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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.
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!
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 no one could manage to pull it off). When a truck starts up it bounces between 1/2v to 16v. Bellow 4v this particular chip would not write or would write garbage. It would even get worse as the more you wrote to it. As flash gets slower the more you write to it. Turned out the super cap we had put in to mitigate the issue was not enough to account for age... So we went from 1-2 returns a month to hundreds. We had to open every one up and replace the chips with newer ones for it to be 'fixed' but that would only last for about 3 years.
For it to be corrupt you have to be writing something at the same time. If you corrupt a cell in the middle of your page file or a temp file in the middle of a power off would you notice? Because when you come back those files by definition are junk and free game to throw away.
Many SSDs out there will finish the current page it happens to be writing. That is about all they guarantee. Many do not even do that and just go off.
Do I use an SSD? Hell yeah. The speed increase is worth it. 500 meg a second is well worth it. I just make sure I have a full drive image.