Samsung MZ FLV2560 M.2 NVMe SSD – Purchase Guide

Introduction

In today’s time, most individuals continue to opt for high-performance Solid State Drives as they’re significantly faster and more reliable than conventional storage drives like HDDs. If you going to buy flash storage like SSD, there are some vital aspects to look for including price, specifications, and performance (that we will discuss in the following article).

SSDs possess NAND flash memory to store data instead of magnetic platters like their HDD counterparts. The flash memory makes SSDs faster than HDDs. If you want to keep your budget under the limit it is recommended to opt for at least 256GB SSD in parallel with 1TB HDD (A combination recommended here will be discussed later in this blog). For instance, Samsung MZ FLV2560 SSD is one of the most frequently bought solid-state drives that offers 256GB of storage space and is available in M.2 form factor (formerly known as Next Generation Form Factor) with an NVMe interface, making it a perfect performance-grade SSD for PC users who want to acquire a budget-friendly and performance-intensive storage solution for their laptop or desktop systems with a motherboard that supports PCIe interface. Some of its technical specifications include:

• Product Type – M.2 (Next-Gen Form Factor) SSD
• Form Factor – M.2
• Capacity – 256GB
• MTBF – 1500000 hours
• Drive Interface Type – NVMe

5 Factors to consider before buying

Before marking a stamp on your purchase decision for a new SSD, it is recommended to consider the following aspects to make an informed decision and free yourself from facing any troubles later on.

1. Price Factor

As the new flash storage technology is becoming more common, the price structures of SSDs have experienced a significant deflate over the course last 10 years. At the start of the preceding decade, the SSDs were available at the cost of around $3.00/GB. Whereas, in 2022, you can easily find technically more superior SSDs around $0.1 to 0.5$ per GB depending upon its interface, form factor, and underlying technology. 

Keep in mind, if you choose higher capacities, they can cost you much higher but an SSD with optimum storage capacity like Samsung MZ FLV2560 256GB with NVMe interface can be much more affordable. You can further cut costs if you opt for an SSD with the same capacity but in 2.5 FF with SATA interface.

Due to underlying NAND technology, SSDs are more expensive than conventional mechanical drives like HDDs, and this difference is not negligible but they are remarkably better in performance and durability. A price gap between HDDs and SSDs has experienced a notable reduction since the debut of SSDs, which was much higher back in time. 

But the performance you will experience by choosing SSDs is more valuable when it comes to choosing between HDDs or SSDs. For instance, if you opt for a 256GB SSD like Samsung MZ FLV2560 to use as a boot drive in combination with at least 1TB SATA HDD, you’ll still notice the significant increase in performance due to reduced fewer boot times and applications load times.

In a nutshell, when it comes to budget-friendly, HDDs surpass SSDs in this domain. If you are tight on your budget and can settle with the average performance, go for an HDD. But SSDs have never touched the existing price bed before, as they are much more affordable compared to the time when they entered the market. Want to maintain a fine equilibrium between performance and cost? We recommend you choose 256GB Samsung MZ FLV2560 NVMe SSD to use as a boot drive for your operating system with 500GB or over 1TB HDD (depending upon your storage needs), you’ll still notice the difference!

2. Physical Aspects

Before settling down for a particular hardware product, you need to consider compatibilities from different aspects. Even the top-notch SSD of the world is of no use for you if your system fails to support it? Fortunately, all SSDs share almost the same configuration features (for the most part), But still you must consider the following factors to avoid any compatibility issues.

• Form Factor

Most of the SSDs available in the market are available in 2.5-inch form factor, making it a standard form factor for most laptop or desktop systems. But for most desktops, you need to opt for a 3.5-inch form factor, but you can curb this issue by using a 2.5 to 3.5-inch adjustment mount. But in modern PC cases, you can leverage from 2.5-inch SSD mounting racks.

Apart from the standard 2.5-inch form factor, there is another top-of-the-line SSD form factor namely M.2 (Next Generation Form Factor – NGFF). M.2 SSDs like Samsung MZ FLV2560 are much smaller than 2.5-inch Form Factor SSDs. M.2 Form Factor was introduced to be used in ultra-thin laptops. For their compact dimensions as well as super-fast speed due to the NVMe interface, M.2 SSDs are more expensive than 2.5-inch FF SSDs

• Connectivity Standard

Most Budget-grade SSDs normally offer a SATA interface. You can further choose between 3 Gbps SATA or 6 Gbps SATA depending on whether your motherboard has PCIe slots to support these connectivity standards. Nowadays, 6 Gbps SATA SSDs are more common, with 3 Gbps becoming obsolete with the passage of time.

Other high-end SSDs with an NVMe interface that is often available in M.2 Form Factor like Samsung MZ FLV2560 are directly installed on your system board PCIe slots. NVMe SSDs offer remarkably higher performance and data transfer speeds compared to SATA SSDs.

3. Performance

The plus point of choosing SSDs over HDDs is that SSDs are remarkably faster. With SSDs, you can have reduced boot-up times and applications launch times, and you can leverage from file transfer speeds up to 10 times faster.

It can be undoubtedly claimed that even budget-grade SSDs are far more superior to modern HDDs in terms of speed and performance. As we have discussed earlier, if the performance is your primary concern, go for SSD.

4. Storage Capacity

Another discriminating feature between SSDs and HDDs is their storage management process. HDDs have disk fragmentation features and SDDs manage storage using a methodology called garbage collection.

Data write operation on SSD is performed in the form of small data chunks called pages and a group of pages is called a block. At any given time, the pages in a block could be all void, all saturated, or share a hybrid state.

SSDs are designed in such a way that it is not possible for the SSDs to overwrite existing data (which is the case in HDDs). Instead of directly overwriting new data over existing data, the entire block needed to be made clear.

Apart from this, to prevent data loss, a piece of data written on the particular block must first be shifted to another block (a reserved space) before the data can be erased. Once the data is moved to another block and the particular block is made empty it becomes ready to store new data. This process of copy-move-delete-write is called garbage collection and it requires additional or reserved empty space for an SSD to perform this procedure. If you don’t have a reserved space, then the garbage collection fails to achieve its goal and your SSD starts losing its performance over time.

To keep the garbage collection working effectively, a recommended practice is to keep almost 20% of your SSD empty. For a 256GB SSD like Samsung MZ FLV2560, you should only fill up to 200GB of storage keeping an additional 50GB as reserve space to let garbage collection function properly.

5. Durability

Another concern of buyers while choosing SSD is its durability. Unlike HDDs, SSDs don’t have any mechanical parts making them an ideal solution for canceling noise and ensuring performance even under overwhelming workloads. The lack of mechanical components also ensures zero vibrations or any friction that can cause any damages or temperature hikes.

But the downside of having flash memory is they are more prone to failures caused by glitches in electricity, while the SSD is running. It can cause permanent data loss or even physical damage to SSD. 

But overall, the average operational life of an SSD is much higher than HDDs, ranging from 2 million hours (about 228 years) to 5 million hours or 570 years, known as the meantime before failure (MTBF).

Conclusion

If you are tight on a budget and performance is not of utmost concern, you can choose a spinning storage drive like HDD. For everyone else, it’s about time to upgrade to high-performing Solid-State Drives.

You can also deploy both storage technologies in parallel by opting for an entry-level and optimum-capacity SSD like Samsung MZ FLV2560 that offers 256GB of storage space and at least 500GB or 1TB HDD to store media files that you use less often.