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Samsung Releases First 2TB Consumer SSD For Laptops

Lucas123 writes: Samsung has released what it is calling the world's first 2.5-in consumer-grade, multi-terabyte SSD, and it's issuing the new drive a 10-year warranty. With up to 2TB of capacity, the new 850 Pro and 850 EVO SSDs double the maximum capacity of their predecessors. As with the previous 840 Pro and EVO models, Samsung used its 3D V-NAND technology, which stacks 32 layers of NAND atop one another in a microscopic skyscraper. Additionally, the drives take advantage of multi-level cell (MLC) and triple-level cell (TLC) (2- and 3-bit per cell) technology for even greater density. The 850 Pro, Samsung said, can manage up to 550MBps sequential read and 520MBps sequential write rates and up to 100,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS). The 850 EVO SSD has slightly lower performance with 540MBps and 520MBps sequential read/write rates and up to 90,000 random IOPS. The SSDs will range in capacity from 120GB to 2TB and in price from $99 to $999.

9 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Warning: DO NOT USE SAMSUNG SSDs IN LINUX SERVERS by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Informative

    We've been using Samsung drives in "non production" status servers, embedded servers, etc. and have had a terrible time of it. The first drives we bought a few years ago (840 Pro) were good, but we've seen Samsung SSDs run entirely through their write capacity (as reported by SMART) and then go dead when not even mounted! Turns out we aren't the only ones to get bit by buggy Samsung drives.

    It also turns out that Samsung drives are even blacklisted in the Linux Kernel

    I welcome Samsung's excellent cost/size value proposition! I just wish their drives were solid enough for our actual use.

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  2. this is a watershed event by sribe · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's the first time that max SSD capacity is greater than HD in a given size.

    Yes, I know there's a 2.5" 2TB HDD out there. But it's a 12mm height, and so cannot be used in any laptop that I know of, including my older thicker MacBook, which takes a 9.5mm height drive.

    This Samsung is a 7mm height, and thus will fit in any laptop that takes a 2.5" drive of any kind.

    1. Re:this is a watershed event by adolf · · Score: 3, Informative

      You must have forgotten about Samsung's own 2.5" 9.5mm 2tb HDD, which works in every laptop that I know of.

  3. Re:Are these relevant? by war4peace · · Score: 3, Informative

    M.2 is a mess. Same connector type for two, even three* different protocols is always dumb. This, combined with poor mobo documentation, confuses people.
    I got shafted yesterday, bought an M.2 SATA EVO 850, 512 GB for my PC and when I got home the PC wouldn't recognize it. After lots of digging around, I came to realize my mobo only had support for PCI Express M.2 SSDs, not SATA ones. No, the user manual was NOT straightforward, nor did it provide any hints on compatibility (or lack of it). So I gave it back and upgraded to a 2.5" 1TB EVO 850. At least I can't be surprised (in a bad way).

    *three because there's PCI Express 2.0 support and PCI Express 3.0 support as well.

    --
    ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
  4. Re:Big but price has stalled by jratcliffe · · Score: 5, Informative

    "The price-per-gig on the EVO model comes out to around $0.40/GB, which is where SSD prices have more or less been stalled for a few years now."

    Really? A few years?

    The 850 EVO 500GB is currently $162 at Amazon (0.32/GB). In December, it was $252 (0.50/GB).

    That's a nearly 40% decline in six months.

    I'm getting 500GB SSDs today for what I was paying for 250GB drives a bit over a year ago.

  5. Re:Step 1 by mjwx · · Score: 4, Informative

    Clearly you're not a gamer. 60 GB installs are the norm these days.

    How does that work? Multiple Blurays?

    No one sells games on Blurry. Chances are they never will, the drives are just not popular and digital download is slowly taking over as a means of game distribution.

    I bought GTA V in physical form. It came on 7 DVD's and I still had to download another 5 odd GB.

    60 GB installs are only the norm for "tripple A" dross because they're too lazy to use compression on audio and textures. I've bought a lot of non-AAA games during the recent Steam sale, the largest was Cities Skyline at 2.9 GB.

    --
    Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  6. Re:Step 1 by mjwx · · Score: 3, Informative

    Clearly you're not a gamer. 60 GB installs are the norm these days.

    Or video editor. Unless you are fastidious about getting rid of stuff, you can stack up some serious GB on each project.

    Not a video editor, but I've been a sysadmin for GIS companies, they deal with a shitload of high res imagery as well as databases. GIS analysts have to be fastidious about using fast storage and slow storage. We've been able to provide them with a lot of slow storage for ages now but fast storage is still expensive even with consumer grade SSD's. They still have to set up their work to read from slow storage and write to fast storage, after processing is complete they move the finished product to the slow disk. I set up a modern GIS workstation with 2 SSD's and at least 1 big spinning disk. I use one small SSD for the OS and applications and a second larger SSD just for processing.

    If the company is rich enough to give them fibre channel connections to a SAN it gets a lot more expensive (the extra processing speed on server HW can be worth it though).

    --
    Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  7. Re:Will these still die as quickly? by halltk1983 · · Score: 4, Informative

    1) He's overwritten the entire drive 8 times in 33 days. That's not a "consumer" workload.
    2) 177 isn't a percentage. It's how often it's had to overwrite the data. 8 times. Which matches the data written.
    3) Samsung claims 2,000 P/E cycles (the number represented in SMART 177). Independent testing has shown closer to 6,000 P/E cycles. That means that it's at .25% of its claimed and documented life cycle, being overwritten every 4 days for over a month. If he wasn't okay with replacing the drive after 500 days or a year and a half, then he should have researched better, or bought the next size up in drive capacity, which would have cut the wear in half. It's more likely, though that the drive will last around 5 years, even under these write loads, according to independent testing by anandtech and others.
    If you don't understand what SMART is, does, or means, please don't talk about it as though you do. Other people might see your confident ignorance and believe you instead of doing their own research.

    --
    Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
  8. Re:Warning: DO NOT USE SAMSUNG SSDs IN LINUX SERVE by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since TRIM is a standardized command, SSD vendors either need to support it, or like is done with the format command on IDE drives... do nothing, return a success value.

    They do support the TRIM command.

    The "bug" is how TRIM and command queuing interact (specifically a race condition labeling the wrong logical sectors RZAT/DRAT) I put "bug" in quotes because the specification specifically says that TRIM is a non-queued command. Windows/NTFS makes sure that the queue is empty before issuing a TRIM. Linux/EXT4 does not.

    Ideally the drives should make sure that their queue is empty themselves, but it likely takes a tortured reading of the specification to think that compliant drives will make sure that their queue is empty.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."