Samsung Releases First 2TB Consumer SSD For Laptops 195
Lucas123 writes: Samsung has released what it is calling the world's first 2.5-in consumer-grade, multi-terabyte SSD, and it's issuing the new drive a 10-year warranty. With up to 2TB of capacity, the new 850 Pro and 850 EVO SSDs double the maximum capacity of their predecessors. As with the previous 840 Pro and EVO models, Samsung used its 3D V-NAND technology, which stacks 32 layers of NAND atop one another in a microscopic skyscraper. Additionally, the drives take advantage of multi-level cell (MLC) and triple-level cell (TLC) (2- and 3-bit per cell) technology for even greater density. The 850 Pro, Samsung said, can manage up to 550MBps sequential read and 520MBps sequential write rates and up to 100,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS). The 850 EVO SSD has slightly lower performance with 540MBps and 520MBps sequential read/write rates and up to 90,000 random IOPS. The SSDs will range in capacity from 120GB to 2TB and in price from $99 to $999.
Step 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally we have a reasonably sized SSD... now it's just got to come down in price 80-90%
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Finally we have a reasonably sized SSD... now it's just got to come down in price 80-90%
Reasonably sized? It's 5 times the size of all data on my system.
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Re:Step 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly you're not a gamer. 60 GB installs are the norm these days.
How does that work? Multiple Blurays?
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Re: Step 1 (Score:3)
Consumer PC Blu-Ray isn't worth the money. I can get 32GB memory stix for less than the cost of Blu-Ray blank disks. Some makers put combo drives in but those only burn DVDs, blu-Ray writers are like the Zip drive when CD-ROM came out.
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Almost everyone does digital anymore. For some stupid reason though, the PC gaming industry refuses to adopt Blu-ray, so they just ship games like GTA V on a truckload of DVDs.
GTA V had 7 DVD's.
As for Blurry, its going the way of LaserDisc. Digital distribution is taking over and Bluray doesn't offer any advantages over DVD. In fact it has a few disadvantages, the fact the drives and media are too expensive compared to DVD. For people that need Shit-ton of portable storage. A 64GB SD card or USB thumb drive is cheaper and reusable. When games become too big for DVD, they'll be shipped on flash media instead.
The use of optical media is declining, but I'm still going to bet D
Re:Step 1 (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly you're not a gamer. 60 GB installs are the norm these days.
How does that work? Multiple Blurays?
No one sells games on Blurry. Chances are they never will, the drives are just not popular and digital download is slowly taking over as a means of game distribution.
I bought GTA V in physical form. It came on 7 DVD's and I still had to download another 5 odd GB.
60 GB installs are only the norm for "tripple A" dross because they're too lazy to use compression on audio and textures. I've bought a lot of non-AAA games during the recent Steam sale, the largest was Cities Skyline at 2.9 GB.
Re:Step 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly you're not a gamer. 60 GB installs are the norm these days.
Or video editor. Unless you are fastidious about getting rid of stuff, you can stack up some serious GB on each project.
Re:Step 1 (Score:4, Informative)
Clearly you're not a gamer. 60 GB installs are the norm these days.
Or video editor. Unless you are fastidious about getting rid of stuff, you can stack up some serious GB on each project.
Not a video editor, but I've been a sysadmin for GIS companies, they deal with a shitload of high res imagery as well as databases. GIS analysts have to be fastidious about using fast storage and slow storage. We've been able to provide them with a lot of slow storage for ages now but fast storage is still expensive even with consumer grade SSD's. They still have to set up their work to read from slow storage and write to fast storage, after processing is complete they move the finished product to the slow disk. I set up a modern GIS workstation with 2 SSD's and at least 1 big spinning disk. I use one small SSD for the OS and applications and a second larger SSD just for processing.
If the company is rich enough to give them fibre channel connections to a SAN it gets a lot more expensive (the extra processing speed on server HW can be worth it though).
You need to try Nethack, then (Score:3)
"My Documents"/prog/nethack on my laptop is about 7MB, including a bunch of bones files and a saved game or two...
But yes, bigger hard drives can be useful. My last laptop refresh at work went from a 300GB rotating hard disk to a 256GB SSD, and I had to move my music and Linux ISOs to an external drive. (Eventually I added a 128GB SDXC card, but the news keeps saying that the latest iTunes has serious bugs, so I haven't reinstalled it yet.)
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Why keep ISOs at all. They are static and available via download and Torrent. Music? Just get Pandora or whatever, and stop worrying about what you have where it is and what format it might be in.
I don't own music, the artist does. I just listen.
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Why keep ISOs at all. They are static and available via download and Torrent.
Clearly you have a badassed internet connection. Mine is the opposite. It maxes out at 6Mbps. It's the best thing I can get where I live for $62/mo. I'd have to get a fractional T3 in order to get more bandwidth here, or a private point to point microwave link perhaps. I save ISOs for a rainy day. Literally.
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By the time I need to reuse a Linux ISO, there is a newer version out there and I have to download it again anyways. It has little to nothing to do with bandwidth. My view is different because waiting two hours for an ISO to download isn't that big of a deal.
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This tempts me to raise the side question about whether games today are more fun. I don't mean slicker, with infinitely better graphics and so on. I mean more FUN. What makes a 50GB game more fun than an old 200kB game?
I'm not trying to be silly. In pre-computer days, we had fun with card and board games. In the 80s, we had great fun with those "new" computer games. Things progressed. Today, we can play incredible 50GB games, but does size and slickness and super graphics translate to more fun, or is there
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Re:Step 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have 148 Steam games, only 11 of which are installed due to lack of space. I regularly have to run with less than 500MB left on my 1TB budget laptop harddrive. I figure we download about 200-300GB of data every month that is deleted once consumed/needed for something higher priority.
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I have 148 Steam games, only 11 of which are installed due to lack of space. I regularly have to run with less than 500MB left on my 1TB budget laptop harddrive. I figure we download about 200-300GB of data every month that is deleted once consumed/needed for something higher priority.
Wow, I'm not sure if I have played 148 different video games in my lifetime. But then, I am only 45 years old and I only spent most of my free time in my youth playing video games. I just finished playing Lego Jurassic Park and it took about 40 hours. Games like Skyrim I have not even gotten completed, but have hundreds of hours invested.
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Having 148 games in his Steam account doesn't mean he's played them all.
For comparison, I have 228 in mine, 67 currently installed. When I'll ever get around to playing half of them, I have no idea.
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That's true, I've only played 73 of the 148. 55 of them are sequels that I haven't started because I haven't finished the previous game. (I tend to buy collections so it's cheaper)
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I have completed every achievement in 266 xbox platform games, played 1147 of them enough to get at least 1 achievement (37% completion of the 1147 overall), Steam has ~2,538 recorded hours, and that doesn't include anything before 2007 or my PS1/2/3/Wii/Xbox Original/Genesis or Blizzard games collection.
Insomnia opens up an amazing amount of time.
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My steam folder is 250G and I'm just a poor Linux user.
Now a LAMP server, that's something that can fit in about 4G.
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"Finally we have a reasonably sized SSD... now it's just got to come down in price 80-90%
'Reasonably sized? It's 5 times the size of all data on my system.'
Wot? You don't have an Oracle Server running on your laptop?
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Wot? You don't have an Oracle Server running on your laptop?
No, but I have IIS, Tomcat and SQL Server. I think the bitcoin blockchain takes up more space than anything other individual thing on my system.
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Oracle express limits you to 10G.
Although you can always snag the enterprise version and go crazy with that on your own system if you really want.
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Finally we have a reasonably sized SSD... now it's just got to come down in price 80-90%
Reasonably sized? It's 5 times the size of all data on my system.
Wow... I delete the equivalent of your system every month due to lack of space. Currently our household has 8TB of HDDs (not including the 4TB of dvd storage) every one of them is near capacity and we're not backing up nearly as much as we should. We could easily fill 30-40TB if we had everything we wanted installed/properly backed up.
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I have over 2000 DVDs and BluRays and they are all nicely organized and tucked away. They take up the equivalent of a single tall IKEA bookshelf and sit in the unused bits of space along the walls of my home theater.
Unless you live in a closet in NYC, that amount of space doesn't even register for most people.
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Are these relevant? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose there are a few 5 pound laptops out there for power users that still use the 2.5" form factor, but they're disappearing rapidly. Things are moving fast in the SSD storage area and many are moving to the M.2 format. Though I suppose any increase in density is good as it means higher cap small format drives and cheaper options*.
*so that Microsoft and Apple can increase their profit margins on storage. The great thing about impossible to open PCs is that they can charge whatever the fuck they want for storage no matter how cheap it gets.
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They've already announced the newer form factors for m.pcie m2 sdds which will leverage this. I can't wait till we get above 256GB for this. As for the 2.5" form factor, cracking open any SSDs now shows a lot of empty space, so this lastest announcement is evolutionary, not revolutionary. aka Tock
Re:Are these relevant? (Score:4, Informative)
M.2 is a mess. Same connector type for two, even three* different protocols is always dumb. This, combined with poor mobo documentation, confuses people.
I got shafted yesterday, bought an M.2 SATA EVO 850, 512 GB for my PC and when I got home the PC wouldn't recognize it. After lots of digging around, I came to realize my mobo only had support for PCI Express M.2 SSDs, not SATA ones. No, the user manual was NOT straightforward, nor did it provide any hints on compatibility (or lack of it). So I gave it back and upgraded to a 2.5" 1TB EVO 850. At least I can't be surprised (in a bad way).
*three because there's PCI Express 2.0 support and PCI Express 3.0 support as well.
Re:SSD Card Formats - Arrgh! (Score:3)
My wife's Lenovo laptop power connection fried recently, and we got to discover the joys of different SSD formats. The first generation X1 Carbon had a Sandisk 20+6 format, and I think the second was M.2 and the third some mSATA format, but I may have the latter two backwards. After looking around online for a while, I found a $25 adapter board from China that lets you plug in the 20+6 drive so you can read it on a "standard" SATA connector, so we were able to back up the data before sending it in for (Ya
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I'm waiting for the patent on Apple's original iPod connector to expire so I can get a portable media player compatible with it.. or by then, everyone will have forgotten about it.
Don't get your hopes up.. I don't even know of a single media player compatible with the iPod connector.
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I suppose there are a few 5 pound laptops out there for power users that still use the 2.5" form factor, but they're disappearing rapidly. Things are moving fast in the SSD storage area and many are moving to the M.2 format. Though I suppose any increase in density is good as it means higher cap small format drives and cheaper options*.
*so that Microsoft and Apple can increase their profit margins on storage. The great thing about impossible to open PCs is that they can charge whatever the fuck they want for storage no matter how cheap it gets.
If you are referring to Apple (especially Apple laptops) with your "impossible to open" comment, that hasn't been true for quite some time now. Remove the 10 Phillips-head screws holding the bottom "pan" on, and the battery, RAM (on replaceable-RAM models) and Drive(s) are readily-accessible and replaceable, even on the newer models with the PCI(?) SSDs. Even the Trackpad is easily replaced.
Ironically enough, when Apple went to the Unibody design for laptops, the only thing that became an absolute BEAR to
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Even the Trackpad is easily replaced.
I give you the instructions [ifixit.com] for replacing the trackpad on my Macbook. It is an easy 44 steps. Well, 87, since you have to do it all in reverse to put it back together.
Also, it's $450 just for the parts and tools. More if you don't like to buy refurbished.
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Even the Trackpad is easily replaced.
I give you the instructions [ifixit.com] for replacing the trackpad on my Macbook. It is an easy 44 steps. Well, 87, since you have to do it all in reverse to put it back together.
Also, it's $450 just for the parts and tools. More if you don't like to buy refurbished.
Funny, the TrackPad I replaced in a friend's 2009 13 inch MacBook Pro was like 4 steps, if. Remove screws from bottom pan. Remove battery connector. Remove battery. Remove 4 screws holding Trackpad. Done.
Well, I see that it IS a bit more involved for that model (you did pull the wrong guide though. Here's the right one [ifixit.com]). But the tools needed are more like $20, and the TrackPad can be had for around $60 [powerbookmedic.com] online. FAR less than the $450 that you quoted (without citation).
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Funny, the TrackPad I replaced in a friend's 2009 13 inch MacBook Pro was like 4 steps, if. Remove screws from bottom pan. Remove battery connector. Remove battery. Remove 4 screws holding Trackpad. Done.
It all changed around 2012.
My information came from the link I supplied: "The MacBook Pro 15" Retina Display Early 2013 packs the battery, keyboard, trackpad, and upper case into one assembly. If any of these components fail, the entire assembly must be replaced."
Your guide is for the 13" model. I do not know whether it works for the 15" model, but I can assure you that I am not intending to find out.
But yes, it can be done for one $80 in tools and materials at least on the 13" model, unfortunately in 47 (w
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Incorrect, especially the latest gen ones:
First, they are not Phillips head. They are five-lobed Torx-like screws which require a special tool to open. A Phillips head will round them out.
Second, you have to heat the battery in order to remove it, as it is slathered with glue. Too much heat... it expands and destructs. Too little, and pulling it out might cause it to destroy itself.
Third, the Apple drive is not a standardized format. You can't just replace it unless you can bribe an Apple employee to use a drive just for that model. If you order 256 gigs, you are stuck with that. RAM? Soldered on.
The grandparent is right. Apple's laptops are scoring a 1/10 for repairability on iFixit with newer models.
Funny that the same site, iFixit, that whines about "repairability" seems to always manage a COMPLETE teardown without having to bribe anyone for special tools, take a bandsaw to the product, etc., eh?
My point being that, if you assess "repairability: on ANYONE's modern consumer devices, especially the things like phones, tablets and laptops, and restrict your "toolbox" to the one your Dad had, you will be frustrated. But a modern bench-tech should really have things like Torx screwdrivers and even Tri an
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I don't why anyone who wants to tinker with things complains about difficulty of repairs when it comes to fasteners.
Because this is Slashdot; where ANY excuse to Apple-Bash (no pun intended) is considered a good excuse.
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Valid point, but there actually are still some very popular choices out there in Corporate/Enterprise class laptops which would still take a 2.5" form factor drive.
For example, HP has the Elitebook 840G2 out now, and I believe it's a "new for 2015" version of the Elitebook 840G1, which is still being sold until existing inventories of it dwindle. Both of these laptops have the option of using a M.2 format SSD, but still provide a regular internal 2.5" drive bay too.
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Of course they're relevant, maybe not for laptops so much though. I have a bunch of servers using 512GB 840 pros in our datacenters, and when we EOL those drives, these 2TB models should be at the same price we paid for the 512GB parts so we'll get to quadruple our storage for the cost of the EOL refresh. Nice.
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Unlike Apple, the dinosaur PC makers are refusing to move on.
Thank you for stating that correctly!
Just like with the Floppy Drives, Serial Connectors, and VGA, then DVI...
But now, cue the Apple haters that will whine incessantly about no eSATA and the USB-C connector on the new MacBook (hey, I think they should have at least kept the MagSafe, too!).
Thin notebooks - Lenovo X1 Carbon didn't use 2.5" (Score:2)
It has an SSD daughter card on the motherboard. (As I ranted above, three different generations of them had three different interface formats, but to be fair, the market was changing rapidly.) There's no room for a 2.5" drive. There are probably other ultra-thin notebooks with that limitation as well.
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I have a 2TB drive in my laptop. It's more of a mobile workstation though. It's not intended to be tiny and anemic.
good news, bad news (Score:3)
the good news is that fantastic advances in memory construction are coming to SSDs. the bad news is all SSDs and HDDs are relying on security by obscurity and at some point everyone's storage devices will be permanently infected with malware that gives away their personal information.
Re:encryption won't help you against malware (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't matter whether they use security-by-obscurity or real hardware-driven or OS-driven encryption. The malware's running on top of the OS, which already has access to all the data on the drive (unless you're doing something fancy with multiple user logins, each of whom has differently-encrypted home directories, but even then, the malware can attack whoever's logged in right now.)
Drive encryption mainly helps you against stolen hardware, and not usually very much, because that would require an inconvenient user interface.
encryption? huh? (Score:2)
i'm not talking about encryption, you fool! i'm talking about firmware! why else would i write "permanently infected" if not to say it was firmware?
Big but price has stalled (Score:2)
The price-per-gig on the EVO model comes out to around $0.40/GB, which is where SSD prices have more or less been stalled for a few years now. So that's not so great. We really ought to be seeing some price reductions from 3D NAND.
On the other hand, $800 is roughly what I paid for my first SSD, an 80GB Intel G1. Today, for the same price, you can get 2000GB.
Re:Big but price has stalled (Score:5, Informative)
"The price-per-gig on the EVO model comes out to around $0.40/GB, which is where SSD prices have more or less been stalled for a few years now."
Really? A few years?
The 850 EVO 500GB is currently $162 at Amazon (0.32/GB). In December, it was $252 (0.50/GB).
That's a nearly 40% decline in six months.
I'm getting 500GB SSDs today for what I was paying for 250GB drives a bit over a year ago.
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I may have made the mistake of comparing prices today using CAD and historically in USD, and only comparing at the ~1TB level, where price per gig seems to be a bunch higher.
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There are even some down around $0.30/GB if you shop around and aren't picky about brand name.
My price point is no longer about $/GB, but "how much space can I get for $100" if it's an office / light duty machine or "how much for $400" if it's a power-user / gaming machine.
So, please call me these new 2TB drives drop below $400. Which will probably be around this time next year,
Warning: DO NOT USE SAMSUNG SSDs IN LINUX SERVERS (Score:5, Informative)
We've been using Samsung drives in "non production" status servers, embedded servers, etc. and have had a terrible time of it. The first drives we bought a few years ago (840 Pro) were good, but we've seen Samsung SSDs run entirely through their write capacity (as reported by SMART) and then go dead when not even mounted! Turns out we aren't the only ones to get bit by buggy Samsung drives. [techreport.com]
It also turns out that Samsung drives are even blacklisted in the Linux Kernel [algolia.com]
I welcome Samsung's excellent cost/size value proposition! I just wish their drives were solid enough for our actual use.
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I welcome Samsung's excellent cost/size value proposition! I just wish their drives were solid enough for our actual use.
Then how is Apple having such good luck with them? Granted, Macs aren't generally used as high-transaction-count Servers; but people who do media creation/editing can sure churn through some R/W cycles in a hurry.
Re:Warning: DO NOT USE SAMSUNG SSDs IN LINUX SERVE (Score:4, Interesting)
First off, the problem is Linux is somehow triggering a bug in the TRIM implementation on Samsung SSDs.
We know Windows doesn't do it, as Windows users are probably the biggest consumer of Samsung SSDs and there isn't a mass loss of data problem from Windows users. (And from querying Windows 7 via the command line, Windows does use TRIM).
OS X may be using TRIM or not (depends on whether you're talking Apple-approved SSDs which are OEM versions, or third party user installed SSDs replacing the hard drive that was shipped). It's possible OS X may use TRIM in a way that it doesn't trigger the bug. Or maybe it does it less aggressively than Linux, so the bug incidence is far lower and no one noticed it yet.
All we know is that Linux definitely triggers the TRIM bug, OS X and Windows doesn't, yet (but there are no guarantees that Apple or Microsoft won't change the way Windows 10 or El Capitan does TRIM which WILL expose the bug).
The bug is in TRIM. That's all, if you don't use TRIM, it'll be fine. Maybe even using fstrim periodically is OK over using discard mode.
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Why in God's name are you using SSDs in a server (production or not) without using hardware RAID? And none of that fakey-RAID that Linux sees right through either, I might add. From what I can see it's a problem between Linux trying to manage TRIM and the drive getting confused. Cut out the middleman, RAID them and underprovision a bit to give the drives more life, and then let Linux only see the storage presented by the RAID card and let the card itself handle communication with the drives.
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While I agree with you for the most part, why do you say Hardware RAID instead of Software?
The historical reasons for not using Software RAID (via mdadm) have long been resolved:
What, then, is the advantage of spending hundreds (or thousands) on a RAID card and introducing another point of failure?
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Maybe it is just me, but if I have to spec a SSD by brand, it will be Intel. $2200 gets me a 1.7 TB Intel enterprise tier SSD (DC S3710.) It isn't cheap by any means... but you get what you pay for, and Intel has a very good reputation for reliability.
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More specifically, TRIM is not broken in those drives but it is designed to work against the behavior of Windows mass storage subsystem. Linux can issue unexpected command patterns which can make the drive enter weird states and get confused. It's the same thing that happens with ACPI: in practice no manufacturer writes against the official spec but against the Windows spec.
The mess should be fixed really. Either the SSD makers should get their shit together (the proper solution), or the Linux kernel should
Re:Warning: DO NOT USE SAMSUNG SSDs IN LINUX SERVE (Score:4, Insightful)
Since TRIM is a standardized command, SSD vendors either need to support it, or like is done with the format command on IDE drives... do nothing, return a success value.
It is better to do nothing than to do it broken, and TRIM isn't exactly a new technology... it has been around for quite a few years now.
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It is better to do nothing than to do it broken
apparently you've learned nothing at all, modern computers are steeped in layers and layers of "doing it wrong" for the sake of compatibility
Re:Warning: DO NOT USE SAMSUNG SSDs IN LINUX SERVE (Score:5, Informative)
Since TRIM is a standardized command, SSD vendors either need to support it, or like is done with the format command on IDE drives... do nothing, return a success value.
They do support the TRIM command.
The "bug" is how TRIM and command queuing interact (specifically a race condition labeling the wrong logical sectors RZAT/DRAT) I put "bug" in quotes because the specification specifically says that TRIM is a non-queued command. Windows/NTFS makes sure that the queue is empty before issuing a TRIM. Linux/EXT4 does not.
Ideally the drives should make sure that their queue is empty themselves, but it likely takes a tortured reading of the specification to think that compliant drives will make sure that their queue is empty.
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this is a watershed event (Score:5, Informative)
It's the first time that max SSD capacity is greater than HD in a given size.
Yes, I know there's a 2.5" 2TB HDD out there. But it's a 12mm height, and so cannot be used in any laptop that I know of, including my older thicker MacBook, which takes a 9.5mm height drive.
This Samsung is a 7mm height, and thus will fit in any laptop that takes a 2.5" drive of any kind.
Re:this is a watershed event (Score:4, Informative)
You must have forgotten about Samsung's own 2.5" 9.5mm 2tb HDD [amzn.to], which works in every laptop that I know of.
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Many laptops these days can only fit 7mm high drives. This has been the case for years now... even my Thinkpad X220 only has a 7mm slot (you can get a 9.5mm high drive in there, but it's a squeeze and you need to remove the keyboard and palmrest assembly IIRC).
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You must have forgotten about Samsung's own 2.5" 9.5mm 2tb HDD [amzn.to], which works in every laptop that I know of.
How the hell did I miss that??? I'm constantly watching for bigger drives for my laptop, because I actually need 2TB these days, and the only one I'd seen previously was 12mm.
There are a lot of laptops these days that only take a 7mm, but not mine, so I'm happy now.
The speeds are not worth mentioning (Score:2)
The 850 Pro, Samsung said, can manage up to 550MBps sequential read and 520MBps sequential write rates and up to 100,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS).
There's nothing special in bothering to even mention the speeds of current consumer drives. They all saturate the SATA 6Gb/s bus, and that's that.
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They all saturate the SATA 6Gb/s bus, and that's that.
I really doubt that is true for truly random access like you would get in a multiuser database
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Good Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
This summary is well written. It is:
As a former professional technical writer, I am always on the look-out for good explanatory writing. I wanted to call it out here, especially since often we just complain when the summary's bad. When something's good, we're often silent. I suppose that's partly because when things are working, like the utility company, they don't attract attention and we just take them for granted. But writing like this is no accident.
Get the terms straight (Score:2)
TLC is a kind of MLC. "Multi" means "more than one". Multi does not mean "two and just two".
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"Triple Level" does not sound like three bits or eight levels.
You're assuming that "levels" means "voltage levels". It's more like levels of a fractal; each level divides the range of voltages in half, yielding one additional bit of storage. This corresponds to the way the cells are actually programmed, shifting the voltage by 1/2 step relative to the previous bit, e.g.:
111 = 0.5 -> 0.75 -> 0.825
101 = 0.5 -> 0.5 -> 0.625
011 = 0 -> 0.25 -> 0.375
You could also visualize each cell as a three-level binary tree with eight leaf nodes.
Of Course It's Time for Larger SSDs (Score:2)
I am surprised it has taken this long to get to 2TB. Perhaps the price on 1TB will drop a little now, as they are no longer considered a premium drive.
[Personally, I have 750GB of data. When replacing drives, I've always bought twice as much storage as I have had data.
Once you do anything with video, space goes quick, I also have lots of photos, graphic projects, CAD and design projects.]
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Has anyone experimented with SSD RAID? (Score:2)
...using these con/pro-sumer drives and not high-dollar SLC enterprise drives?
I've been long tempted to and more so with the generally positive results from the SSD write-them-to-death-athon that wrote to SSDs until they expired.
I know it's "not advised", risky, etc, but I'm thinking that maybe the drives are more reliable than we think and between backups and maybe a double parity RAID scheme or hot spare the risk is dialed down, or at least worth taking on a what-if basis.
For my own home/lab VMware cluste
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Because of the way virtualization has so much random I/O, going with a SSD will mean a night/day performance increase, just because each OS isn't fighting for a share of the drive head to read/write its own data.
Running virtual machines on a SSD versus a spinning platter, you definitely will notice a performance improvement.
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I don't doubt the performance would be stellar, but even with the encouraging news from the write endurance tests and stuff like Samsung's 10 year warranty on their Pro series drives I still am just nervous enough about long-term durability and some rubber-hits-the-road compatibility with systems like FreeNAS/Nas4Free that it makes me just a smidgen nervous about dumping $2500 into a new NAS setup.
My own personal usage patterns are probably low enough that durability really wouldn't be a major issue, althou
"10-year" warranty (Score:3)
From TFA: "Samsung guarantees the 2TB 850 Pro for 10 years or 300 terabytes written (TBW), and the 2TB 850 EVO for five years or 150 TBW."
So the warranty is limited to 150 write cycles regardless of age for the Pro, and 75 for the EVO. That doesn't sound good to me.
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The idea of a 10 year warranty makes me more nervous than a normal 1-3 year warranty. There must be a reason they need to make that kind of offer. When I bought my last car, I could have bought a mid-range Hyundai with a 10 year warranty but I bought a Toyota, barely glancing at the warranty terms. Why? Because it's a Toyota. It'll run forever with regular maintenance. It's about to roll over 100,000 with nothing but regular maintenance.
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The idea of a 10 year warranty makes me more nervous than a normal 1-3 year warranty. There must be a reason they need to make that kind of offer.
You are nervous due to a general mistrust for corporations and thus don't understand the simple reason. Wildly extended warranties are typically a show of faith to customers that a company is willing to stand by the claims that are covered by a warranty: namely that a SSD won't just magically lose data and die due to time, but rather only due to wear out.
You car example is quite telling too. Hyundai were a horrendous brand tarnished by a reputation it deservedly received in the early 2000s over it's absolut
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All you need to do is insert page numbers and the firmware will do the rest.
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Well, since it's solid-state, it should be much faster to rewind compared to a DVD [dvdrewinder.com].
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Who needs local storage? We use the cloud now.
Local storage is cloud storage for people who care about their data and their privacy.
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I don't even care that much about privacy most of the time.
I do care a great deal about being able to access my data when I'm not connected to the internet, which if I'm traveling - being, you'll note, the *reason* for using a laptop - is reasonably likely.
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I use a cheap virtual "storage server" and put pgp encrypted tarballs on it
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I'd love to live somewhere where WAN bandwidth is cheap enough to use for primary storage. The cloud is either usable for file syncing (Dropbox, Google Drive) [1], document backups (again, a secondary copy, with the primary on local media), or long term archive copies on something like Amazon Glacier.
[1]: With proper encryption, of course. BoxCryptor comes to mind for cloud drives, and one can use OpenPGP for long term storage.
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You're doing something wrong if you're wearing out an 850 in a consumer environment. You're also doing something wrong if you're using an 850 in an enterprise environment.
Re:Will these still die as quickly? (Score:5, Informative)
2) 177 isn't a percentage. It's how often it's had to overwrite the data. 8 times. Which matches the data written.
3) Samsung claims 2,000 P/E cycles (the number represented in SMART 177). Independent testing has shown closer to 6,000 P/E cycles. That means that it's at
If you don't understand what SMART is, does, or means, please don't talk about it as though you do. Other people might see your confident ignorance and believe you instead of doing their own research.
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Well no.. You're at 8 write cycles used, and 99%.
Here's a pair of 840 Evo's in RAID1 after 13,150 and 15,536 POH:
177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 080 080 000 Pre-fail Always - 237
241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 75268142612
177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 095 095 000 Pre-fail Always - 55
241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 79376718460
The one has 80% left and
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Right that value represent the raw maximum erase cycles (~3.000 cycles TLC, ~10.000 MLC, ...)
Let me quote wikipedia:
Now my own raid0 drives:
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Personally I'm also dissapointed in the consistency of the TLC NAND drives.
I get performance degradations on all my Samsung drives even though I've applied all the performance fixes.
I can't fathom though why you are putting the smallest (slowest) and cheapest drives in your server.
A Professional SSD (Sandisk or Intel) would be a lot more appropriate.
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You used TLC drives rather than MLC, worse by one or two orders of magnitude or more ; and those number are what SMART tells you, it's a dumb count ill-related to the physical realities.
If you use an MLC drive and ignore the SMART count, then I believe it's a ton better, bigger drives are better than smaller ones too.. Then they'll die without notice but less often.
If you want some "fun" order a "Kingfast" 30GB SSD and install windows 7 32bit on it.. Now that's probably a shit ton worse than any Samsung 850
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With DDR4 and the huge amounts of ram available to modern desktop pcs, I would think the ramdrive would be gaining in popularity. I guess though, if you've got sensitive data a ramdrive is a bad move.
I wouldn't say sensitive data, I'd say data you need to persist. Actually putting sensitive data (stuff you don't want disclosed) into RAM might be a good idea in some ways. With data in RAM power off and the data is gone, where if you have it on a removable device it can sprout legs and walk away.
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No. It's more like a Ford Escort with a JATO engine welded to the roof.
Although the "always in the shop" aspect of the SSDs might be spot on. Then there's the whole "you got the horses but can't actually use them" aspect of "glamour cars". Also probably a good match for SSDs.
Perhaps your attempt to grovel at the feet of the gods of conspicuous consumption wasn't wrong after all...
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But a Ferrari is useless, does something like 10 mpg (?) and you're more likely to kill someone or yourself with it.
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The enterprise is the best place to see what leads. There, it is Kingston, Micron, Sandisk, and Intel. Business doesn't suffer fools gladly, and a drive maker with a poor record won't last long, especially since the drives are usually OEM-ed by an array maker (EMC, HP, Dell, NetApp), and the array/SAN maker has their rep on the line.
I do agree on the above... I wish there were a better protocol than SATA... but factored in would be the ability for drives to "downshift" to SATA, similar to how a USB 3.1 de
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Just in case you didn't know, SATA and SAS use the same physical interface on the drive side. For systems with a small number of drives there isn't a whole lot of difference. The main issue comes down to how fan-out is handled when a large number of drives are available but the driver is simply so that vendors can pump up the price for the controllers and drives (double, triple, etc for basically the same hardware). The SATA protocol was intentionally hobbled in order to not compete with the SAS protocol