3.84TB Micron 5210 comparison with 850 Evo

Hey everyone! I recently made a thread over on the Sager sub-forum asking for advice on whether to get an NVME or a 2.5" SATA SSD for mass storage for my P870KM1-G, mainly because I was worried about temperatures. The long and short of it is that temperatures should be fine regardless of which drive I choose, and that NVMEs are only that hot under high sustained loads that go on for a while.

But in that thread @1610ftw had suggested that I might want to look into Micron's 5210 QLC SSD because it was made for mass storage at a relatively low price. I found a deal off of CeX (a good used electronics retailer here in the UK) for the 3.84TB model for £250 (or ~$330), so I thought I'd get it ( Note that its price brand new is much more expensive, ~$500 or more normally from what I've seen). I couldn't believe what I got as this drive is literally brand new according to CrystalDiskMark:


Satisfied, I ran a couple of benchmarks via CrystalDiskInfo, and got these results:


I thought the 4KiB writes were a bit slow so I thought I'd benchmark my ~2 year old 1TB 850 EVO too, and here's the comparison:


So it is a bit slower on the writes, but probably way faster than any HDD can get me. Plus it's almost 4TB so I can't complain at all.

Out of curiosity, I thought I'd try out Micron's Momentum cache which leverages your RAM to see how much faster my drive would get. Well. Just look at the figures:


Those speak for themselves to be quite honest.

But I'm not gonna use Momentum cache. I don't need these speeds at the moment, and if I do, I'll just get an NVMe SSD.

Anyway, thought I'd share this great deal, and also in case someone else is considering this SSD in the future. Also, I'd like to point out that another reason I got this SSD beyond mass storage (and the great value) is longevity. TweakTown reviewed this and recommended it for enterprise applications, and they also handily converted Micron's endurance figures. Look at their review here for figures and tests. Long story short, a 5.6PB endurance rating is way better than most consumer SSDs are, and for the price, you can't really say no.

Hope this info was good and helpful! And also thanks again to @1610ftw for letting me know of this drive!

 

Good stuff mate. Glad you found a solution that didn't break the bank. I use a QLC drive for the gaming consoles and it gets the job done. However, for anything important on your computer, I'd still recommend at least putting them on a reputable brands drive like your Samsung. For long term storage I still use a spinner as one of the back up protocols, along with a cloud, ssd, and the nas.

 

Definitely. I also backup everything to my OneDrive. I just wanted to have fast-ish mass storage as well.

Also, Micron is fairly reputable, right? They make memory modules and controllers for so many companies. And they own Crucial.

 

Thanks for letting us know, it is good to get a follow-up to such a story once in a while.
I am a bit surpsied that even with 1 GB writes the drive is that much slower than the Samsung but still for the money you paid you definitely can't complain, great deal!

As for the momentum cache the numbers are crazy - better not to get used to those

 

I'm not sure how much we can trust CrystalDiskInfo with those reported numbers if the drive was Secure Erased (I don't do Secure Erase myself, ever), those stats may have just been reset too? (Anyone who does use Secure Erase can confirm either way)?

As for the Momentum Cache, I have used it in the past with hardly any issue (maybe needed a reboot once in a while). Vastly superior to Samsung Magician and 'Rapid' mode which is/was quite buggy and even corrupted Windows back then on various test systems too. (Which is why I currently install it, check for any firmware upgrades on any Samsung drives and then promptly uninstall it immediately).

Great buy and a perfect fit for your use-case, agreed!

With 32GB of RAM in your platform, I would fully set up the system as you need it and then enable Momentum Cache afterward (at least in testing mode - have your backups handy!).

The read speed improvement is worth it and very noticeable.

Thanks for your great post! Now, enjoy!

 

Thanks!

I also was a little skeptical of the info from CrystalDisk, but I'm hoping for the best. It didn't seem to change any info when I sanitized it using Micron's Storage Executive utility. But I'm not an expert, so maybe Secure Erase with a different utility might reset SMART details.

 

SMART data shouldn't change with a Secure Erase unless there is a bug in the micro-controller..
There was a rash of some OEM Samsung SSD on ebay due to a bug that allowed to reset/restart the SMART counters, but that was a bug, not suposed to work like that.

And Micron isn't a no name brand, they make their own flash and RAM chips..

 

I cant seem to find that drive anywhere for 4TB, can only seem to locate 8TB which is too much for me personally and financially lol

 

LOL

As I mentioned, it was a lucky deal that I found on a used electronics store here. These drives are actually quite a bit more expensive, as are most large capacity SSDs.

And who knows, Micron's working on denser QLC layers, as are Samsung. So if those come out, either they'll have decent price-tags for these capacities, or the older ones (like the Micron 5200 series, the newer Micron 5300 series or the Samsung 860 QVOs) might drop in price.

If you want these, I'd recommend just keeping an eye out for sales or on the used market (if you're lucky).

 

Micron is decent, but it ain't Samsung #1 or SKHynix #2. I use several crucial mx500 1tb and 2tb drives as my secondary. I also prefer micron over sandisk any day as I've completely blacklisted sandisk from my arsenal after many failed drives over the many years of photography.

As for micron making their own chips etc.. True, however, I have discovered a major marketing stunt by crucial, which made me lose respect for them in the ram department.

I bought a set of ram for my water cooled Ryzen build and on the outside of the ram is printed: crucial by micron... However.... The memory chips being used are actually Samsung!

In reality that's actually a good thing as Samsung chips are always preferred over micron, but morally it's really misleading and it just makes you shake your head due to catching crucial cheating.

This misleading stunt by crucial of relying on Samsung's quality memory to boost their brand is really petty, because it misleads people to think that their good ram is micron when in reality it is not. The perception of it being good is due to it containing Samsung B-die memory chips!

Anyhow I thought that was a major *face palm* moment so crucial has definitely lost some points in my book due to lying and artificial boosting of their ram.

 

Re: The brands, Thanks for the info! It's good to know the best ones in the business. I knew Samsung would be there, but I didn't know SK Hynix were also there. I only know them for their HDDs. And it's good to hear that Crucial is pretty good.

Re: Crucial/Micron's stunt. Yeah, that's pretty bad. I didn't know they pulled that and that'd definitely make me get a little sour. If they did that with a "better" chip, who's to say they wouldn't pull that with a "worse" one for a budget offering or any offering really.

 

Yes indeed. Samsung has always been the World's #1 and SKHynix has been a close second at #2, just more behind the scenes.

Apple has always used Samsung or SKHynix memory chips in their premium products (premium is subjective I know lol as they went down hill a lot over the last several years) but back when they were good, they only used those two vendors to supply their memory and ssd storage for good reason. (Samsung MLC based storage.) -

Razer's upper end laptops are another example as they use Samsung memory (ram) in their higher end products; although some of their cheaper offerings may use micron as expected like other low to mid range product lines. + Budget line.

Aw/dell had a horrific run with using cheap toshiba ssd's in their laptops that would overheat and cause stuttering.. It was a mess.. Then they started to offer Samsung PM981's which were Awesome.

The 2080ti GPU's contain either micron or Samsung memory chips and it's well known in the overclocking world that Samsung is far superior to micron.

Ex. The 2080ti Kingpin and Nvidia Super cards are all Samsung memory, which overclocks much higher than micron based cards.

The list goes on and on....

With all that being said, I'm happy with my crucial mx500 secondary drives and I have several of them. I bought them on SALE when it was a hair under $100 for the 1tb mx500 2.5", but just this past BF the 1tb Samsung 860 Evo was on sale for $100 so I bought those to phase out the mx500's... Between the two the 860 Evo is much preferred all around especially at the same price. I'll use the mx500's in an external enclosure for a scratch drive.

However, my primary drives are all Samsung from PM (tlc) ssd's, SM (MLC) ssd's, 1tb 970 Pro Nvme m.2 (primary), 2tb 970 Evo Plus m.2 NVMe, etc...

As for the stunt with crucial, yea that was really interesting. It was the craziest "oh no they didn't," moment. It didn't seem real at first... Then the reality kicked in and I was shocked. "Cowards I thought lol... What kind of stunt is this? Shame."

To have "crucial by micron," printed on the product, then to contain and be using Samsung memory is like a bad singer that can't hold a tune, using a ghost writer and singer to claim fame...

Absolutely low class and just wrong in every way....

It baffles me that there are so many people out there (who own the Samsung based ballistix ram kit with the false writing on the outside) with the false illusion that their micron ram is oh so good, when in reality it only is because it has Samsung B-Die!

Astonishing. Lol.

 

Micron is definitely a good brand, they make fantastic SSD's

 

we gotta go big now!

https://www.servethehome.com/phison...xua66eKV5FeDSz0eXRs3rZntkp6wtFEvyeYIcLJeQSlMM

16TB SATA SSD finally, this probably be the only company that will do this, rest will all go PCIe.
8TB NVMe for QLC. more m.2 ports the better for faster storage though unsure what the saturated speed is since its QLC, sequential write at a constant 3 GB/s is prob not possible.

thank god my laptop has 3x m.2 ports. 1 for optane boot, rest sata + nvme ports for these drives. only about 48 TB, barely enough.

@tilleroftheearth @Spartan @jclausius

 

Most definitely. Was surprised that 2TB NVMe was the plateau for a bit. Hopefully 2020 brings bigger drives!

 

if samsung isnt going to make them someone else will see the market for cash, albeit less still worth it.

thing is looks like they are using micron qlc which i havent heard of, intel should be ahead in terms of qlc and density right now.

optane boot drive, optane work drive, everything else 3D QLC/TLC for decent endurance storage device all sequential read/writes only.