This man is truly one of the GOAT tech KZfaqrs Thanks for never disappointing, Chris!

This should be held up as the "Gold Standard" by which all technical explainer videos should be judged. Clear, concise, broad yet detailed coverage of the topic, and lots of "why" mixed in. I tip my hat, sir.

These are the aspect of computing that Linus Tech Tips cannot explain. Or if they can, they just gloss over gleefully for the sake of click bait without going in-depth. Good thing we have ExplainingComputers to explain things thoroughly.

This is what I love about this channel, you learn something new every episode. Even if you think you know all there is to know, along comes Chris and says 'Hold my beer...' Top stuff, top creator. Have restful Sunday Chris!

I retired from a nearly 40-year career as a computer and network admin. This has always kept me close to the hardware and how the operating system uses it, especially in the earlier days through the evolution from mainframes and minicomputers to common standards-based ISA and PCI systems with mass produced expansion cards. This particular tutorial is excellent, and has expanded this old dog’s understanding of non-rotating storage devices. I was vaguely aware of the cycle-based limits on lifespan, and now I see the details far more clearly. Thank you..

This should be required viewing for EVERYONE who owns a PC. Mr. Barnatt makes it so simple to understand these concepts!! So many of my computer customers have no clue, and never worry about maintenance of their machine.. all they do is cry when things break and they don't backup. I do my very best to have my best customers watch as many of your instructional videos!! You do more for responsible computing than any youtuber that I have ever seen!! Keep up the great work, and we need to call you DR. BARNATT!!!

This is award winning level education! Thank you Chris for a thorough yet understandable overview of SSD technology. You are an educator extraordinaire! Cheers from Canada!

God damn, it's like the fog has cleared. I am now a more savvy consumer. Brilliant!

Sunday Morning Solid EC

I once bought a dram-less Sata SSD. Never again. Saving a few coins isn't worth it. Better to buy one with dram.

Oh look 👀 Chris is in a solid state of excitement driving home his ssd’s!

We've come full circle. I subscribed when you last talked about SSD and now, how the landscape has changed.

Cadence. That's just 1 thing about what I love about this channel.

Very good, Sir! Now pop down to the local establishment for a well-deserved drink!

Another excellent video, with lots of great information! Here's hoping that SSD size and price will soon be able to compete with HDDs for NAS use. :)

Your ssd explanations are the best on the net.

There is one HUGE negative to D-RAM less drives that Chris didn't mention. They CANNOT be used in external drive enclosures/external drives because they require your pcs RAM to function. I found this out the hard way recently, and it took hours of hair pulling and frustration to figure out WTH was happening. Don't buy D-RAM less drives! The minor savings are not worth it.

Been watching this channel for 5 years and one thing i can say I love about this channel is the very retro, feels like 1987, computer theme song that happens in the opening.

Thanks for explaining that so clearly Chris. It's very helpful to understand the reasons why certain cheaper ssds might not be as good of a deal as they appear, although for general use they are okay. I have a good quality system nvme drive and a decent larger drive for game storage. I do a little bit of video editing but nothing that requires massive reads/writes. I might see if any good deals pop up before Christmas as drives like the Kingston Fury and Western Digital 850X have been a nice price in recent months. As Samsung recently brought out their 990 Pro drive the 980 Pro has also seen discounts. These cost so much until fairly recently so it's nice to see prices come down. Long may it last! 😁

Thank you Chris!

Recently found this channel and he deserves a lot of praise. I came here wanting to learn about DRAM-less, and he definitely covered it. Plus, I learned a couple other things I didn't know about SSDs. The added graphics are really nice. 10/10 channel. Easy upvote from me.

I think it's getting close to 10 years since i first started watching your videos Chris. Thankyou so much.

Excellently explained once again. In just under 15 minutes I'm thoroughly and masterfully informed. Life expectancy of SSDs is what really does worry me the most actually. I just don't know what exactly is to expect in terms of practical anticipation defined in years of use. I can see SSDs for starting up the OS but best leaving working data, files and backups on a physical quality platter such as WD, so it seems.

I can’t believe this video is free. I learned so much, thank you.

A very thorough and clear explanation. Some time ago when I read EVO 860's slow down when copying a file larger than ~60 GB (I think it was that value) I changed to the Crucial MX500 as that one has a dynamic SLC cache and doesn't appear to slow down.

This is great. Before this video I knew 1) what SSD stands for 2) they wear out 3) they are generally faster than HDDs. Everything else was learning for me. I use an SSD as my system drive but I do store other stuff on there as well so I'll be taking a look at how much it changes and consider wear.

Chris you are a real treasure. 👏👏👏

this is an excellent video dropping legit knowledge on what we use everyday. it’s a refreshing step away from a lot of other youtube pop “tech” channels unboxing buy-this buy-that consumerism videos, which has a time and place… where anyone can open a box but not much knowledge is gained.

I think most manufacturers hide most of the info on their SSDs and will only tell you the max read and write speeds and IOPS, and no information about dram or cache or anything 😓

Thanks for more very useful info Chris. It seems that as a rule of thumb in consumer SSDs the TBW figure is roughly half the numerical size of the drive and given should give many years of normal use before failure. Most SSDs also have 3 to 5 year warranties. But as a professional I have seen SSDs fail without warning long before reaching anywhere near their advertised TBW or warranty period. And once they do (unlike with magnetic drives) you can more or less forget about recovering any data from them. Admittedly in the same breath I had a WD 4Tb magnetic drive catastrophically fail two days after buying and partitioning it, and it was completely unrecoverable. So I guess having a good backup strategy is increasingly important these days.

This is by far the best explanation of SSDs I’ve seen. So thank you for that. As a next step, can someone pls create an online spreadsheet for SSDs with columns like Type of NAND (SLC, TLC, QLC) | SLC Cache | Interface | Max expected speed | Measured Max Speed | DRAM-less |. It’ll make buying process so much easier

Well done presentation Chris!

Enjoyed the video. One thing you didn’t talk about with the newer drives is heat. PCIe4 &5 drives generate a lot of it. I tried to use a 4TB WD SN850X in an Orico 10Gbps external enclosure as a backup drive. Over a period of about 30 minutes it overheated and did not throttle, rather it just crashed and needed to be reformatted (MacOS). So best to avoid external enclosures and use these with a heatsink and active airflow.

Now the Samsung 990 PRO 4 TB has been dropped to $299! I bought 4 and made a 16 TB RAID level 0 using the OWC 4M2 Express enclosure . It is a joy! Thanks for this superb article.

Wow, I never watch any video about SSD that are digestible by my BRAIN. Love your work.

Chris, I upgraded my SSD to my newly built computer. WD Black NVMe Game Drive 2TB GEN 4 from a Samsung 970 EVO PLUS NVMe 500GB. Corsair 110R Case, Intel Core 12th Gen Inte Core i5-12400, 2500 MHz 6 Core 12 Logical Processor Gigabyte H610M S2H DDR4 H610/Intel LGA 1700/Micro ATX/DDR4/Single M.2/PCie 4.0/USB 3.2 Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 DRAM 3600MHz Desktop Memory Kit. Gen1/Realtek GbE LAN/Motherboard) EVGA 750 GD, 80+ Power supply Thanks for the great content and information on SSDs.

OS running on SSDs has been so much better than disk drives...faster, more reliable, never corrupted or crashed. Disk drives were a constant problem.

Very good video(short, clear and pretty much all encompassing) except Chris didnt mentioned one aspect of the SDD'd - data retention. All SSD's can retain the data a certain amount of time while not powered, usually around a year, after that it starts to lose the data stored in it. This argument ties well into "No SSD is a permanent data storage" statement at the end of the video.

Thanks for making sure TBW was in there. It's good to note that TBW is often used to limit warranty (like "1200TBW or 3-years, whichever comes first") but that DOESN'T mean a drive dies when it exceeds rated TBW. It does mean it's less reliable at storing data long-term + power-off. But I have SSDs at 3x their TBW still working with no errors.

This was a very useful video Chris. I bought a DRAMless M.2 SSD a couple of years ago to be the system drive in an HP desktop. I knew there were tradeoffs but you explained them well in this video.

For someone strongly thinking of getting an SSD for an old HP15, Mac Mini 2012 and my PS5? That was super helpful, truly. Thank you.

when I saw the title, I thought: yes, I know SSDs. after I saw the video, I now think: okay, I know a lot more about SSDs. which is actually quite nice 🙂

Clear and concise explanations are why I started watching EC!

I only recently took the plunge and added SSDs to a couple of my computers. They're quicker now. Not crazy fast but definitely snappier.

Man the level of explanation, salute.

Another masterclass from our leading teacher... I've finally understood how the SSD in my DELL laptop behaves during file transfers (the size of the cache memory...). I'm sure many of Christopher's other admirers have gained new knowledge thanks to this update. Definitely material for computer science students! Thank you for this!

It would be very interesting to see the computer setup you use as your daily driver, a tour.

A very succinct, easy to understand explanation.

No bullshit channel, I love that. Just 1.25x to get rid of awkward silences at the end of the sentences.

Fantasticly informational video! Thank you.

Thank you, that was interesting. specifically, the fact that leaving an ssd less than 90% full so it can shuffle data around easier. I already did that because hard disks liked that to prevent fragmentation so it's nice to know that this still holds true but to prevent wear instead.

I really needed this video, great timing! TX

Not that this technology existed back then, but I had a flashback to watching Open University as a kid while watching this and I absolutely loved it. Awesome as usual!

And here I thought there was something wrong with the speeds on my new Samsung 970 EVO PLUS SSD as its functioning perfectly normal as demonstrated in this highly informative video. Thanks for the valuable tech lesson Chris! 👍

Of course in some laptops like Apple Macbooks, the NAND flash chips are directly soldered to the logic board which means you don't any choice as to upgradeability.

wow already sunday"s afternone !! have a good week next all viewers !!!!

Excellent video finally I can make sense of all the ssds on sale. Thank you for sharing your knowledge

I'm going to watch this in full when I get home later.. I'm certain that it will clarify the world of SSDs for me...

Good morning from the states I have to say this is one of your best videos in terms of knowledge really liked it...

You explain things so well to the layperson - it’s a talent, I appreciate you.

Thank you for explaining this topic!!

Thank you very much for the information and great presentation sir🙏

Still using the same boot drive 240GB Kingston SSD from 2015 that was slated in reviews on release. Doesn't seem to be any reduction in capacity. A many-times upgraded and updated Windows still up and fully running in

Very interesting video and this will be a great help in buying a new ssd, thank you for all the time you put in to your channel.

I love that you've kept your early 1990s technology style theme. You're brilliant!

Thank you for all the hard work you've put in bringing us interesting weekly content. Today I've certainly learnt more about SSD's which I still find quite a fascinating subject, a happy Sunday to you & the crew :)

Nicely done. With manufacturers (ahem Samsung) throwing around acronym's like they were candy, you've cut through the technobabble hype and made choosing an appropriate drive easier (even for the lay person). This video should be made mandatory for anyone looking to purchase a SSD drive. i realize this was specifically about SSD drives, a few wise words on the interface's would be helpful, especially on the M.2 format. Perhaps something for the future.

You've covered everything one would need to know when in the market for an ssd upgrade or expansion (being already familiar with basics like form factors, etc). Briliantly clear, concise, and devoid of the typical YT faff. Many thanks for your efforts here!

Love the way you speak and show the examples of the workings. And here we meet again on exciting Sunday 🌞🖥️ Greetings!

Excellent explainer Chris - I've been banging on about some of this online on forums for ages, now I don't need to bother - I can just link to this video...😁

Hi Chris. Thanks for the update. Quite refreshing indeed.

Brilliant video, thank you very much for educating us

Excellent job gathering volumes of technical data and presenting it in a short, concise video that the layman can understand!

Thank you, again for sharing you knowledge!

Thank you so much Chris! Very useful video.

Great overview. I would add a few things. I prefer to decipher TBW as "Total Bytes Written" rather than Tera Bytes Written for the simple reason that with older drives, manufacturers specified in GB, and now with the big capacity ones we get into PB territory. In the old magnetic platter days, we called the sustained write speed that a drive fell back to once the fast cache is saturated "media speed" and the same concept applies to SSD now, as you explain. A S-ATA III drive with a 6 Gbps (750 MB/s) interface may have a media speed of only 50 MB/s. Especially in the flash memory for high resolution * high speed cameras we see a need for very high media speeds or sustained write speeds. The write speeds on flash memory cards, generally, is burst speed and only valid as long as the cache is not saturated. We also see cards that have higher sustained speeds with increasing capacity and this is not the consequence of more cache - because sustained - but likely something like RAID 0 or dual I/O controller chips inside the card. Over-provisioning - Having worked in enterprise IT, I can add that a way to raise the number of P/E cycles in flash memory devices is to just put more memory in than the user and operating system (host computer) will see. So the usable capacity is what is on the label, but under the hood, for wear levelling, there is, say, 50% more. In the round-robin storage of data in fresh blocks (even after wiping a file from the FAT) the added capacity then results in more P/E cycles or higher TBW. Reduced overprovisioning - we also see capacity numbers now that are outside the standard 2^n (n an integer) numbers. Imagine an SSD that has cheap memory cells but for TBW got 50% more - say it's 512GB on the label but has 256GB overprovisioning - and this SSD is sold for 1.00X. What has happened in recent years is that manufacturers had less complaints about SSD failing too early from consumers, so they shift part of the over-provisioning to usable and label. The 512GB now becomes 640GB with 128GB under the hood and the price now becomes 1.25X - for the same material. The most important most overlooked property of SSD and flash memory is how long data retains integrity when the SSD/card is taken off power. Some cards have data integrity protection and maybe some SSD too. Ask a collective of people with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and quantum physics for a number and you may get 7 to 7,000 hours as an hour. In the light of wear levelling and consumers buying SSD that have low P/E cycles, today's advice to never switch a computer off really makes sense. If you need reliable storage with a high number of P/E cycles (TBW) today, then rather like buying SSD variants, I would buy CFexpress Type B cards from a brand with a very good reputation (such as Delkin Black and Power series). Put these in a Thunderbolt reader/writer and its fast, very fast too.

The best explanation of every concept. What an excellent video, especially on the meaning of bit level acronyms. I've been buying Samsung Pro SSD's exclusively for many years. I did not know they were retiring TLC. I guess I'll have to keep buying older drives. I have TLC SSD's that are 15 years old at this point and used almost daily. All still functional.

Superb update. I'm in the market right now. 4 TB Samsung Qlc for 180€. Incredible. I paid this amount for my very first SSD in 2010. It was 120gb. 40 times the price per GB back then. By the way, this new 870 QLC (the review in video is the 860 model) has a TBW of 2.800, but that is just for the 8TB model. For the 1TB model Samsung states 1.5 Million Hours Reliability (MTBF). Here are the numbers for all sizes from Samsung itself: 360 TBW for 1TB model, 720 TBW for 2TB model, 1,440 TBW for 4TB model, and 2,880 TBW for 8TB model. I am going to use the 4TB as NAS supplement and backup to my new router which has a USB3 port. (Asus ax4200, strongly recommended). So this disk will outlive the TBW limit I'm sure.

Hey Chris. Another great educational video. Even though I have been in the various tech industries for a long time, I still learn something new each time you present what are very relevant subjects.. This tutorial on SSD's is especially relevant, as they seem to change every time I purchase one. I too have always used the old one-two approach to computer storage: SSD's for the operating system, HDD's for data storage. It has always worked well. Thanks for making it clear what to look for when purchasing a new SSD. At least for now! Thanks for all your hard work!

I've learned modern SSD's HAVE to do internal wear leveling in order to maintain performance. I have a 2TB Samsung EVO that started freezing when doing write operations and even benchmarks showed as low as 100MB sec writes. The drive barely had 5 TBW and only 1/2 capacity was in use. I ran manual windows TRIM operations and nothing helped. After doing lots of research I've learned SSDs do their own internal 'cleanup'. Moving data around and clearing cells to optimize write performance on new operations. It took several weeks and now write speeds are back to normal. Apparently this is all done through the SSD controller and is a 'black box' that we have no control over. This happened after doing a couple hundred GB of write operations. Read speeds were unaffected.

Outstanding video. Very clear as always. Thanks, I never understood the inner workings and why some SSD's seem faster for large writes than others.

@ExplainingComputers love your end of a video

Thanks again Chris, for all this info. It makes your head spin, trying to think of all the aspects, while choosing your next SSD.

Very well done and easy to understand overview of the technologies!

Wonderful. I've kind of picked up a lot of that by reading around over the years, but it is so good to have it all laid out clearly, with good guidance on what matters for which uses. Mostly, for my low intensity uses, it evidently doesn't matter much at all, except that this is one area where bigger really is better.

Thanks Bob Denver!

This is so bloody interesting…. Always been a fan of Samsung Pro’s 👍👍

Thank you so much for this video! It answers many questions for me that will prove useful in maintaining the equipment at work!

Sunday greetings! Thank you for explaining computer's SSDs. I will need to watch this one a few times to get it right/write :) Hidden manufacturers specs drive me batty. Stay well!

Have an slc drive in a openbsd firewall and it's been running for over 6 years without issues. But it's not being written to alot. Great explanation!

I don't know, Chris... SSD's are bulky in size. A 5¼-inch floppy is much more sleek.

Super interesting as always Chris. Big thanks for educating us.

Thank you for explaining all of this :)

That was the best lowdown on ssd's i've ever seen or read. Detailed and easy to understand. 👍

Such an important landmark video. The more I learn about SSDs the more I am proud to have my 14TB CMR HDD with 500mb cache (AFD hard drive, non-shingled) properly formatted, partitioned aligned etc. The problem is most consumers were unable to distinguish CMR from shingled drives. In addition most consumers were unable to purchase the expensive larger capacity drives which usually harbour the largest amount of cache, and unable to align the partitions correctly due to scarce software as well as tech knowledge . These 3 problems arose around the same time SLC SSD started to appear in the markets. Hence those who tried SSD never looked back at HDD. However if you have the tech knowledge to be able to purchase a high capacity CMR+AFD then format optimally , partition optimally and align it correctly AND you don't need daily video editing / aaa gaming then you probably won't need to enter the utter mess that the SSD drives have become: Overrated poor quality soldered low quality chinese QLC chips hiding behind their 1)DRAM, 2) SLC cache, 3) terabyte written capacity (TBW) 4)wear levelling caching behaviour 3)HMB cache. Ugh!

Thanks for this and all other videos! I always enjoy watching them and learn a lot!

One word for you ......Brilliant.!

Ah yes, a new updated explaining video about SSDs 🤓🔝 thanks again!

There is so much more to this than I realised. A great explanation. Thank you.

Very enlightening, thank you!