Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB & 1TB TLC NAND Drives Tested

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

[Rockoon]

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.

You were (amplified?) writing 32.8 GB per day, on average.

Clearly you will run into SSD erase-limit problems at such a rate, but such workloads normally turn out to not be tasks that actually benefit from an SSD to begin with (32.8GB/day = 380KB/sec, so the devices speed wasnt actually an issue for you)

You were either very clever and knew you would hit the limit and get a free replacement, or very foolish and squandered the lifetime of an expensive device when a cheap deice would have worked.

In any event, in general the larger the SSD the longer its erase-cycle lifetime will be. For a particular flash process its a completely linear 1:1 relationship, where twice the size buys twice as many block erases (a 320GB SSD on the same process would have lasted twice as long as your 160GB SSD with that work load)

Re:Call me old fashion

[Rockoon]

Indeed. I just don't see how the erase-limit issue applies for most people. The most common activity where it might apply is in a machine used as a DVR (dont use an SSD in a DVR), with the next being a heavily updated database server (you may still prefer the SSD if transaction latency is important.)

For people that use their computers for regular stuff like browsing the web, streaming video off the web, playing video games, and software development.. then get the damn SSD -- its a no-brainer for you folks.. you will love it and it will certainly die of something other than the erase-limit long before you approach that limit.

Re:Call me old fashion

[hackertourist]

(32.8GB/day = 380KB/sec, so the devices speed wasnt actually an issue for you)

That's an odd way to look at it. You assume that GP spreads out his writes evenly over 24h, and has no desire to speed things up.