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We have seen plenty of companies flock to the SSD market in recent years and now there is a new member joining the ranks- Sony is set to break into the SSD market with its own line of SATA based drives.
Technically, Sony has some experience with SSDs but it has usually limited its product to Asian markets, so this marks its international debut, with the launch of the SLW-M series of drives, built in Japan. These SSDs use a SATA 6GB/s interface and come in two sizes, 240GB and 480GB.
As far as performance goes, Sony's offerings advertise some decent numbers, with up to 560 MB/s read speeds and up to 530 MB/s write speeds, which puts it on par with plenty of other mainstream offerings currently floating around today.
Unfortunately, we don't know what controller or NAND flash Sony is using with these drives nor do we have word on pricing in the US or Europe. However, we do know that the drives come bundled with a license to Acronis True Image 2015 for those looking to clone their drive and switch to an SSD without losing data.
KitGuru Says: Sony has experience with SSDs in the Japanese market but this is the first time it has announced a drive for other countries. It will be interesting to see if Sony can compete with the likes of Samsung in this area. What brand do you use for SSDs? Would you consider going with Sony?
Can’t lie, looks smart.
In 8 months they’ll probably be breaking out.
I’ve had Crucial, Kingston and Samsung SSD’s. I’m not really picky.
well… how are they gonna make me pick their SSD and not a samsung evo?
I don’t have any SSD because are completly overpriced and home users don’t need that speed for nothing.
I’ll go with any brand as long as it gives good value
After all the problems I got from Sony VAIO laptop, I’m never going to buy it from Sony.
Sony sucks. Customer service was too bad not for me only, for all the people who were that day when I visited Sony VAIO service center.
Dude, VAIO division has been dead since years!
You clearly live in the past. SSDs are definitely useful for home users to run their OS and applications on. A 120GB is quite cheap, and most home users don’t need bigger, much much better than 500GB hdd.
Good price/GB. I’m in!
If you are smart enough to do your own homework, you would never go with a TLC based SSD like the Evo.
There are no reported/widespread issues with Samsung 850 Evo series. The main issues were on the 840 version.
I could thank you for the info, but with this retarded attitude of yours… well…
A retarded statement like “How are they gonna make me pick their SSD” deserves a retarded reply, this is capitalism, not dictatorship, you buy whatever you want to buy and not complaint about it, you are welcome!
Is not only the issues, is the performance consistency that is lacking. If you use it for the OS alone, good. But you use it as a main drive with lots of writes and moving files along, it will get sluggish, still faster than a mechanical hard drive but unfavorably compared to similarly priced MLC drives.
asking why to pick something instead of something else is “retarted statement”?
you are really stupid…
One thing is picking, another thing is make me pick, no one forces you to pick anything and no one cares about your purchase decisions.
if someone make you pick something, it doesn’t mean he forced you. Maybe he told you why it is better to make that pick…
So I asked why to pick A instead of B, but noooooo you jump to conclusions because you are unable to think and understand.
Right, cause I speak “Make me pick and picking up is not the same thing”. No one forces you to buy anything, all is related to appeal and functionality within a budget. And unfortunately no TLC SSD’s are as good as MLC counterparts regarding consistent performance after several write cycles.
Do you have actual third party data/review that supports such claims? I have genuinely not read anything related to these issues on the 850 EVO series and planned to purchase the 1TB version this year. Every review on it I’ve read is favorable and write performance is also top notch, even compared to the 850 Pro version:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/6
DOn’t you read your own links? Don’t you see the 250GB on the bottom of the charts? Sure that the 1GB comes out at top, but its cause it has more NAND modules, making it more parallel and offsetting the inherent issues of TLC.
But what about the TLC nature?
Do you think its a good idea to pack 3 bits per cell? What about the power amplification issues? Or when they need refreshing due to retention issues? Or their lack of durability compared to MLC counterparts? TLC is just a way to squeeze more data on a cell to cheap out manufacturing costs, nothing beneficial to us, just the manufacturer.
Ya, but I am not arguing in favor of the 250GB TLC drive. The point is there isn’t sufficient evidence that I have found or you have provided. You simply stated theoretical durability.
Even the worst last generation SSD can easily handle 600+ TB of lifetime writes. By the time the Samsung 850 Evo dies from excessive writes, it’ll be so outdated (we already have 1500-2000MB/sec M.2 SSDs). Besides, it has a 5 year warranty.
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
I am not an engineer or an expert on SSDs. My point is I haven’t seen any legitimate study that shows that the average user is better off buying a Samsung 850 Pro over the Evo drive if he/she simply intends to install games on it. It’s not being subjected to random server workload or queues or anything.
I highly doubt that the Sony SSD is more reliable than Samsung’s SSD.
Why not? Sony can use reliable NAND like Toshiba or even the Samsung ones and rebrand it as Sony (I think that Sony also make flash technology). Also the term outdated is subjective. I have a very old OCZ Vertex 4 which is over 4 years old and yet, it can deliver reads and writes of over 500MB/s and better consistency than typical TLC drives. While users that uses a SSD for the OS alone might not have any issues with TLC, power users like me that moves a lot of files around (I do a lot of archiving/media encoding) and I had the Samsung 840 Non-Pro with the latest firmware fix and while it would work fine specially on reads, after several write cycles it would run below 60MB/s. I end up selling it and buying a Crucial MX100 which is a midrange MLC based drive and I am a happy camper. While its average write speeds hoves around the 350MB/s mark, it always stays there (Unlike Samsung 840 which would start at over 400MB/s and then drop consistently until garbage collection would catch up)
Thanks for sharing all of that data. Very informative. My point still remains though the issues with 840 Evo drives are not showing up in the 850 Evo drives. You may be right that they could show up later but it’s been almost 2 years since 850 Evo drives launched. I can see how you have a negative feeling after getting burned by a TLC drive.
In fact, Samsung just announced 750 Evo TLC drives and it seems they have fixed most of the issues that were found on the 840s.
“The 16nm TLC NAND is the successor to Samsung’s 19nm TLC that had a troubled tenure in the 840 EVO. More than a year after launch, 840 EVO owners started reporting degraded read speed when accessing old data that had not been written recently. Samsung acknowledged the issue, then provided a firmware update and Performance Restoration tool less than a month later, but had to issue a second firmware update six months after that. The 750 EVO inherits the results of all the work Samsung did to mitigate the read speed degradation, and there’s no reason to expect it to be any more susceptible than the competition using similarly dense planar TLC built on Toshiba’s 15nm process or Micron’s 16nm process.”
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10046/samsung-releases-750-evo-sata-ssd
Either way, I am not in a rush as I have an SSD in my system already and am eyeing a solid 1TB SSD.
In real world testing, 850 Evo is a champ, even moving large files. I don’t plan to archive anything on the drive. It will be used primarily for OS + Micro 4/3 pictures and video games.
You can see some drives can beat the 850 Evo in bang for the buck but their real world performance is underwhelming:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/08/18/sandisk_ultra_ii_sata_iii_ssd_review/7#.VsSPiPl95D8
Same here, my Alienware laptop runs fine with the 1 year old Crucial MX100 and my gaming desktop still rocking with that Vertex 4 128GB LOL