Best that money can buy is true MLC (2-bit) which is the Samsung 970 EVO Pro.

Honestly speaking, you'd be hard pressed to push TLC and even newer QLC drives to the point of failure. However, the very fundamental of non-volatile storage itself is deterioration over time as the operation of program and erase happens over the life of the device. You can guarantee that from the day a storage cell is created, it is promised an eventual failure. The industry has come a long way in improving the characteristics of the device, and great algorithms to spread out the burden among the many cells on a NAND chip, even across NAND chips. So that's my honest 2 cents.

I'm using a 2 QLC drives now. Not feeling the drives as a performance bottleneck. I backup regularly onto a HDD NAS so I'm less concerned of a failure in any of the drives.

I'm using an Adata SX8200 Pro 1TB NVMe drive at the moment. Jury is still out though; when new with just Windows on it and nothing else, I was getting the advertised read/write speeds of roughly 3500/3000 respectively. Now that approximately 10% of drive space has been used, speeds have dropped significantly to 2700/2500 or thereabouts.

TRIM command does nothing to improve performance.  Only thing truly positive I can say about the drive is that it's cheap. It's a TLC drive with MLC chips used for cache.

Jury is still out though; when new with just Windows on it and nothing else, I was getting the advertised read/write speeds of roughly 3500/3000 respectively. Now that approximately 10% of drive space has been used, speeds have dropped significantly to 2700/2500 or thereabouts.

Looks like a significant degradation of program (write) vs read. At 10% utilization, both SSD and NAND firmware should not be doing so much housekeeping as to degrade performance so much. I wonder if it has something to do with that MLC cache filling up and not getting erased (as erase is much more costly in NAND operation compared to program/ read).  Are you able to find any firmware update on ADATA's site?

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@GTS81 wrote:

1. As far as I know, there is no viable option to buy a consumer SLC SSD drive.

2. Best that money can buy is true MLC (2-bit) which is the Samsung 970 EVO Pro.

3. Honestly speaking, you'd be hard pressed to push TLC and even newer QLC drives to the point of failure.

4. However, the very fundamental of non-volatile storage itself is deterioration over time as the operation of program and erase happens over the life of the device. You can guarantee that from the day a storage cell is created, it is promised an eventual failure. 

 

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1. Agreed (that is old-tech).

2. Agreed. 

3. Agreed (for most consumer use cases) .

4. My solution is to leave about 10% un-partitioned raw free space and the end of the drive. I think you are good as long as the SSD controller never runs out of space for re-mapped cells.

No firmware update exists for the 8200 Pro as of yet and Adata's SSD toolbox does absolutely nothing in terms of maintenance. I'll give Adata a call tomorrow because I'm wondering the same thing about the MLC cache. 

I remember having read somewhere before that this phenomenon can also affect similar constructed drives and that initiating trim usually helps. In this case, it didn't do squat. 

I'm in the same boat about deciding to switch my boot drive to this Samsung Evo plus 2 terabyte drive. Do you guys have any advice about this I read a lot of good reviews about this drive nothing but good stuff said about it not cheap either