Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB & 1TB TLC NAND Drives Tested 156
MojoKid writes "Samsung has been aggressively bolstering its solid state drive line-up for the last couple of years. While some of Samsung's earlier drives may not have particularly stood-out versus the competition at the time, the company's more recent 830 series and 840 series of solid state drives have been solid, both in terms of value and overall performance. Samsung's latest consumer-class solid state drives is the just-announced 840 EVO series of products. As the name suggests, the SSD 840 EVO series of drives is an evolution of the Samsung 840 series. These drives use the latest TLC NAND Flash to come out of Samsung's fab, along with an updated controller, and also feature some interesting software called RAPID (Real-time Accelerated Processing of IO Data) that can significantly impact performance. Samsung's new SSD 840 EVO series SSDs performed well throughout a battery of benchmarks, whether using synthetic benchmarks, trace-based tests, or highly-compressible or incompressible data. At around $.76 to $.65 per GB, they're competitively priced, relatively speaking, as well."
Re:Call me old fashion (Score:2, Informative)
Well said.
Nothing lasts forever. If a hard-driven SSD lasts 3-4 years, I don't really care that if it's used up some large fraction of it's useful lifetime, because I'm going to replace it just like I'd replace a 4 year old spinning disk.
And the replacement will be cheaper and better.
And if the SSD was used to serve mostly static data at the high speed they provide, then it's not going to have used up its write/erase cycle lifetime by then anyway.
Re:Call me old fashion (Score:2, Informative)
Wearout is not a significant failure mode. Nearly all failures are to due to non-wearout effects such as firmware bugs and i/o circuit marginality.
Re:Call me old fashion (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, many sites have done the maths on such things. The conclusion "finite life" is not the same thing as "short life". SSDs will in general, outlast HDDs, and will in general die of controller failure (something which affects HDDs too), not flash lifespan.
The numbers for the 840 (which uses the same flash, with the same life span) showed that for the 120GB drive, writing 10GB per day, you would take nearly 12 years to cause the flash to fail. For the 240/480/960 options for the new version you're looking at roughly 23, 47 and 94 years respectively. Given that the average HDD dies after only 4 years (yes yes yes, we all know you have a 20 year old disk that still works, that's a nice anecdote), that's rather bloody good.
Re:Call me old fashion (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, they were solved in a firmware patch a long time ago.
Re:Not paying for TLC at that price (Score:4, Informative)
Except if you actually bothered to educate yourself, you'd find that at the capacities samsung is offering you, if you write to them at 10GB a day, every day, they'll last entirely respectable times (12,23,47,94 years respectively for 120,240,480 and 960GB drives).
Re:Call me old fashion (Score:5, Informative)
It depends on what you use it for. I managed to wear out an Intel XM-25 160GB SSD a few years ago by hitting the 14TB re-write limit.
Modern SSDs so a lot of compression and de-duplication to reduce the amount of data they write. If your data doesn't compress or de-duplicate well (e.g. video, images) the drive will wear out a lot faster. I think what did it for me was building large databases of map tiles stored in PNG format. Intel provide a handy utility that tells you how much data has been written to your drive and mine reached the limit in about 18 months so had to be replaced under warranty.
Re:Call me old fashion (Score:3, Informative)
Power failure?
You don't have a UPS or other standby power source available? You know its 2013 right...
Willing to spend hundreds on an ultra fast STORAGE device and have no backup power available? really? come on...
That's some messed up priorities there... Spend a hundred bucks on a UPS already.
Then you don't ever have to worry about data corruption. Or the much more common... Loss of unsaved work due to power failure...
Re:Call me old fashion (Score:4, Informative)
In my case having an SSD made a huge impact. I was using offline maps of a wide area build from PNG tiles in an sqlite database with RMaps on Android. Compiling the databases was much faster with an SSD. I was doing it interactively, so performance mattered.
I can only tell you what I experienced. I installed the drive and I didn't think about it wearing out, just carried on as normal. The Intel tool said that it had written 14TB of data and sure enough writes were failing to the point where it corrupted the OS and I had to re-install.
I was using Windows 7 x64, done as a fresh install on the drive when I built that PC. I made sure defragmentation was disabled.
I'm now wondering if the Intel tool doesn't count bytes written but instead is some kind of estimate based on the amount of available write capacity left on the drive. I wasn't monitoring it constantly either so perhaps it just jumped up to 14TB when it noticed that writes were failing and free space had dropped to zero.
It was a non-scientific test, YMMV etc etc.
Hot vs Crazy (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the thing. SSDs are now more reliable than when this guy logged this report. [codinghorror.com]
But are still maybe not as steady Eddie as a good-quality HDD. But we still want them because having an SSD boot drive changes the whole computing experience due to their awesome speed. And since we are good about backups (Are we not?) we can be relaxed as we ride the SSD smokin' fast Roller Coaster. SSD or HDD then what's the problem if we have data security. Both are gonna FAIL. So what if Miss SSD stabs me for no good reason? It was a helluva ride, Bro. And well worth the stitches. I do wish SLC NAND was not priced out of reach, but, hey, when it comes to hottness we take what we can get. Right?
Okay. This is Slashdot we get no hottiness...no hottiness at all.. No no no hottiness. It's pathetic really. ....