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Data Storage Hardware

Samsung's Portable SSD T1 Tested 105

Posted by samzenpus from the where-the-rubber-hits-the-road dept.
MojoKid writes The bulk of today's high-capacity external storage devices still rely on mechanical hard disk drives with spinning media and other delicate parts. Solid state drives are much faster and less susceptible to damage from vibration, of course. That being the case, Samsung saw an opportunity to capitalize on a market segment that hasn't seen enough development it seems--external SSDs. There are already external storage devices that use full-sized SSDs, but Samsung's new Portable SSD T1 is more akin to a thumb drive, only a little wider and typically much faster. Utilizing Samsung's 3D Vertical NAND (V-NAND) technology and a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface, the Portable SSD T1 redlines at up to 450MB/s when reading or writing data sequentially, claims Samsung. For random read and write activities, Samsung rates the drive at up to 8,000 IOPS and 21,000 IOPS, respectively. Pricing is more in-line with high-performance standalone SSDs, with this 1TB model reviewed here arriving at about $579. In testing, the drive did live up to its performance and bandwidth claims as well.
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Samsung's Portable SSD T1 Tested More

Samsung's Portable SSD T1 Tested

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  • no (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @08:05PM (#49083457)

    regular ssd, usb3 interface, UASP (scsi over usb, new standard) and you have all the speed of native sata (that the drives can put out) and are still vendor neutral.

    I try to avoid samsung products these days. after the fiasco with the evo drives, I'll look for another vendor.

    and then there is always the worry that samsung will insert commercials between disk block seeks (inside joke, sorry if that does not make immediate sense to you).

    • Re:no (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @08:08PM (#49083479)

      I'm more concerned with Samsung uploading an incremental mirror of your hard drive to its cloud.

      (ditto inside joke thing).

      • I was thinking that Samsung had brought forth a PETA Byte(1PT) drive!? Only to discover that it was a 1TB poser. Pity, I think I'll sell short.

    • Re:no (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @08:53PM (#49083703)
      Intel has a bug that makes you lose all of your data, oops. Samsung has a bug that reduces the speed of your drive, then they offer a fix, OMG BURN THEM!

    • Re:no (Score:5, Informative)

      by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @09:04PM (#49083759)

      SCSI over USB only really adds queuing, improving speed when many small reads/writes are performed, and you'd need an SSD supporting SCSI and an enclosure/adapter supporting SCSI over USB. Further, for large transfers plain USB 3 is just as fast, while having the benefit of being cheaper, and more readily available and compatible than SCSI over USB. Of course, straight SATA III (via eSATA if you want) is still faster.

      USB 3 gets you 5 Gbps and has to be handled by the CPU.
      SATA III gets you 6 Gbps without going through the CPU.

      USB 3.1 promises to get you 10 Gbps (and lower overhead), but still has to go through the CPU.
      And Thunderbolt is just a convoluted and expensive way of piping a limited number of PCIe lanes to a random physical port and requiring the user to buy an expensive cable. 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps. 40 Gbps in the next revision.

      SATA Express / M.2 can get you 32 Gbps using 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes or 2 PCIe 4.0 lanes wrapped up in NVMe.
      And you can always just throw more PCIe lanes at some controller (on-board or an via a PCIe slot) or some device directly if you want more bandwidth.

      USB 3 will be the standard for external shit for a long time. The C connector and USB 3.1 are going to have a hell of a time gaining traction.
      For people who want performance, SATA Express / M.2 using NVMe or other direct PCIe solutions win.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Only problem is, where are all the NVMe M.2 SSDs I can buy? 3rd gen?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        USB3 supports DMA-ish transfer modes that let you bypass the CPU. USB 3.1 is said to support even more (And a lot of cool things like actual standards for implementing HDMI and displayport over the reversible type C connector).

        USB3 is a lot more than just a fast USB 2. There's been a lot added to make it better, faster.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cb88 ( 1410145 )
      SCSI over USB isn't exactly all that new its been in Linux since 2012, windows since version Win8 and Mac OS since 10.8. I definitly heard about it back in 2012 maybe even in 2011.

      • Re:no (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Thursday February 19, 2015 @02:30AM (#49085097)

        even further back. I have three Adaptec SCSI-to-USB adapters - actually physical pin-compatibility adapters. I've had those since probably 2005 or even before. They'll mount on pretty much anything I plug them into, from Windows ME through 7, OSX from Tiger/PPC (the one I've tried it on), and several flavours of Linux from around Knoppix 5.1.1 and I can still read every hard drive I still own from a 10MB 40-pin Winchester through the pile of 500GB Deskstars, several Seagate 9.1GB UW ans a good few 50-pin random and various capacity drives - not forgetting of course, the takep drives, slot loading and cassette DVD/R/RW/RAM drives and my pride and joy of MO gear that still works: a custom cased LS120/Zip100 triple threat (it reads 3.5" floppies, too!). All USB mass storage is really just SCSI layer on the USB stack.

  • NSA Backdoor preinstalled? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @08:09PM (#49083481)

    NSA Backdoor preinstalled?

    • Speaking as an NSA back-door, I can promise you faithfully that I am not present in any firmware. Nor did I have sex with that woman and I'm certainly not a crook.

  • Danger of SSDs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bradgoodman ( 964302 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @08:25PM (#49083561) Homepage
    for a ton of technical reasons I won't get into right now (remapping/wear leveling) SSDs aren't usually able to handle power faults like regular HDs. Too often, taking an unexpected power hit can easily result of massive amounts of lost data, or even loss of the device itself. I've seen this happen at least 20 times. Thete are allegedly some "enterprise grade SSDs" which may or may not mitigate this issue. I'm tired of seeing articles citing all kinds of performance tests that go into absolutely no detail on if you are going to lose all your data the next time you lose power, or have to force-off your laptop because it locked-up on you.
    • I have a 6-year-old Intel SSD and have had probably 30 power outages, and I've never experienced lost data...

      Anecdotes be anecdotes, I guess..

      • Re: Danger of SSDs (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It will only occur if writes are in-flight during he outage. I don't have much experience with Intel devices - I haven't seen failures with them - but the have the same vulnerability.

        • Re: Danger of SSDs (Score:4, Interesting)

          by dpidcoe ( 2606549 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @08:36PM (#49083629)
          I thought this was the reason a lot of SSDs now have a collection of capacitors to finish out the writes with in the event of a power loss?

          • Re: Danger of SSDs (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            That's exactly the reason. But articles like this don't mention if this drive is protected or not. Most are not.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Bengie ( 1121981 )
            I would like to more about this topic. According to Samsung, the 850 drives reserve a portion of the drive to use as SLC allowing the DRAM to be quickly written to the SLC and allows the drive to slowly write out to the MLC. From the sounds of it, Samsung is less concerned about the drive internal state getting corrupted and committed data being lost and more concerned with in-flight data that hasn't been written being committed.

            I'm also not concerned with losing data during a write, I just don't want to

            • Re: Danger of SSDs (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Yep - it's think kind of thing that causes the issue. The problem is less about if your data is in the cache (like can happen with an HD) - but if the remapping tables themselves (metadata) is in there - which it typically has to be - to prevent write amplification.

              They *could* protect with sufficient capacitance to hold the power up long enough to do an emergency "write flush" - but DO they? I don't know. Like I said - articles really need to discuss this - as do the manufacturers.

              • Re: Danger of SSDs (Score:5, Interesting)

                by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @10:56PM (#49084269)
                SSDs with "power loss protection" store enough power to write out all of their cache, which is something like 1GB now days. Like we've mentioned, we don't care about caches not being flushed, but how to the internal mapping tables hold up without "power loss protected". My hope would be that modern controllers can handle keeping internal state and just screw the data in cache.

                I was reading about Samsung's "RAPID Mode" that uses system memory as a write cache to speed up writes to the SSD. One of the topics about "RAPID Mode", which is even more sensitive to power loss because of increase caching, is that it handles power loss "well". They have done extensive testing with "RAPID Mode" and power loss. I figure if they can offer 10 year warranties and feel confident about these issues, I'll trust them until proven otherwise. They have a great track record. I still wouldn't put all of my eggs in one basket.

          • I thought this was the reason a lot of SSDs now have a collection of capacitors to finish out the writes with in the event of a power loss?

            Has anyone actually tested that? There has to be some power filtering caps but is there really a write-flush cap, and does the controller actually go in a state where it recognizes "Gee, Mr. McDee, we're going down, gotta do these panic writes".

            Of course enterprise storage systems have implemented things like that for ages, but is that mechanism actually present in random consumer/prosumer SSDs?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That is luck...

        I worked on a project about 15 years ago that shipped about 8meg of flash on an onboard truck device.

        We had about 20% fail rate per year (yeah it was very expensive). Pretty much every one of them was returned because of non bootup, they were corrupt. Reflash it and it would come back to life. We would ship it back out as a refurb and it would be back in 2-3 months. The only way we could reproduce it in the lab was power flickage. Not completely off (though we suspected that would happen

        • Re:Danger of SSDs (Score:4, Interesting)

          by mlts ( 1038732 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @09:36PM (#49083865)

          I wonder if the latest generation of filesystems like ZFS, btrfs, and ReFS would be useful, so a corrupt file that wasn't completely written would be detected by the FS during a background scrub or garbage collection task. With RAID-Z, the corruption can be found. Z2, the corruption likely can be fixed.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bengie ( 1121981 )
            You're highly unlikely to get corrupted blocks written and just likely to have "missing" data that never got written at all. If your blocks got corrupted, there's a good chance the entire SSD would be bricked or need to be "reset", losing all data.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          At least good PSUs don't give you "power flickage". Since they're switching power supplies, once there is not enough power to run the electronics, it dies all at once instead of sagging. I also tend to purchase high end PSUs and they can typically handle the PSU at 100% load for 10ms without power from mains and still maintaining stable clean power. Once the voltage in the caps drops too low, the "switching" part of the PSU stops supplying power.

    • Most modern SSDs have power loss protection. If it was that easy to lose all your data, no one would be using these things.

      I've had power failures, and computers lock up, no data lost...

      • Some do, some don't. SSDs don't draw terribly heroic amounts of power, so shoving enough supercaps into the enclosure to let a drive put its affairs in order when power is pulled is conceptually unproblematic; but it does add cost and bulk, so if they don't promise that they do, they probably don't.

        It's not something to freak out too much about(most HDDs have somewhere between 8 and 64MB of cache RAM, and make no particular guarantees about not just dropping its contents on the floor when the power goes

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fnj ( 64210 )

          A few do, most do not. Some that do, only protect the metadata and cannot support flushing RAM cache to flash on power fail.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          "Power loss protection" seems to universally indicate that the SSD can flush all contents of the cache, not just block tables. It is not specifically documented anywhere, but with newer drives being a lot more stable and earlier generations, it's entirely possible that they immediately flush the internal state on power loss.

          One of the features of the Samsung 850s is they can dynamically change MLC into SLC and maintains 3GB of SLC for quick writes. One of their claims is that this allows the dram to be qui

        • so shoving enough supercaps into the enclosure

          Please don't use words like supercaps or cost or bulk. High-end SSDs with full power protection have an array of tantalum capacitors to ensure the entire cache can be written out in event of a power failure. This goes above and beyond what ever other external drive on the market has including all spinning drives which all lose their cache when suddenly unplugged saving only enough power to park the head.

          A few early SSDs suffered from catastrophic dataloss when suddenly unplugged due to the omission of a ver

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mlts ( 1038732 )

      There are some reviews of SSDs on the Net about what drives can stand the most in the way of being depowered while writes are in flight. The one thing about the review is that the Intel enterprise SSDs did not lose data or go into an unusable state. This was a few years ago, so I'm hoping that other drive makers have caught up, so a dirty power-off won't mean the entire SSD is destroyed... because recovering an SSD is orders of magnitudes harder than looking at the stored magnetic domains on a HDD.

      The thi

    • SSDs aren't usually able to handle power faults like regular HDs.

      No, one or two poorly designed SSDs were unable to cope with power faults. The vast majority of SSDs on the market have absolutely no problem with a sudden loss of power.

    • The mods here are idiots. A cursory search reveals the results of testing [extremetech.com] which shows that you know what you're talking about here.
  • I do not believe the claim of 450 MB/sec. data transfer rates on USB 3.0 with data going in both directions. Typically, I see USB 3.0 data transfer rates with SSD's to peak at 180 MB/sec. using HD Tune. I have different USB 3.0 docks and sell various USB 3.0 enclosures and hard drives. I'd believe Samsung's figures if they were using a SATAIII port. No way are they getting an honest 450 MB/sec.on a USB 3.0 port.unless it's non-standard or actually a USB 3.1 port.

    • They measure the transfer rate of a single file in 1 direction.
      USB 3 gets you 5 Gbps. 500 MBps after overhead. 450 is definitely achievable in real-world use with a decent USB controller.

    • That is indicative of your system not being able to push the data rate, not the spec. many chipsets and even supposedly USB 3.0 drives are shit and don't come close to being able to pump out anything close to what USB 3.0 is capable of, but then 99% of people have no need to even come close to maxing out USB 3.0.

  • The HotHardware evaluation focused entirely on speed. What about reliability? Early SSDs were plagued with a limited number of writes, after which no further writes were possible. While recent SSDs seemed to have improved, evaluations should still address reliability.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      The 850s are known for nearly 1PB of writen, come with a 170TB 5 year warranty for 250GB+ models. According to an interview with Samsung, going over the 170TB limit will not always void your warranty, as long as it was "consumer" workloads. I guess they have 120GB drives in their shop with over 8PB of data written to them.

    • Every SSD has a limited number of writes. That hasn't changed. Wear leveling algorithms ensures that normal users will never be faced with that issue under normal use, though. In other words, unless you have some very specialized scenario where you're writing massive amounts of data continuously [extremetech.com], it's really not an issue. Keep in mind that also, even if you happened to hit the write limit twenty years from now, all your data should still be readable.

      Reliability is a bit harder of a metric to cover, beca

      • Right. Improved drive reliability still doesn't negate a need for backups. It's moved from NAND write wear to controller failure as the primary killer of SSD disks. On one hand this isn't very predictable, on the other measures to control the damage when it happens are available.

  • ...a non-portable SSD?

    • Given the cost per gram of contemporary flash memory, I'm going to guess "Really, really, heroically expensive".
    • It's not the drive itself. It's the files. I can't rip the SSD out of my computer and plug it into another one very easily.
  • The problem is that MB/s is the inverse of the figure we're actually interested in. When you're sitting at a computer waiting for it to finish doing something, you measure it in seconds. But HDD manufacturers chose to rate their drives in terms of disk speeds (MB/s), rather than wait times (sec/MB)

    The tl;dr version if you want to skip everything below is that because MB/s is the inverse, the bigger the MB/s gets, the less difference it makes. Let me repeat because it's so counter-intuitive: The bigger th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      I jumped on NewEgg and got greeted with this

      Max Sequential Read Up to 540MB/s
      Max Sequential Write Up to 520MB/s

      4KB Random Read
      Random read (QD1) [IOPS]: up to 10,000 IOPS
      Random read (QD32) [IOPS]: up to 197,000 IOPS

      4KB Random Write
      Random Write (QD1) [IOPS]: up to 40,000 IOPS
      Random Write (QD32) [IOPS]: up to 88,000 IOPS

      I assume what you're talking about is the QD1 4k random read that is important. Yes, they have that information front and center. 10,000 4k blocks every second is about 40MB/s. Abo
    • Do you have the same complaint about car top speeds in mph or km/h rather than min/km or min/mi? And your car speedometer specifies infinity while idling at the traffic light?

      • Do you have the same complaint about car top speeds in mph or km/h rather than min/km or min/mi?

        Try measuring your trip times. For a 20 mile trip:

        20 mph = 60 min
        40 mph = 30 min (30 min saved)
        60 mph = 20 min (10 min saved)
        80 mph = 15 min (5 min saved)
        100 mph = 12 min (3 min saved)

        That's why all your drivers ed classes advised you not to speed. It's not just about being safer and saving fuel. It's a terrible tradeoff in terms of time saved for risk incurred.

  • Portable SSD

    You mean, a memory stick?

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