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Disappointing he didn't test the new Samsung 850 SSD. The old 840 is known to not have such a high endurance so I'm automatically excluding it from my list of c
by higherpurpose 12y ago
Disappointing he didn't test the new Samsung 850 SSD. The old 840 is known to not have such a high endurance so I'm automatically excluding it from my list of choices.
- ris 12y agoIt would be a bit hard to have tested an 850 for 18 months, you know, what with time travel being what it is.
- chisleu 12y agoI don't think it tested 18 months of writing, it tested 18 months worth of writing.
- Goronmon 12y agoThe SSD Endurance Experiment represents the longest test TR has ever conducted. It's been a lot of work, but the results have also been gratifying. Over the past 18 months, we've watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need. It looks like they ran the test for 18 months.
- seanp2k2 12y agoThey read and wrote data almost constantly at full speed for 18 months, which is very likely not what normal people using these drives would do with them. Please read the article.
- EC1 12y agoYou're not wired in 24 hours a day all day? Pfft, casual.
- AceJohnny2 12y agoDid you even read the article? The 840 Pro was the top performer, reliability-wise.
- sp332 12y agoMaybe they got lucky. They only tested one of each of these drives, and there was already a case (with the Kingston drives) where nearly identical models got wildly different lifetimes. The low number of reallocated sectors suggests that the NAND deserves much of the credit. Like all semiconductors, flash memory chips produced by the same process—and even cut from the same wafer—can have slightly different characteristics. Just like some CPUs are particularly comfortable at higher clock speeds and voltages, some NAND is especially resistant to write-induced wear. The second HyperX got lucky, in other words. So it's definitely possible that the 840 Pro has reliability problems even though one of them won this test.
- sevensor 12y agoThank you for this! Yours is the most astute comment I've seen here. As someone who's worked in flash memory manufacturing, I know how much variation is inherent in the process. It gets evened out somewhat by binning, but there's inevitable variation in dielectric thickness, aspect ratios, corner profiles, dopant diffusion, grain structure of polysilicon, and on and on, even discounting the density of particulate defects and watermarks. Even if you don't know that, basic stats should tell you that testing a single unit from each manufacturer is going to be meaningless at best, misleading at worst.
- vacri 12y agotesting a single unit from each manufacturer Is less expensive than testing a dozen drives of each model, and better than testing no drives at all. It's not meaningless at all; it just has to be read with the right caveats.
- vacri 12y agoThe six drives included "Samsung's 840 Series 250GB, and Samsung's 840 Pro 256GB." 840 and 840 Pro are not the same drives.
- rdudek 12y agoWho knows? Maybe he's doing it. Looks like it's taking a while to test these drives.
- scott_karana 12y agoThey did the 840 and the 840 Pro. Your anecdote only fits for the non-Pro: the Pro was the clear winner in terms of writes before failure.
- pixl97 12y agoNot sure what you're going on about here. The cheap EVO wrote at least 100TB, the PRO wrote 2.4PB. After working on home machines for years you rarely see drives that have anywhere near 100TB written in SMART. If you are writing that much data get the PRO edition and the warranty that comes with it.