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Samsung's Portable SSD T1 Tested
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.
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).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
NSA Backdoor preinstalled?
Wake me up when they pack a terabyte on a stable, reliable and speedy SLC external SSD. Or better yet, how bout some storage crystals?
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 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.
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.
but then you realize you're giving money to Samsung. The worst 'tech' company out there.
...a non-portable SSD?
Easy fix. On Windows, plug the drive in, then type in
manage-bde -on x: -free
where x: is the drive letter of the Samsung drive.
It will be encrypted via BitLocker in short order. Of course, there are no key protectors present (the volume key is stored as plaintext), but those can easily be added via the BitLocker control panel or another BitLocker command.
Even if BitLocker is left unprovisioned on the drive, it means that if someone formats the disk, it erases the master volume key, ensuring anything on that volume is unrecoverable. This way, if I need to clean a drive, it is one format away from being clear of data. Of course, this isn't a 100% measure, but it is good enough for all but data recovery services that can look at individual SSD cells and bypass the drive controller.
Finally, I can listen to all my music simultaneously!
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, 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, because there's no way to measure reliability except in aggregate: large number of drives over many years of operation. How would a reviewer with one or two devices to test determine reliability? Over the week or so they tested, it was likely 100% reliable.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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 the MB/s gets, the less difference it makes.
There are two effects going on here. First , because MB/s is the inverse of what you're really interested in (sec), as it gets bigger its benefit to wait times is actually becoming smaller. Imagine you need to read 1000 MB of data.
Or in terms of time savings per constant MB/s:
See how the bigger the drive's MB/s gets, the less time savings you get per 100 MB/s increase? That's because MB/s the inverse of what we're really interested in - sec/MB. Beyond about SATA3 or even SATA2 speeds, you've pretty much passed the point of diminishing returns and there's very little meaningful time saved by going faster (for tasks
The second effect has to do with which disk operations take more time. Everyone looks at sequential read/write speeds, when they should actually be concentrating on the 4k random speeds. Why? Say your SATA3 drive gets 500 MB/s sequential speeds, and 50 MB/s 4k speeds. Because the 500 MB/s figure is 10x bigger than the 50 MB/s figure, people assume that means it's 10x more important.. In fact, the opposite is true - the smaller MB/s figure matters 10x more. Imagine this drive has to read 1000 MB of sequential data + 1000 MB of 4k data.
Surprise! Your drive spends 91% of its time doing the 4k read task, and only 9% of its time doing the sequential read task. Consequently, the smaller MB/s figure matters a lot more in terms of how long you wait for the drive to finish doing something. Which is just another way of saying: The bigger the MB/s gets, the less difference it makes.
So why do HDD manufacturers and review sites insist on using MB/s? Marketing. Because it exaggerates the impact of faster drives, it makes you want to pay more money for the latest and greatest drive. The jump from 500 MB/s to 1000 MB/s by going to PCIe SSDs seems like a huge increase, when in fact it's a miniscule tiptoe. And review sites are complicit because if word got out that there's really not much difference between using a budget SSD and the latest and greatest PCIe SSD, people would stop reading reviews and they'd lose advertising revenue. (That's not to say this is always true - certain specialized tasks benefit disproportionately from the high sequential speeds on large files. Real time video editing is a good example.)
So if you want a fast SSD, you should be obsessing over the smallest MB/s figures, not the biggest ones; the 4k speeds, not the sequential speeds. 10 MB/s faster 4k speeds makes about 10x as much difference as 100 MB/s faster sequential speeds. (The same thing is true for car MPG. MPG i
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.
... in Samsung paid reviews.
We have tested every single SSD drive and Samsungs are pretty much the ones guaranteed to fail every test we do. They are completely unreliable and unpredictable. You test multiple drives (same model/size/firmware) and you will get completely different results from each one.
Portable SSD
You mean, a memory stick?
Very much depends who "you" are, how many you tested, what you tested and whether you have any interest in seeing Samsung fail or not.
Sorry, but an AC post against Samsung - hell, even 100, or 100 1-star posts on Amazon (which often consist of "it didn't arrive", "I broke it and don't know how to fix it" or "this was shit and didn't work as cat litter at all", can't compete against the sheer number of 5-star reviews I see of some of their SSD products (not all, granted, but some) - including those of actual confirmed purchases.
Like with everything, you have to know what you're buying, and buy the right thing. And still you might get stuck with the flaky cheap model, or have a run of bad luck.
As far as I can tell, despite the early firmware problems which I waited out to see Samsung's response, the 840 EVO range are still top of their class, especially the 1Tb model - and the firmware problems are basically gone now (we all cock up, it's how you handle the cock-ups that matters).
Sorry, but your post is just noise without any kind of evidence. Sadly, a random blog post from some guy showing you photos of what he bought and when, screenshots of a benchmark or two, and a running list of problems and/or statistics about those devices means infinitely more than your post does.
And if you, logically, don't trust the manufacturer's tests there are some others who have pushed over a terabyte to SSDs:
SSD endurance experiment
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Yes because a closed source propitiatory encryption system from one of the largest American companies couldn't possibly have any back-doors.
Is it possible to do TRIM operation via USB on this thing? OS support? What about other SSD (possibly over USB interfaces?)
I don't think so :)
Run your own encryption on top of it. But then, how do we know their ssd firmware is not backdoored? Or that *any* drive is not backdoored (q.v. recent NSA revelations of firmware-infesting trojans).
D'jever think of taking all of the drives that are 100 GB or less and moving the data to one permanent drive?