Yeah but it looks much fancier so to the average Joe that's worth another $30! It's a strategy that Apple has used and been praised for for decades. Performance means nothing to the computing masses. It's just those of us on IT forums that care.
No "average Joe" is even looking at NVMe SSDs. This costs double the price of a GOOD SATA SSD, and frequently fails to even meet that performance level.
I saw that skipped right to the conclusion for the (predicted) disappointing results. If they screw up the engineering for the sake of appearance like that, I was sure the rest of it would be disappointing as well.
The thing is that the heatsink is protruding between the adhesive pads, so it presumably makes contact with the chip, however without any thermal interface material it is likely that the heatsink severs to insulate and worsen thermal performance than to improve it.
Probably it is a mix of both, yielding somewhere between barely improving to barely "detrimenting" thermal performance, making it mostly a pointless gimmick.
Like everyone else, ADATA is well aware how low average consumer IQ is, thus attempting to make this fly.
On the bright side of things, adding some thermal paste would easily make the cooling solution functional. Although I doubt the product performance will get any less pathetic because of that. They didn't put that heatsink there because it is throttling as a side-effect of being very fast. They put it as a cosmetic feature, that much is evident from the clumsy implementation.
For some reason I thought the black insert was plastic, but it actually doesn't say either way. If plastic, well... You pretty much said what I was skirting around, it's all cosmetic like so many of the weird and funky heat sinks/heat spreaders you see on "enthusiast" gear. There to look cool, doesn't actually do much of anything, either because it's not really needed, the device with the heat sink doesn't actually get all that hot, or it's no more effective than a plain old simple heatsink.
I am absolutely perplexed that anandtech doesn't specify the material of that insert. I mean that is so goddamn relevant. And I'm actually wondering what adata's comment on that insert would be. They should have asked them.
As for needed, all tests have shown a good heatsink on the M2 SSD's does indeed do a world of good. And tests have also shown that half the companies in the world that supply such, either bundled or third party, can't figure out such a simple thing as a piece of aluminium on a freaking small rectangle. I mean how complex is it? But again it's been shown that if you put a good one on it it's always noticeably beneficial.
I went to go look at what you were talking about and my first reaction when I saw the graphs was "Ouch! WTF!". It barely matches the performance of a SATA SSD, putting it on NVMe is just a waste.
It is very hard to undersell samsung, they make the memory, they make the controller, they make the pcb. Vertical integration.
Now imagine that you have to buy each of those components from someone else, pay profit margins on the components, then put work into making a product out of it, and sell that product with a profit margin for yourself.
It is a pointless endeavor. In a better world, they won't even bother to compete with a vertically integrated company like samsung. But in the world as it is, there are plenty of idiots who will buy this, one way or the other, either for the gimmicky but nice looking heatsink, or it will get it shoved down their throats by an OEM who has a deal with the manufacturer to bundle the product.
The negative aspect of this is that after so many years of domination, samsung will significantly cut on the purchase value of their products, because it still has tremendous lead and could let some of it melt in order to materialize as profits. Upcoming SSDs from samsung, even if a tad faster, will be disappointing compared to what we used to get in the past. Get ready for a slump of TLC and QLC, endurance and warranty period cuts.
People aren't idiots. They are just uninformed. There is a big difference. For my uninformed friends who either can't or don't want to do the research, my recommendation is always "just buy Samsung and don't worry about it". Or if they want reasonably priced but larger storage with "OK" performance then it's "just buy Crucial and don't worry about it.
If you know specifically what you are looking for and know what trade offs you are willing to make there are other choices that fit certain niches. But even knowing what I wanted/needed I ended up with a 512 GB 960 EVO and a 750 GB MX300 (got on prime day last year for $139 :)).
Tomayto, tomahto... If you make a purchase uninformed, that's idiocy right there.
IMO everyone is an idiot, including me. It is not a matter of idiots or non-idiots, at this stage of evolution we are all idiots, it's just that some are more idiotic than others. And the first step to overcoming idiocy is to acknowledge it :) The gradation of idiocy is acknowledgement of it, ignorance of it, mistaking it for something else and finally taking pride in it.
A vertically integrated company like Samsung still wants to make a profit on its investments into R&D, so the fact that all of the R&D is done by one company doesn't directly help costs. It does remove some of the costs associated with developing and maintaining relationships between companies. For example, Silicon Motion has to market its products to SDD manufacturers, which is an overhead that Samsung's controller development group doesn't have. Another possible cost savings for Samsung is that it knows it's controllers will never be used with anything other than Samsung flash, so it doesn't have to develop a controller that is compatible with multiple brands of flash.
Even a proper heatspreader doesn't cool the underlying components, to do that you need fins to dissipate heat. Add fins to a heatspreader then you have a heatsink. I'm not saying heatspeaders are worthless, but they don't do much unless attached to something else.
The heatspreader will work, if it has good contact with the chip, which it doesn't.
The purpose of the heat spreader is ... well... to spread heat. This gives you more surface to displace heat. Fins serve to increase the head-spreading effect further, although for this product in particular I doubt fins are necessary. In fact, as I mentioned above, the way the heatspreader is implemented and the pathetic performance itself suggest that the cooling solution is 100% unneeded, and present purely for cosmetic purposes.
Information on the die/channel configuration is lacking in many SSD reviews by Billy Tallis. This information is especially important for SSDs using non-power-of-2 density NAND chips, which often result in awkward die/channel configurations that consequently lead to low performance. Tallis rarely discusses this.
It is not enough to simply state "... severely reduced performance potential due to not being able to populate every channel of the controller with NAND flash chips". I expect more from AT articles. If not every, how many channels are populated? How many dies are in each channel? Are they evenly distributed? Tell us exactly how the channels are populated and then you can go on to judge whether that is good or bad.
As another example, Tom's Hardware in their Intel 600p review pointed out the drive was able to use only 6 of the 8 channels. Tallis did not. To me, that is not a trivial piece of information. That is THE reason the 600p does not reach its "performance potential" IMO.
While I too would be interested to see the information you are seeking, I don't think its a critical flaw in the article. For those interested in making a buying decision, its the performance scores and the price and the price/performance equation that matter. Other information is useful if you want to know why one performs better than another. However, with nearly all SSD reviews these days, I usually end up just skimming through to the conclusion. If its a SATA drive, all I really want to know is where is its price/performance ration vs a Samsung 850 EVO. If its NVMe then the price/performance comparison is against the 960 EVO.
However....here is something I really would like to see more of. When drives are tested I would like to see the same drive tested in different sizes...which is kind of getting into what you are talking about indirectly. For example, in all the charts you can see a pretty substantial difference between the 1TB and 250 GB 960 EVO's. It really would be nice to see a 512 GB in there. A drive that wins at 1 TB may not win at 512 GB. Unfortunately when I was buying the 512 is what was in my price range and I had to do some digging for information on that. THG actually did review all three sizes.
Assuming the conclusion is right about next year's controllers being massively better than the current generation they can't get here soon enough. None of the controllers currently available to the down market OEMs are remotely competitive with samsung's last few generations of parts.
Adatas strategy seems to be: make many bad SSDs with fancy names and hope someones buys them by accident. Otherwise I can't explain this and the preceeding drives.
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futrtrubl - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Disappointing.jabber - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Why? You wouldn't notice if it could do 3500MBps either.futrtrubl - Thursday, October 26, 2017 - link
Because it does less but costs more. What isn't disappointing about that?jabber - Thursday, October 26, 2017 - link
Yeah but it looks much fancier so to the average Joe that's worth another $30! It's a strategy that Apple has used and been praised for for decades. Performance means nothing to the computing masses. It's just those of us on IT forums that care.FullmetalTitan - Thursday, October 26, 2017 - link
No "average Joe" is even looking at NVMe SSDs.This costs double the price of a GOOD SATA SSD, and frequently fails to even meet that performance level.
jabber - Thursday, October 26, 2017 - link
You'd be amazed at what I see 'Average Joe's buy. Shocking at times."Why did you buy...that?"
ddriver - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
That's some pristine engineering idiocy right there, having the heatsink make contact with only a small part of the chip area deliberately.ddriver - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
"GAMMIX" - more like "gimmix" LOLrrinker - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
I saw that skipped right to the conclusion for the (predicted) disappointing results. If they screw up the engineering for the sake of appearance like that, I was sure the rest of it would be disappointing as well.ddriver - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
The thing is that the heatsink is protruding between the adhesive pads, so it presumably makes contact with the chip, however without any thermal interface material it is likely that the heatsink severs to insulate and worsen thermal performance than to improve it.Probably it is a mix of both, yielding somewhere between barely improving to barely "detrimenting" thermal performance, making it mostly a pointless gimmick.
Like everyone else, ADATA is well aware how low average consumer IQ is, thus attempting to make this fly.
On the bright side of things, adding some thermal paste would easily make the cooling solution functional. Although I doubt the product performance will get any less pathetic because of that. They didn't put that heatsink there because it is throttling as a side-effect of being very fast. They put it as a cosmetic feature, that much is evident from the clumsy implementation.
rrinker - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
For some reason I thought the black insert was plastic, but it actually doesn't say either way. If plastic, well... You pretty much said what I was skirting around, it's all cosmetic like so many of the weird and funky heat sinks/heat spreaders you see on "enthusiast" gear. There to look cool, doesn't actually do much of anything, either because it's not really needed, the device with the heat sink doesn't actually get all that hot, or it's no more effective than a plain old simple heatsink.Wwhat - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
I am absolutely perplexed that anandtech doesn't specify the material of that insert. I mean that is so goddamn relevant.And I'm actually wondering what adata's comment on that insert would be. They should have asked them.
As for needed, all tests have shown a good heatsink on the M2 SSD's does indeed do a world of good. And tests have also shown that half the companies in the world that supply such, either bundled or third party, can't figure out such a simple thing as a piece of aluminium on a freaking small rectangle. I mean how complex is it? But again it's been shown that if you put a good one on it it's always noticeably beneficial.
jjj - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Don't understand how one imagines a product with that seq read perf.trparky - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
I went to go look at what you were talking about and my first reaction when I saw the graphs was "Ouch! WTF!". It barely matches the performance of a SATA SSD, putting it on NVMe is just a waste.r3loaded - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
If your product is going to get curbstomped in performance by the 960 Evo, at least try to price it at a significant discount vs the 960 Evo.ddriver - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
It is very hard to undersell samsung, they make the memory, they make the controller, they make the pcb. Vertical integration.Now imagine that you have to buy each of those components from someone else, pay profit margins on the components, then put work into making a product out of it, and sell that product with a profit margin for yourself.
It is a pointless endeavor. In a better world, they won't even bother to compete with a vertically integrated company like samsung. But in the world as it is, there are plenty of idiots who will buy this, one way or the other, either for the gimmicky but nice looking heatsink, or it will get it shoved down their throats by an OEM who has a deal with the manufacturer to bundle the product.
The negative aspect of this is that after so many years of domination, samsung will significantly cut on the purchase value of their products, because it still has tremendous lead and could let some of it melt in order to materialize as profits. Upcoming SSDs from samsung, even if a tad faster, will be disappointing compared to what we used to get in the past. Get ready for a slump of TLC and QLC, endurance and warranty period cuts.
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
People aren't idiots. They are just uninformed. There is a big difference. For my uninformed friends who either can't or don't want to do the research, my recommendation is always "just buy Samsung and don't worry about it". Or if they want reasonably priced but larger storage with "OK" performance then it's "just buy Crucial and don't worry about it.If you know specifically what you are looking for and know what trade offs you are willing to make there are other choices that fit certain niches. But even knowing what I wanted/needed I ended up with a 512 GB 960 EVO and a 750 GB MX300 (got on prime day last year for $139 :)).
ddriver - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
"People aren't idiots. They are just uninformed."Tomayto, tomahto... If you make a purchase uninformed, that's idiocy right there.
IMO everyone is an idiot, including me. It is not a matter of idiots or non-idiots, at this stage of evolution we are all idiots, it's just that some are more idiotic than others. And the first step to overcoming idiocy is to acknowledge it :) The gradation of idiocy is acknowledgement of it, ignorance of it, mistaking it for something else and finally taking pride in it.
Lolimaster - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
For sata the WD/Sandisk 3D SSD's seems a like a better option than the Crucials.KAlmquist - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
A vertically integrated company like Samsung still wants to make a profit on its investments into R&D, so the fact that all of the R&D is done by one company doesn't directly help costs. It does remove some of the costs associated with developing and maintaining relationships between companies. For example, Silicon Motion has to market its products to SDD manufacturers, which is an overhead that Samsung's controller development group doesn't have. Another possible cost savings for Samsung is that it knows it's controllers will never be used with anything other than Samsung flash, so it doesn't have to develop a controller that is compatible with multiple brands of flash.Flunk - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Even a proper heatspreader doesn't cool the underlying components, to do that you need fins to dissipate heat. Add fins to a heatspreader then you have a heatsink. I'm not saying heatspeaders are worthless, but they don't do much unless attached to something else.ddriver - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
The heatspreader will work, if it has good contact with the chip, which it doesn't.The purpose of the heat spreader is ... well... to spread heat. This gives you more surface to displace heat. Fins serve to increase the head-spreading effect further, although for this product in particular I doubt fins are necessary. In fact, as I mentioned above, the way the heatspreader is implemented and the pathetic performance itself suggest that the cooling solution is 100% unneeded, and present purely for cosmetic purposes.
znd125 - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Information on the die/channel configuration is lacking in many SSD reviews by Billy Tallis. This information is especially important for SSDs using non-power-of-2 density NAND chips, which often result in awkward die/channel configurations that consequently lead to low performance. Tallis rarely discusses this.It is not enough to simply state "... severely reduced performance potential due to not being able to populate every channel of the controller with NAND flash chips". I expect more from AT articles. If not every, how many channels are populated? How many dies are in each channel? Are they evenly distributed? Tell us exactly how the channels are populated and then you can go on to judge whether that is good or bad.
As another example, Tom's Hardware in their Intel 600p review pointed out the drive was able to use only 6 of the 8 channels. Tallis did not. To me, that is not a trivial piece of information. That is THE reason the 600p does not reach its "performance potential" IMO.
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
While I too would be interested to see the information you are seeking, I don't think its a critical flaw in the article. For those interested in making a buying decision, its the performance scores and the price and the price/performance equation that matter. Other information is useful if you want to know why one performs better than another. However, with nearly all SSD reviews these days, I usually end up just skimming through to the conclusion. If its a SATA drive, all I really want to know is where is its price/performance ration vs a Samsung 850 EVO. If its NVMe then the price/performance comparison is against the 960 EVO.However....here is something I really would like to see more of. When drives are tested I would like to see the same drive tested in different sizes...which is kind of getting into what you are talking about indirectly. For example, in all the charts you can see a pretty substantial difference between the 1TB and 250 GB 960 EVO's. It really would be nice to see a 512 GB in there. A drive that wins at 1 TB may not win at 512 GB. Unfortunately when I was buying the 512 is what was in my price range and I had to do some digging for information on that. THG actually did review all three sizes.
DanNeely - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Assuming the conclusion is right about next year's controllers being massively better than the current generation they can't get here soon enough. None of the controllers currently available to the down market OEMs are remotely competitive with samsung's last few generations of parts.MrSpadge - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
Adatas strategy seems to be: make many bad SSDs with fancy names and hope someones buys them by accident. Otherwise I can't explain this and the preceeding drives.