You probably already know about different types of SSDs in terms of NVMe versus SATA, and some of you
may even know about the different layers per cell, like MLC, TLC, QLC and all that. And some of you
geniuses may even know about DRAM versus DRAM-Less SSDs. But I would be willing to bet for one
example, that almost none of you know whether your SSD is a so-called "open channel" SSD or not. I
know, I sure didn't before researching everything for this video, but by the end of this one, you
probably should be pretty much an expert on all the different factors on what you might wanna look
for when buying an SSD, so you can get exactly what you're looking for and not be swindled
out of buying something cheap when you thought it was the top end. Now, before we jump in, listen
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All right, so the first property or criteria, whatever you wanna call it, that you will look
for when going to buy an SSD, you probably already know. NVMe, versus SATA. So I'm not
gonna focus much time on this. SATA is like that older technology that was created for hard drives,
so it's not really optimized for SSDs. It's kind of slow, tops out in the hundreds of megabytes,
like 500, 600. Whereas NVMe use the PCI express lanes which connect more directly to a CPU,
way faster, thousands of megabytes per second, way lower latency and actually was designed with
SSDs in mind. So basically if you can get an SSD that is NVMe that's always is one to go for versus
SATA. You just have to make sure that you actually have a couple of m.2 slots, if that's what it's
using, free on your motherboard or maybe you have a PCI slot that you can add one in there too. Of
course, with an adapter. Next up, we can talk about the layers per cell. Now this one is still
pretty common knowledge, I think people have at least of some of these, but I still think it's
important to go over a little bit more in detail what these are. So basically I'm referring to the
number of bits of information stored per flash cell. So if it's one bit per cell, then that
means that the information is gonna be stored in certain voltage levels. So either on or off,
and they're kind of far apart, so it's really easy to distinguish whether the thing is supposed
to be a one or a zero. However, you can actually split it up and add more voltage levels basically,
to store multiple bits simultaneously. And the number of bits per cell that you're gonna store,
is gonna determine whether it's SLC single layer cell, MLC, multi-layer, TLC, triple layer, QLC,
quad layer. And I believe they're even eventually probably gonna do PLC, penta level, five levels.
But really the only advantage of a higher level of per cell, is a higher density of storage,
and it's usually cheaper, but that's the only advantage. The more layers per cell you have, the
less durability you get, by kind of a long shot, and also it's typically kind of slower because
the more you have to distinguish between several different layers. It's more error prone slightly,
so I guess there's more correction going on and it's just a little bit slower, but really the main
thing is that change in durability. So what you wanna always do when you're looking for an SSD,
is the durability rating in terms of TBW, terabytes written, or maybe total bites written,
I always forget which one it is. And also you may see it as disk writes per day, so it's either the
total number of terabytes you can write to it before it's expected to start to degrade
or for disk writes per day, it's how many times you could write the full disk's worth of data
in the span of the warranty time. So you kinda have to do a calculation there. So as an example
to show you the durability difference between QLC and TLC, I can look at, for example, Sabrent's
Rocket SSDs, and these are their PCIe 4.0 for both of them. For the TLC drives, three bits per cell,
you get a durability of 1800 TBW, terabytes written, total bites written, whatever. And
for QLC, same capacity drive, one terabyte, just 200 terabytes. So, one ninth the durability. And
it's the same ratio for the two terabyte ones, 400 terabytes verse 3,600, I mean, it's insane how
big of an endurance difference, it is. Now, does this mean you should never go and buy a QLC drive
ever? No, I actually have one in my computer, but I bought it specifically as a data storage
drive, where I kind of wanted it to be cheap and it specifically is gonna be having data that is
not gonna be rewritten a lot, so I know that it'll be fine. And 400 terabytes realistically for a lot
of people is more than you're probably gonna be using. However, that being said, I would still not
buy it for a main drive, where it's gonna be for your main operating system, you're gonna be doing
most stuff off of it, I would probably only buy a QLC if it's purely gonna be used for storage,
not running any programs off it, stuff like that, personally. Okay, so next up, let's talk about
DRAM on the SSD. And this one, I am gonna go a little bit more in depth into. So basically,
DRAM on the SSD, it's the same type of thing as in your computer, the RAM. It's very, very fast,
random access memory, though it is volatile, so it can't be used to store data permanently, but while
the thing is running, it can be used for very quick data access, so it can be used for mapping
all the data on the SSD and then looking it up, so the operating system can get the data that it
requests. And it can also be used as a cache, so if the data is coming from the OS faster than it
can write to the SSD flash memory normally, it'll take in all that data really quick into the DRAM,
and then it'll just feed it out to the flash memory as fast as it'll accept
and keep it as like a buffer. And one of the important concepts to understand is on the SSD,
there's something called a flash translation layer, so this is the thing that basically does
the mapping. I believe it's called L2P table, logic to physical. And what it does is the OS,
it doesn't know what's going on in the SSD, it's kinda like a black box. So the OS will say,
"I wanna write this much data to the SSD." And the flash translation layer will come in and it'll
say, "Okay, here, I'm gonna put it somewhere." And the SSD will create its own map in the RAM
and just kind spread it all out all over the SSD. So not really in any logical order other than
wear leveling to spread out the data so that each cell kind of gets used, a similar amount of time,
to improve the life of the SSD, which is a lot different than on a hard drive,
where it kind of writes sort of in the same region, of different data. But also another
important thing to understand is the translation layer does stuff like garbage collection,
moving the data around because the way flash memory works, is there are relatively large blocks
of data, that if you want to write any tiny amount to it, you have to first erase the whole thing,
to write anything to it. So that means that if there's a tiny bit data coming in
and there's only cells that have data in it, that means you basically have to back up all the data
in that block, erase it and then write it again or write it somewhere else. So that means you're
constantly moving data around, even if you want to just write a little bit of data. And that's why
having DRAM is useful because you can take data off really quickly, put it back whenever you need
and move stuff all around really quickly, there's like that buffer zone. And the OS, again,
doesn't know any of this is going on, it just sends in the data. And usually what I've seen,
if an SSD has RAM on it, typically the ratio is gonna be about one gigabyte of RAM
per terabyte of flash storage. However, the big thing to know is that not all SSDs have any DRAM.
Yes, DRAM is really good for quickly taking in data from the OS or moving stuff around, but
it can also be a DRAM-Less SSD, where it is uses its own flash memory for that kind of stuff. Yeah,
it's probably gonna be faster than a hard drive, but it's not gonna be as fast or as low latency as
a SSD that does have a DRAM cache. Then again, it will probably be a little bit cheaper, but these
days not so much. However, there is one more thing with this to consider, which I don't see a lot of
people talking about, which is that a lot of SSDs these days should be able to take advantage of
something called a host memory buffer, HMB. This is something that was introduced in the NVME 1.2
spec, which I believe is back in 2014 and it has to be supported by the OS, but Windows has,
since 2017. And basically what it does is instead of having the RAM on the SSD itself, it actually
uses some of the RAM on your computer. And it's not much, it's only like up to maybe 64 megabytes
tops or something like that, but it could be 16 to 32 megabytes, not much at all. And it basically
uses this for storing the mapping, instead of on the flash memory, which is a lot slower. So it's
kind of in between a DRAM-Less and a RAM SSD. And there was actually a study in 2020 that actually
compared these different operating modes. So basically they compared SSDs with RAM and
DRAM-Less and also DRAM-Less plus HMB. So these are the original graphs used in the paper and the
models and info about the different drives they used, but I went and added some colors labels,
to make it easier to interpret. So basically what you're looking at is for each graph,
the three on the left with the darker background, are the DRAM-Less and the three on the right,
do have DRAM. As for the colors of the bars, each bars for a different SSD and they're colored so
that the bars of similar color are SSDs that are similar hardware, as described by the writers of
the paper. They're not exactly the same drives, but they're sort of similar specs. So this means
that drives A, C and D are similar, except the D has DRAM, B and E are similar, except the E has
DRAM and F is just a highest-end SSD they put in and it does have DRAM. And then the shaded
versus unshaded parts means it had either HMB on or off. And what I'll do is only highlight one
color at a time, 'cause that's, I think the most logical to just compare the most similar hardware
you can. So for the sequential read, the DRAM was way faster, except for this blue bar, I don't
know why it could be because whatever controller algorithm they had was pretty good in that one,
but with the yellow at least, the DRAM clearly was faster and even with the HMB, it kind of
made little or no difference. For the sequential right with the light workload, DRAM and DRAM-Less
seemed to be pretty much exactly the same even in the heavy workload, the yellow bars are similar,
but the blue bar is actually higher, but again it's not even similar hardware, so I wouldn't
compare these. For random read, the light workload without HMB, the yellow ones are way slower.
And then with HMB, actually pretty much catches up to be the same as with DRAM and then the blue is a
little bit higher actually. With heavy though, even with HMB, the yellow is only about half
of with the DRAM and the blue is also way lower even with HMB. And with random write, the host
memory buffer basically again makes no difference even in the heavy, but the DRAM also only seems to
be a slight improvement anyway. So basically, the conclusion I draw from this, is sometimes
having a host memory buffer on a DRAM-Less SSD, which I think most should at this point,
can sometimes make it comparable to DRAM, but having a DRAM on SSD is really gonna be the best.
All right, now, finally, let's talk about that term I used before, open channel SSDs. Basically,
this term is more of a very general term. It just means an SSD that doesn't have a flash
translation layer on the SSD itself, and instead uses the host for doing all of that stuff. So how
is this even different from host memory buffer? Well, from my understanding with the host memory
buffer like I said, it doesn't have that much data on there, it's only like few tens of megabytes
and then I believe the rest does still happen on the flash memory. Whereas with an open SSD,
everything basically happens on the computer, so the CPU does a lot of the garbage collection,
stuff like that, as well as the mapping, as opposed to it being on the SSD at all. However,
with an open channel SSD, it's still gonna use information and kind of work together with the
SSD. The SSD will still provide information about itself, such as which cells have been written to
different times, stuff like that. So basically the computer will have a lot more information to
work with and that creates one huge advantage, which I'll talk about in a second. But again,
this open channel is more of a general term, it's not really any specific "strategy" you might say.
Now I know that probably didn't clear up anything, so next we can talk about one of these actual
strategies that is a type of open channel SSD strategy, which is ZNS, Zoned Name Spaces. And
even though basically all of the work happens on the host instead of on the SSD itself, it actually
has some major advantages and actually could be better than just having any DRAM on the SSD. And
this ZNS is actually a new set of commands that was added into the NVMe protocol. As a super
simplified explanation, the ZNS protocol basically allows the SSD and the computer to really work
together at a really low level. So instead of the SSD just taking in the data and writing it sort of
randomly to evenly spread it out across the SSD, you might have one file that's all over the place,
basically with ZNS the SSD and the computer, will assign different "zones" of blocks of information,
and then it will be written to sequentially. And having these pre-designated zones where
you know that all the data is gonna be stored together sort of, the big advantage there is
it's way faster to write sequentially and it's also way faster to read sequentially. And also
it is way more durable, because you don't have to constantly move files around, the computer knows
ahead of time, all right, we're gonna write all of this data into this zone. And the only reason this
works from my understanding, is that the computer, the host, knows way more information about what
is being written to the SSD than if it was just kind of sending it to the SSD and having it deal
with it itself, writing it all over the place. The computer, for example, might know that this is
data that is gonna be constantly accessed, so it's gonna store that maybe differently from a file
that it knows is not gonna be accessed frequently, whereas the SSD doesn't really know that,
so it just kind of spreads it all out the same. So this means that the computer is able to arrange
the data in these zones, in a way that it will not have to move data around nearly as frequently,
'cause it's kind of like the master planner. And this is really important because what I
was talking about out before with the durability of an SSD, the terabytes written basically is not
always a 100% accurate. It's more of a estimation. And that's because there's something called "write
amplification". Like I was just saying multiple times, when you write even a little bit of data,
that might require moving even more data. So you might write one gigabyte of data and it
ends up actually writing four gigabytes of data internally. So a lot of times, if you are writing
a big, big stream of data onto an SSD and say your SSD speed is 500 megabytes tops and then all of a
sudden it drops down to like 100 megabytes, inside the SSD, it probably is still writing total,
about 500 megabytes a second, but a majority of it is being used for moving data around and then
it can only actually write 100 megabytes of new data per second, if that makes sense. Anyway,
the big advantage of ZNS is basically, you can get to the point where there's effectively almost
no write amplification, because everything's kind of pre-planned and it is way more smart
about assigning stuff together. And there's also some additional commands and protocols
like "appending" and having different statuses for the blocks that I didn't fully understand,
but there's a lot more that goes into it than the way I described it. Now, unfortunately, ZNS drives
at this moment are not really a consumer thing. They're apparently starting to come on the market
for enterprise. Samsung in 2021 did actually release a ZNS drive, though it's only for their
enterprise drives again. But depending on when you watch this, it might be a thing. So I definitely
wanted to talk more about it, 'cause I wanted to future proof this video. So I think by now you're
probably way more equipped to go out and decide what kind of SSD you want. You should be pretty
confident that you'll know everything pretty much to look for. Thanks again, to Masterworks for
sponsoring this video, again, be sure to check out the link in the description so you can get started
investing in blue chip artwork. So definitely let me know you think down in the comments, give this
video a thumb up. If you guys wanna keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is one where I was
talking about five reasons that are unexpected, for why your hard drive might be filling up. So
it definitely should be useful. If you guys wanna subscribe, also be sure to enable notifications
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in the rest of your subscriptions. So I'll see you in the next video and thanks for watching.