Samsung SSD 850 EVO 32-Layer 3D V-NAND-Based SSD Tested

MojoKid writes Samsung just took the wraps off a new family of mainstream solid state drives, targeting the market segment previously occupied by its popular SSD 840 EVO series. The new Samsung SSD 850 EVO series is the follow-up to the company's current flagship SSD 850 PRO, but the new EVO is Samsung's first to pack 32layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash memory. The move to 32layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash brings pricing down to the .50 to .60 per GiB range, but doesn't adversely affect endurance because the cell structure doesn't suffer from the same inherent limitations of planar NAND, since the cells are stacked vertically with the 3D VNAND. The new 850 EVO drive performs well with large sequential transfers and also offered very low access times. The compressibility of the data being transferred across the Samsung SSD 850 EVO had no impact on performance and small file transfers at high queue depth were fast. Small file transfers with low queues depths, which is what you'd expect to see with most client workloads, were also very good. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO drives also put up excellent numbers in trace-based tests like PCMark 7.

Comments

Very cool.

[Ravaldy]

Anytime the price and reliability of SSD improves it makes it more viable for end users and business work stations. If I had a bigger budget, every workstation would currently have an SSD.

Re:Very cool.

[grimJester]

How much space do they need? If you're talking tens of GB, is that really more expensive than the smallest spinning disk drive you can get?

Re:Very cool.

[jones_supa]

256 GB should be enough for anyone.

Re:Very cool.

[WarJolt]

I had a professor who would build an atom based PC and install an ssd. IO is usually why users perceive a system as slow.

It amazes me how hard it is to find a sub $500 laptop with ssd. Tablets and 2 in ones seem to have them, but nothing with a 15 inch screen. I was temped to buy a $200 laptop and throw a ssd in there. Not sure what I was going to do with the 500GB hd it comes with.

Re:Very cool.

[0123456]

It amazes me how hard it is to find a sub $500 laptop with ssd.

Why? For a cheap laptop, the manufacturer's choice is probably a 500GB-1TB hard drive, or a 60GB SSD, with half of that 60GB used by Window 8. Which one do you think people would rather buy?

Re:Very cool.

[ArcadeMan]

The one with the bigger breasts, of course.

Re:Very cool.

[kamapuaa]

Not quite 15", but the HP stream is a $230 14" laptop with a 32 GB ssd. Windows, office, and the various bundled apps take up about 15 gigs of that. I have the 12" version and speed is fine, you just can't use it for games, and if you want to keep a large collection of music or pictures (or whatever) you need an external drive or SD card.

Re:Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

256 GB should be enough for anyone.

Yes, we all know the underlying joke here, but in this case, it's still very much true.

Sorry vendors. You can push your multi-terabyte hard drives all you want, but Moore's Law hasn't even remotely held true in the consumer space when it comes to storage demand. The average consumer fills 10 - 20% of their drive capacity. Ever.

Re:Very cool.

[afidel]

And since SDXC cards are available at ~ $.40/GB (up to 256GB) addon storage is competitive with 2.5" SSD's in price if not performance. It would be nice if the internal SSD was about 4x that size though so you could have more programs than the base installed, but that would add ~$40 to the price which would make it too expensive to compete with Chromebooks.

Re:Very cool.

[stasike]

Not sure what I was going to do with the 500GB hd it comes with.

Just buy an external USB enclosure for the left-over spinning disk. You can get USB3 version for under 15 bucks
Or get one of those HD bays that installs instead of DVD drive.

Re:Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Sorry vendors. You can push your multi-terabyte hard drives all you want, but Moore's Law hasn't even remotely >held true in the consumer space when it comes to storage demand.

Of course it has. I'm up to about 12TB in used storage, and I'm not anywhere near alone in this. Don't think that just because you're not using as much storage as computer users generally do now, that no one else is.

>The average consumer fills 10 - 20% of their drive capacity. Ever.

The average consumer isn't the market for hard drives. They don't even need computers since tablets and phones better suit the needs of non-technical people.

Re:Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same issue with small screen resolutions.

Re:Very cool.

[ArcadeMan]

You wanted something sexist? Why didn't you say so in the first place! Here you go!

Re:Very cool.

[sexconker]

>Sorry vendors. You can push your multi-terabyte hard drives all you want, but Moore's Law hasn't even remotely
>held true in the consumer space when it comes to storage demand.

Of course it has. I'm up to about 12TB in used storage, and I'm not anywhere near alone in this. Don't think that just because you're not using as much storage as computer users generally do now, that no one else is.

>The average consumer fills 10 - 20% of their drive capacity. Ever.

The average consumer isn't the market for hard drives. They don't even need computers since tablets and phones better suit the needs of non-technical people.

The sum total of all the special snowflakes like you who need many TB of storage pales in comparison to the Joe Schmoes who grab whatever drive is cheap and big enough. 1 TB has been "big enough" for 99.9% of people for a long time, and 1.5 and 2 TB drives only move when they're priced very close to the 1 TB versions.
Storage is fully commoditized. I bought my last hard disk drive at Costco, for shit's sake. I see them at supermarkets and drug stores.

People don't need more space to store HD video.
  - They don't buy Blurays like they bought DVDs. They stream. And for the few times they do buy a Bluray, they don't rip it, they stream or download the heavily-compressed "digital" copy it comes with.
  - They don't store their own HD video. They post to Youtube.
  - The HD video they do store is stored in less space. Hardware accelerated H.264 encoding is ubiquitous.

People don't need more space to store music.
  - Again, streaming.
  - Music sizes have not increased as video sizes have with the introduction of HD. If anything, they've decreased.

People don't do shit else locally on their PCs that requires large amounts of storage. Even games with massive textures don't break the bank - 30 or 50 GB is nothing when you consider that people typically play a game, beat it, and then uninstall it. Only multiplayer-focused titles stay on the drive, and only a few at a time. 1 TB is enough to keep 20 of today's largest games installed at once. And gamers that do want (or believe they want) more storage represent the same niche that buys a $600 GPU (or two) every 8 months - they aren't the meat of the market by a long shot.

So good for you if you use 12 TB and want more, but 1 TB is enough for 99% of people, and 2 TB enough for 99.9%.

Re:Very cool.

[AK Marc]

Why? Just buy a laptop that has an mSATA port. I've bought two of those for $600 or so (one for the wife, one for me). The wife's came with a 24GB drive, set up as a cache. I dropped a 256GB drive in mine (came empty) and moved the system and common programs on it. We both have a 1 TB drive as the "main" storage.

The cache works better that I would have guessed. Almost as fast as a "pure" SSD for all common tasks, and cheaper/easier.

Re:Very cool.

[Nethead]

Good solution. I do like my pure 480GB SSD in my work laptop for the battery savings. I get 6 hours out of an i5 laptop now. It's an HP Elitebook 840 if you're interested. For pure storage I have a 2TB USB3 drive that holds things like music, software packages and all the found Doctor Who episodes, just in case, ya know.

Re:Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm downloading like 500GB to 750GB of data every month and I never delete anything. And files are getting bigger, while bandwidth is also getting better. So I need those large hard drives. I kow I'm not the average consumer though

Re:Very cool.

[fnj]

People don't need more space to store HD video.
    - They don't buy Blurays like they bought DVDs.

WRONG.

They stream.

WRONG.

And for the few times they do buy a Bluray, they don't rip it, they stream or download the heavily-compressed "digital" copy it comes with.

WRONG.

- They don't store their own HD video. They post to Youtube.

WRONG.

- The HD video they do store is stored in less space. Hardware accelerated H.264 encoding is ubiquitous.

If you knew what you were talking about you would know that Blu-Rays are already H.264 or comparable, and they are GIGANTIC.

Re:Very cool.

[mlts]

Even with that in mind, capacity is still in high demand (the guys selling SSD upgrades for MBPs seem to be doing quite well.) Any user with a clue has some sort of backup drive (be it a Mac with Time Machine, a Windows machine with TrueImage, a Linux box with amanda/zmanda, or something.) Eventually, that backup drive will fill up with changes. A smarter user will be at least changing out HDDs every so often so that if the computer and the external drive are destroyed, the data is still accessible.

Re:Very cool.

[HiThere]

You are basing your assumptions on current storage requirements. Applications will be developed that push those limits, even if they aren't here yet.

Re:Very cool.

[PRMan]

I stuck a brand new 840 into an old Asus eeePC netbook (the original 9" with the hard drive). It's very usable like this and I'm using it as a file server.

Re:Very cool.

[PRMan]

The first round of system updates will take you to 40GB easy. A 32 GB SSD is practically worthless.

Re:Very cool.

[AK Marc]

The mSATA ports are usually in laptops that have a full-sized (for a laptop) bay anyway. So a 500 GB SSD and 1 TB spinner would be enough for almost anyone, with great speed, or in my wife's case, the 24GB flash and 1 TB HDD for SSD performance across 1 TB of storage.

Re:Very cool.

[kamapuaa]

I don't know, I have a second browser and a second office suite and some old-school games and some programming tools and some translation tools and still have like 12 gigs left. If I want to watch downloaded videos I stream them from my desktop computer. 32 GB is fine if you're not using it for modern games or to house all your media.

Re:Very cool.

[Noah Haders]

I think what the GP is saying is very fair description of "the average person". The most popular camera on flickr is the iphone, and this has been true almost going back to the iphone 1. I don't know anybody who torrents movies the way people torrent audio, and I bet it's much less common. Especially since it's so easy to stream anything on mainstream sources or other options (just search bing video - they connect people with all the pirate stuff).

video editing is a prosumer activity. flickr, picasa, and the new apple photos move desktop photos to the cloud, as do music services like iTunes match. aside from niche activities, local hard drive needs have peaked. I've been running all my shizz on 500mb MacBook harddrive that is 6 years old. And this includes a windows 7 VM as well as a windows XP VM.

Re:Very cool.

[Applehu Akbar]

I refute with one word: photography. Without even looking at the cavernous requirements of video, the size of a RAW still image is increasing exponentially now that phones are north of forty megapixels. Use any Adobe product for editing, and we're looking at PSDs the size of New England states and edit catalogs that dwarf even that.

Re:Very cool.

[Noah Haders]

the guys selling SSDs for MBPs are doing well, but they're selling 500MB drives. the need for capacity isn't increased. Time machine is smart about which versions it keeps. It keeps hourlies for a week, dailies for a month, and weeklies after that. once the drive fills up it starts deleting the old weeklies. the demand isn't there like you think it is.

Re:Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

How could 3rd party SSDs for those particular brand of computers be selling well when they're gimped without hacking or running off and installing random crap?

Re:Very cool.

[rpresser]

Most consumers are not photographers who keep every RAW image.

Re:Very cool.

[Iamthecheese]

The average consumer fills 10 - 20% of their drive capacity. Ever.

And most drive space owned by companies isn't used. If you're filling 80% of your drive you're starting to lose options. You're making tough choices about what data to keep. When I buy a computer I want a hard drive large enough for the great unknowns of the future. That way when a new game comes out, or I want to provide backup space to my friend, or when I want 100 GB of swap space for an unusual purpose it's there. My personal data takes up about 100 GB now. My OS and applications take up another 50 at most. If you would recommend me a 200 GB drive based on that data you would do me a great disservice.

Re:Very cool.

[amiga3D]

I've got about 8 terrabytes of video of my grandchildren alone. I think for general storage on the computer 512GB is plenty but storage of video long term goes to the big 3.5 inch drives stacked in the tower.

Re:Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you aren't a "typical consumer" when it comes to computers and electronics, now are you? I don't think anyone on slashdot can really claim they are part of the "typical consumer" crowd in this regard.

Re:Very cool.

[sexconker]

Bluray's aren't heavily compressed H.264. The "Digital Download" shit they pack in with every major Bluray release have bitrates that are 1/4 of the Bluray or less. Streaming bitrates are even lower. Blurays by comparison have massive, wasteful bitrates because they have to be decoded by ancient shitty players.
And no, not all Blurays are H.264, the spec also supports MPEG2 and VC-1 - many early Blurays were MPEG2. MPEG2 is nowhere near the same class as MPEG4 Part 10 - they're not "comparable" with regards to quality for a given bitrate.

Blurays can have up to 40 mbps for video bitrate.
A nearly-identical rip from the Bluray can be had for 8-10 mbps video bitrate.
A nearly-identical rip from the same source the Bluray was encoded from (i.e., what the studio can provide you with in the "digital download") can be had for even less.

If YOU knew what you were talking about you would post actual arguments instead of just trolling like a dipshit.
Try again.

Re:Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would we being doing you a disservice by recommending a 640-750 GB drive for your purposes? On the other end of the spectrum, wouldn't a 4TB drive be a waste of money ( even if only $70 or less for the difference in price)

Re:Very cool.

[sexconker]

My girlfriend rapidly fills her disk with RAW photos from her pro DSLR. She does not represent the 99%. She might represent the 99.9%. Still, she's not buying new storage week. She'll buy when she fills up the current disk and she'll buy 1 new disk that lasts her a while, using the existing disk as backup / overflow. She and the market segment she represents do not represent the driving force in the market. The vast majority of people simply aren't photographers.

This isn't about thinking of instances where X niche users need Y storage; it's about where the vast majority of money in the storage market goes.
Niche users needing 50 times the storage of the average user doesn't mean shit when the average user outnumbers them by 1000 times.

And if you take 100 photos and like 4 or 5, it's OKAY to delete the others, or at least delete the RAWs. The only reason to keep every RAW (let alone every photo) is if you're shipping the full shoot to a client. The amount of people who keep every RAW is even smaller than the amount of people who are photographers.

Re:Very cool.

[sexconker]

And everyone other grandparent would simply be watching those videos on Youtube.
Your 8 TB of disk cost you a few hundred dollars. You don't represent a market force.

Re:Very cool.

[amiga3D]

Why would I put my grandchildren's videos on Youtube? I can't fathom why I'd even think about doing that. Storage is cheap, pennies per gigabyte. If I put them on youtube I am entirely hostage to youtube. Storage is dirt cheap and getting cheaper.

Re:Very cool.

[amiga3D]

I know I'm not typical. I bought my first computer in 1983 and I run Linux, Mac and even Windows computers. Everything from a raspberry pi to a quad i7 box. Still, enthusiasts aren't rare and spend a lot of money on hardware. I spend a lot more than Joe Schmoe with his Kindle Fire tablet. I know plenty of people that have stuffed hard drives full of data and buy external hard drives for backup and additional storage. The market for USB drives is pretty vibrant. People like to keep their stuff.

Re:Very cool.

[TheGratefulNet]

sadly, m-sata is going away. and there are not many choices for msata drives right now, either.

m.2 is the new hotness. buying msata is probably not smart since next year's systems (and future) won't have msata.

I hate it, but this is how things are.

Re:Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of people who keep every RAW is even smaller than the amount of people who are photographers.

I've found the exact opposite, both in the sense that the former group is larger than the latter, and that the people who keep all of the RAWs are the exact opposite of photographers. I know way too many friends and family that without much tech skills, they just keep taking pictures and fill up folders on their computer. Some of them do it with video too. Precisely because they are not computer savvy or photographers, they are not that familiar with software or organizing things. As long as they can upload it to the site they are using and organize things there, they just keep putting more photos on the computer in whatever format. Or for video, not being good at editing means having lots of clips and chunks of video that haven't been trimmed down or re-encoded, and they just accumulating.

Less tech savvy types don't know how to easily keep track of how full their computer is until something goes wrong, and then they just randomly prune things or throw some money at it instead of actually worrying about reducing files to things they need.

Re:Very cool.

[AK Marc]

Well, then take M.2 when it's available. It's just the next generation mSATA. Though a quick look, and the shops around here aren't carrying M.2 yet, but it can be mail ordered. The slowest M.2 match mSATA, and they get faster from there. Eventually.

Re:Very cool.

[Jeremi]

Why would I put my grandchildren's videos on Youtube?

I don't know why you'd do it, but I think the reason many people put their videos on YouTube is because it's an easy way to share said videos with the people they want to share them with. Sending someone a YouTube URL is a lot easier and quicker than figuring out how to get a multi-gigabyte video file from your computer to their computer.

Re: Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

You download 500+GB/month of "stuff" and NEVER delete anything? Jesus I bet copyright lawyers would love to get their hands on your data man. Fine of $700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 with all the infringements, right?

Re:Very cool.

[umafuckit]

Yup, likely this is true, but some of us would *love* to replace some HDDs with SSDs but still can't due to cost. I'm currently working with large data sets and I need at least 8 TB of storage locally. 16 TB is better. Access speed matters a lot. Right now I'm on btrfs RAID 1 with 8 spinning disks. It does the job but it could be faster. Setting up anything remotely similar with SSDs is going cost $5 at a minimum. Just can't afford that now. When sizes double and prices halve I may start thinking about it.

Re:Very cool.

[deroby]

If you knew what you were talking about...

Pot-kettle much ?

I think sexconkor is pretty spot on regarding Joe-average usage of storage and what goes on it.
I'm not saying that you are 'lying', it's just that you probably move in 'media-heavy-circles' and reality might look a bit distorted to you.

Simply address 10 people in a 'random' location that is based on something different than your choice. If you have kids, simply address some of the parents of kids in your children's class and ask them about their computer habits. You might be surprised to learn that
* a big part of them don't give shit about computers; they have their phones and tablets and an SD card of 64Gb to store their photos is the ultimate Valhalla for them
* a big part, when asked about 'the internet' will tell you that 'the internet' is that thing that comes with Facebook
* a MINORITY will know the actual difference between OS's (not just windows = work + ios = shiny + linux = hackers); heck, I have had to learn to restrain myself form getting upset when they show a total ignorance when it comes to the difference between RAM and disk. ("My computer said out of memory but I still had 298Gb free ?! I didn't know what to do so deleted some pictures and after that it worked again." ...aarrrgg...
* a few might in fact be using the computer for all kinds of things : gaming, accounting, creativity, ... Often those are either hobbyists on computer related stuff or people that use the computer heavily at work and simply see it as a tool for their needs at home.
* some of the (usually) younger WILL be hoarding movies/music/etc.. and yes, they do spent quite a bit of money on storage, usually adding external disks etc as time goes by. Portability is important for them; and Gb/$. Speed is way down the requirements list, as is reliability. If the drive fails they can simply copy it again from a friend. IMHO, for most of them this is a phase that will pass as they grow up (**)
* and maybe, just maybe, you'll find 1 or 2 that actually take up 'storage' serious and have pretty decent setups at home.

But in general, the GP is right and people don't link the /concept/ of video (or music) with their computer. To them it makes more sense to watch video and photo's on their TV (at home) and/or their phones (on the move). I'll admit that it is "wasted potential", but it is the way it is and who am I to fault them?

(**: FYI: I amassed a shit-load of cd-roms full of MP3 music when I was young(ish); threw them all away last time I moved; never listened to them... I've heard similar stories from friends)

Re:Very cool.

[nctritech]

You can get sub-$500 laptops with SSDs but they're all extremely low-capacity (the HP Stream 11 is $200 and has a minuscule 32GB SSD with ~8GB already eaten with a "recovery partition") and often are netbook-esque machines with drives that cost way too much to upgrade because they're not 2.5" SATA form factor. I have made a fair amount of money buying $350 laptops, slapping a $60 120GB or 128GB SSD in place of the 750GB 5400RPM drive, doing a fresh junkless reinstall of Windows, and reselling the units for $500. When you show someone a cheap-ish laptop with an SSD booting up to a fully started desktop in 20 seconds, they literally see the value of SSD technology.

As you've pointed out, no major manufacturer seems to currently offer a low- to mid-range ($300-$500) laptop with a reasonable SSD as standard equipment. If they did, they couldn't milk the margins on SSD upgrades for their overpriced "enthusiast" laptops. Laptop makers tend to have thin margins on the cheap machines at their base model specifications and make most of their (consumer-grade) profits on sales of accessories (AC adapters, extended-life batteries) and heavy markups for each bullet-point in their "customize this computer" system upgrades.

In my experience, most people also fall into two data usage categories: people with 0GB-50GB of data (mostly iTunes libraries, Word docs, and maybe a few photos) and people with well over 100GB of data (media professionals, obsessive family photo shutterbugs, heavy gamers, people who would download a torrent of "the entire bloody internet," etc.) The majority of them fall into the first category and the ones in the second category will usually spend a lot more money on equipment because they're a different class of user and they know more about computers and how to meet their needs.

Re:Very cool.

[nctritech]

Oh, I forgot to mention: take the hard drive it comes with, buy a USB 3.0 external drive enclosure, and you've got yourself a drive to do backups to!

Re:Very cool.

[amiga3D]

Maybe. But once it's there it's really not yours anymore. And years down the road it may not exist at all. I've got a few videos from when my children were little. It's 30 years old and I still have it because I kept it, backed it up and protected it. I know a lot of people my age who no longer have videos from that era because they failed to back it up. I didn't put a lot of though into it but I'm glad I did it. That stuff is precious to me now and the grandchildren love looking at their parents when they were the same age they are now. It's a hoot. God how I wish I had taken more video.

Re:Very cool.

[Ravaldy]

128GB is probably enough for most but doesn't really give much space for future requirements. I'd think 256GB is enough for every single user in my work place since work files are required to be on their network drive or department drive. The base install for engineers here is 90GB. Other users are probably about 40GB.

Re:Very cool.

[Ravaldy]

My parents which aren't from the technology generation do record lots of video when they go on vacation and their storage requirements are above the 2TB mark.

This being said, nobody would buy SSD for long term storage. That's not what SSDs are meant for (at this current time)

Re:Very cool.

[Noah Haders]

you're surely doing some niche professional thing. why not just buy what you need and expense it?

Re:Very cool.

[umafuckit]

Yes, of course: it's niche and for work. But there are always limits. For my application, local storage space matters as much as speed. No good having super fast drives if they're too small and so I have to keep pushing TB of data back forth across the network to the server. Spinning disks and being smart about the workflow will do for now. SSDs just won't be worthwhile for me until they're at least 2TB.

Re:Very cool.

[Jeremi]

But once it's there it's really not yours anymore. And years down the road it may not exist at all.

There's nothing that says you have to delete your original file after you've uploaded a copy of it to YouTube.

Re: Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

What a useless post.

Re: Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

500MB? Oh really?

lowering price?

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I wonder with 3D stacked chip is... will this truly lower the price?
The same amount of silicium die need to be produced. The only saving seems to be with the packaging of the chip.
Yes it will be possible to get smaller package but will that be enough considering the increase in complexity (thus cost)?

Re:lowering price?

[LehiNephi]

They're not stacking silicon wafers on top of each other. Rather, they're putting more layers of oxide, semiconductor, etc onto each wafer in order to produce the 3d stacking. Yes, it's more complex. But it's a pretty mature technology.

Re:lowering price?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to AnandTech, they move from 20nm back up to 40nm for this tech!

Re:lowering price?

[Kjella]

Well, with so many layers your process control must be extremely good which means a more mature process. Here's a good illustration, they're like little wells with regular gates down the sides.

Re:lowering price?

[m.dillon]

No, actually for flash it does NOT have to be extremely good. Flash memory production can handle lots of bad bits due to process errors. The controller firmware will simply map-out the bad bits, simple as that. If 1% of the flash cells are lost due to process errors, it just isn't a problem.

The same cannot be said for cpu and ram logic.

-Matt

Re:lowering price?

[beelsebob]

The question is, were they already at 1% before they started stacking 32 on top of each other, because the drive firmware sure as hell can't cover up for 32%* of the drive being screwed.

Re:lowering price?

[0123456]

The question is, were they already at 1% before they started stacking 32 on top of each other, because the drive firmware sure as hell can't cover up for 32%* of the drive being screwed.

If 1% of each of the 32 layers is broken, 1% of the drive is broken, not 32%.

Re:lowering price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your assumption does not follow from the data available.

If 1% of the flash cells are 'bad', then by layer you get 1%.

1% bad per layer of 32 layers does not equal 32% bad.
It equals 1% bad, because each layer increases the *total*, not just the 'bad' count.

Re:lowering price?

[Christian Smith]

They're not stacking silicon wafers on top of each other. Rather, they're putting more layers of oxide, semiconductor, etc onto each wafer in order to produce the 3d stacking. Yes, it's more complex. But it's a pretty mature technology.

They're actually doing both. The 120GB drive only has a single NAND package (the PCB is tiny!) which contains 8 stacked 3D NAND dies. The NAND package has eight chip select pins, one for each die, and the controller interleaves requests to each die to achieve parallelism.

Should prefix titles like these with "Ad: ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

If I wanted hardware reviews I'd go to Anand or Tom's Hardware...

Re:Should prefix titles like these with "Ad: ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Then fucking go already and relieve us of your tripe.

Re:Should prefix titles like these with "Ad: ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Mojo (the submitter) gets pissy when people accuse his site of running ads.
At least this time he at least benchmarked the product a little bit rather than just rewording the press release and specs.

Re: Should prefix titles like these with "Ad: ..."

[bill_mcgonigle]

if you're here you should be able to tell the difference between reviewing the first entrant in a new product category and every subsequent device.

Re:Should prefix titles like these with "Ad: ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should he? Because he objects to submissions that are just clickbait to drive traffic to an ad filled site that routinely publishes sub standard reviews?

.50 WHAT?

[mythosaz]

.50 or .60 what per GiB?

Quarts? Furlongs? Solar masses?

Re:.50 WHAT?

[jones_supa]

It could also be interpreted as being .50 or .60 times of the price we had before.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[fyngyrz]

Obviously, it's .50 "3-d's" per cell. Otherwise, it would be six bits. And kudos to them for going for two significant digits of accuracy.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[smithmc]

I think we can assume 50 or 60 US cents.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[ArcadeMan]

If the price was set by Verizon, it probably means "0.50 cents" per GiB.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[rahvin112]

As the words before that say pricing it should be assumed that they are talking about a monetary measurement. As this is a US site and this storage pricing value is typically measured in the worlds major reserve currency it would not be out of line to say it's in dollars. But yes it should be included.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[__aaclcg7560]

Caliber. Some of my coworkers like to take old hard drives down to the shooting range and shoot the spindles out.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Caliber.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[fahrbot-bot]

.50 or .60 what per GiB?

Quarts? Furlongs? Solar masses?

Libraries of Congress - obviously.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[beelsebob]

But flash was already that cheap, so that would hardly be a breakthrough.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[beelsebob]

The problem is, 50-60 US cents per gig would be pretty expensive by modern flash's standards.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

.50 or .60 what per GiB?

Quarts? Furlongs? Solar masses?

This is Slashdot, so I'm hoping it's Quatloos.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[rasmusbr]

I'm more irritated by the bringing price down-part of that sentence. SSD:s are already about $0.55 per GiB and have been at that price point for several months.

I hope the $0.55 price will turn out to be more like $.40 once production is in full swing.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung is a Korean company, I will assume 0.50 or 0.60 Won.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

0.50 South Korean Won is pretty cheap by modern flash's standards.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[rahvin112]

I would agree, that's why they should have included the unit of measure. I had the same reaction you did, that 50cents a gig is actually quite high with average selling prices quite a bit below that right now.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Nethead]

Blame ASCII. There is no standard (7-bit) ASCII symbol for cents. Back in my day we use to just type a c and then backspace and type a / to make the US cents symbol. Of course, back then most typewriters didn't have a numeral 1 and we just used a lower case L for that.

The lack of cent and degree symbols always bothered me when it comes to the ASCII set. Before all you internationalists get upset about including a US centric symbol, remember that the A in ASCII stands for American.

Now why the author of the article decided to use a useless trailing zero...

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

GiB - the international, standardized unit of measure when dealing with disk.

It's called exabinary, since disk sectors are based on 512byte (or multiple of), 1 kibibyte = 1024 bytes, 1 GiB (or gibibyte) = 1024 Mibibytes..

Prevents confusion when disk manufacturers sell you a 500GB (500 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) byte drives and you format them to 460ish GiB and wonder where all the space went.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Bengie]

When did storage start using chucks of flesh as units of storage?

Re:.50 WHAT?

[roman_mir]

That's .50 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[PRMan]

I just got .40 per GB on Black Friday on a 250GB drive ($99).

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Bill Cosby, so I'm hoping it's Qualudes.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[rasmusbr]

Yeah, I got a similar price on a 256GB drive back in June/July.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[TeknoHog]

If you really must know, I got mine for a .357 per GiB.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

But .60 caliber is illegal in modern cartridges, so that's likely not the measure. Or, do you think for this shiny new 3d/multi-level NAND stuff they're recommending black powder?

Re:.50 WHAT?

[Christian Smith]

But flash was already that cheap, so that would hardly be a breakthrough.

They only have to match the current market, which is a bonus if you can do so with an effectively new technology.

Once mature, Samsung will probably be able to bang these out much cheaper. Also, any bad non-SSD grade chips will just be redirected to their SD Card devision, which will map out the bad blocks at the controller level and work with what would otherwise be waste.

The FLASH industry is very efficient, and the price will remain high (price parity with planer FLASH) until Samsung recoup their upfront R&D costs, before raking in the money.

Re:.50 WHAT?

[__aaclcg7560]

I came across a post that you can still buy old stocks of .60 caliber cartridges (~$10 each). However, finding something to fire those cartridges is a different challenge.

Why no 2tb model?

[Anonymous Coward]

With increased density from 32 layers (despite larger feature size) why don't they have a 2tb (or 1920gb) model yet?

Re:Why no 2tb model?

[sexconker]

Fuck that.
Why no PCI-E model?

Re:Why no 2tb model?

[Kjella]

With increased density from 32 layers (despite larger feature size) why don't they have a 2tb (or 1920gb) model yet?

Anandtech wrote:

Initially I was told that the 850 EVO would come in 2TB capacity as well, but later on Samsung opted against it due to the limited demand.

Most likely because there's no savings whatsoever, if a 1TB drive is $500 then 2TB is probably like $980. They scale almost perfectly, all you need is an extra SATA port and you'd get a lot better performance with two in RAID0.

Re:Why no 2tb model?

[Anonymous Coward]

That'd be the SM951 (or SM953 for the MLC V-NAND version)

Re:Why no 2tb model?

[Twinbee]

Many laptops don't have space for two SSDs, and even with a desktop, it's cumbersome to have two drives, instead of everything on one.

And never mind 2TB, 3D SSDs should manage at least 10TB right?

Re:Why no 2tb model?

[Kjella]

Technically 10TB is probably possible but if you do the math, do you really want a $4-5000 SSD in your laptop? Or let me rephrase it, you want it but would you pay the price of a cheap used car before you even get to the rest of the machine? You know you wouldn't. And to be honest, I think if you're the kind of user where 1TB is not enough then 2TB is probably also not enough. If we could see a sales breakdown I'm guessing even 1TB is rare.

Re:Why no 2tb model?

[WuphonsReach]

You're young. Early PCs cost 4-5k. Individual hard drives were in the $1000 range back in the 80s.

For someone who absolutely needs 10TB of zero-wait storage in a 2.5" form factor, 4-5k is not a big deal. Because pretty soon it will be $2000, then $1000, then $500.

Inexpensive enterprise SSD is having a big impact on how you spec out servers now. Do you build something with a bunch of 15k RPM drives in a RAID 0+1 array, short-stroked and end up with about 1TB of useful space? Or do you simply put 2x1TB in a RAID-1 array in a much smaller unit?

I paid about $650 per drive last week for 1TB enterprise quality SSDs. I expect them to be below $400 by this time next year. By 2016, I suspect you will not be able to buy a 15k RPM SAS drive as the enterprise SSDs are crushing them from above on price/performance.

.50 WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Milligrand, of course, which is more or less equivalent to the microrock.

Did they fix the EVO firmware for real this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not buying it if it has to rewrite all the data once a month to <del>ensure an early demise</del> keep access speed up.

And a 5 year warranty

[timeOday]

The summary fails to mention the 5 year warranty, which is obviously quite fantastic. It was only a few years ago many hard drive manufacturers were cutting back from 3 years to 1. A quick survey of amazon indicates many HDDs are currently offering a 2 year warranty. I'd be peeved if a drive died at 2 1/2 years. 5 1/2, not so much.

Re:And a 5 year warranty

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still have 5 year spin disk warranty.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

I've had no problems with it. I suspect most of the performance issues people experience have nothing to do with disk drives, but lack of RAM. Every time someone complains to me about "computer is slow", all you need to do is look at their HDD activity to notice that it's swapping madly.

If you want fast computer, get at least 16GB RAM. Turn OFF swap. Enjoy.

Re:And a 5 year warranty

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good rule of thumb...

Then look to the junk they have running and ask 'do you use x' 'do you use y' and so on.

Someone just dropped a 2003 dell in my lap. 256 meg of ram, 'its slow'. "not sure if it has a virus or not". Probably always has been 'slow'. Upgrade is currently at 100-150 to get it going nicely. But then it has XP which is EOL. At this point he is better off with a totally different computer. I am sooooo tempted to just beat the hell out of the HD and say 'its broken'.

Re:And a 5 year warranty

[jez9999]

If you want fast computer, get at least 16GB RAM. Turn OFF swap. Enjoy.

Until you run out of RAM and start losing data. :-)

Re:And a 5 year warranty

[PRMan]

If it's a PATA drive just say it's broken anyway. You're not really lying...

Re:And a 5 year warranty

[mlts]

In my experience, RAM is usually the second thing that causes slowdowns.

The first are either obvious malware, or the countless junkware programs that add ghost loopback VPNs for adding ads in transit, browser add-ons, random crap that sits in memory and phones home to Bog-knows-what, "virus" scanning utilities which pop up and say there is a major infection, and the only way it can be fixed is via a credit card, and so on. The best way to fix this is to back up the box via an image, dump all documents, completely nuke the OS HDD (boot from Windows media, get a command prompt , diskpart, run clean all on the disk after selecting it), and reinstall the OS and patches [1] from scratch before the machine ever goes back onto the network. Then, reinstall apps, AV program, and toss the data files back on (after a scan, of course.) Crapware is the #1 cause of a machine being dog slow. Well, a Windows machine, that is. If it is any other OS, the #1 cause will almost invariably be a RAM bottleneck.

[1]: I use Offline WSUS, which works pretty well.

Hi! I see you're trying to write in English!

[WillAffleckUW]

(Clippy pops up)

Hi, I see you're trying to write in English!

Can I help?

Did you mean to say "I'm trying to sell Samsung tech and want you not to realize this is a PR puff piece"?

Re:Hi! I see you're trying to write in English!

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Or as gamergate would call it, "Ethical journalism."

Re:Did they fix the EVO firmware for real this tim

[stasike]

It is a shame I already made a comment and can't give you mod points.

Why is 3D NAND better?

[hackertourist]

TFA says:

The move to 32-layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash brings pricing down to the .50 to .60 per GiB range, but doesn't adversely affect endurance because the cell structure doesn't suffer from the same inherent limitations of planar NAND, since the cells are stacked vertically with the 3D VNAND.

which didn't make sense to me. Luckily Anandtech has a non-gibberish explanation:

Rather than increasing density by shrinking cell size, Samsung's V-NAND takes a few steps back in process technology and instead stacks multiple layers of NAND cells on top of one another. ...In the floating gate MOSFET, electrons are stored on the gate itself - a conductor. Defects in the transistor (e.g. from repeated writes) can cause a short between the gate and channel, depleting any stored charge in the gate. If the gate is no longer able to reliably store a charge, then the cell is bad and can no longer be written to. Ultimately this is what happens when you wear out an SSD.

With V-NAND, Samsung abandons the floating gate MOSFET and instead turns to its own Charge Trap Flash (CTF) design. An individual cell looks quite similar, but charge is stored on an insulating layer instead of a conductor. This seemingly small change comes with a bunch of benefits, including higher endurance and a reduction in overall cell size. That's just part of the story though.

V-NAND takes this CTF architecture, and reorganizes it into a non-planar design. The insulator surrounds the channel, and the control gate surrounds it. The 3D/non-planar design increases the physical area that can hold a charge, which in turn improves performance and endurance.

The final piece of the V-NAND puzzle is to stack multiple layers of these 3D CTF NAND cells. Since Samsung is building density vertically, there's not as much pressure to shrink transistor sizes. With relaxed planar space constraints, Samsung turned to an older manufacturing process (30nm class, so somewhere between 30 and 39nm) as the basis of V-NAND.

By going with an older process, Samsung inherently benefits from higher endurance and interference between cells is less of an issue. Combine those benefits with the inherent endurance advantages of CTF and you end up with a very reliable solution. Whereas present day 19/20nm 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND is good for around 3000 program/erase cycles, Samsung's 30nm-class V-NAND could withstand over 10x that (35K p/e cycles).

Samsung 840 EVO 500GB

[DigiShaman]

That explains why I was able to get a sweet deal on the 840 EVO 500GB for $219 and Micro Center. I ain't complaining, I'm thrilled in fact =).

Re:Samsung 840 EVO 500GB

[Anonymous Coward]

I love mine. Make sure you check to see if yours is one of the ones that needs the firmware update, there's a nasty bug that really tanks drive performance over time.

Re:Samsung 840 EVO 500GB

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon had them for $189 the other day. The often go down to $199.

Re:Samsung 840 EVO 500GB

[DigiShaman]

I read about that before I bought mine. I figured I would have to update it once i got back to the office. Good news, it was already at the latest rev out of the box. So yeah, they're now shipping latest firmware. Which is good because I'm running a MBP and doing the whole update thing is a PITA.

Samsung rocks..

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading about the petabyte write torture test that the Samsung 840 pro passed, I can't wait to see how these new 850 evo units fair.

With these being the first mainstream releases of the 3d nand chips, we can expect prices to fall once production ramps up.

I think we'll be hearing the death knell of the spinning disks sooner rather than later.

Just downsized to 256GB SSD, Arrgh!

[billstewart]

The lease expired on my work laptop, and the new one has a 256GB SSD instead of the 320GB spinning disk the previous one had. It's not enough :-) Specifically, it's not enough to keep my ~60GB of music on, along with the actual work stuff, so that's temporarily off-loaded to an external drive, plus I had to off-load a lot more stuff for the "move almost all your stuff to the new machine" software to have working space.

And unfortunately, the IT department won't let me crack it open and add an extra spinning disk inside it. The state of the art in SD memory cards seems to be that 64GB cards are cheap, but 128GB cards are really expensive, so I'll probably wait six months for 128GB cards to get cheap and install one. 128GB USB3 flash sticks are getting to be cheap, but I can't leave one of them plugged in all the time.

Re:Just downsized to 256GB SSD, Arrgh!

[Ravaldy]

If you keep your work stuff on the computer 256GB is not much especially if you have music on the same box.

Does your company not require you to keep your work on the network drive? I mean, god forbid you workstation dies.

Re:Just downsized to 256GB SSD, Arrgh!

[billstewart]

Laptop, not workstation; I'm usually not connected to a work LAN, so network drives are for backup and file exchange at best, not for data I actually use. (Email's theoretically also backed up on a server, though I'm not convinced that's reliable for anything older than a month or two.)

There's a project to get everybody to move to VMware-based Hosted Virtual Desktops, but I haven't bitten that bullet yet; it would let me access my stuff from different machines, but needs network connectivity to be usable and I lose control over some of my storage. (If Google Chromecast supported HVD, it might tempting to just leave the PC at work and use TV+Chromecast to telecommute :)

SDxC is cheap up to 64GB, expensive above

[billstewart]

Where did you find cheap SDxC cards for 128-256GB? When I looked online a month or so ago (plus in Fry's today), they were reasonable up to 64GB, then expensive above that (except for no-name Chinese brands on Amazon that had reviews saying the capacities were fake.)

For USB2/USB3 flash sticks, they seem to be cheap up to 128GB, but with most laptop designs, that's going to stick out of the case, so I'd prefer SDxC cards that can stay installed, as long as I'm not using them for high-speed applications. (If I really believed that ReadyBoost accomplished anything, I'd be tempted to get a 16GB USB3 stick just for that, but I assume that makes a lot more difference on a spinning-disk machine.)

The cheapest ones at Fry's today were $40-45 for either 64GB SDxC or 128GB USB sticks. Since I've got just about 60GB of music I had to offload from my work laptop (new one had SSD that's smaller than the old hard drive), 64GB isn't quite enough so I'll wait around for Moore's Law to catch up.

Re:SDxC is cheap up to 64GB, expensive above

[afidel]

Google SDXC nGB and you'll find plenty of ads for cheap memory, the PNY one seems to be the only reasonable one at 256GB, but there are quite a few of the usual second tier players at 128GB.