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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.

18 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Step 1 by JMJimmy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Finally we have a reasonably sized SSD... now it's just got to come down in price 80-90%

    1. Re:Step 1 by tompaulco · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      How does that work? Multiple Blurays?

      --
      If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
    2. Re:Step 1 by macs4all · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Step 1 by tompaulco · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've got Civ 5 (5 GB) on my system, and Flight Simulator X (25 GB) , Simcity 4 (1 GB) , Simcity 5 (3 GB), several Railroad Tycoons, Age of Empires, Zoo Tycoons, GTA IV, several versions of Tropico, plus I have Tomcat, IIS and SQL Server, and a complete backup of my previous system (which has a previous backup of my previous previous system, ad infinitum). My whole system uses about 375 GB.

      --
      If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
  2. Are these relevant? by Overzeetop · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I suppose there are a few 5 pound laptops out there for power users that still use the 2.5" form factor, but they're disappearing rapidly. Things are moving fast in the SSD storage area and many are moving to the M.2 format. Though I suppose any increase in density is good as it means higher cap small format drives and cheaper options*.

    *so that Microsoft and Apple can increase their profit margins on storage. The great thing about impossible to open PCs is that they can charge whatever the fuck they want for storage no matter how cheap it gets.

    --
    Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
    1. 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)
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. Good Summary by Art3x · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This summary is well written. It is:

    • Complete: It covers all of the main facts. There was no big question left in my mind after reading it. It's so complete that many will not go on to the article itself. (Not that they would anyway. This is Slashdot.) But that's what headlines and leads are supposed to do. They are supposed to tell the whole story, from beginning to end --- just not with every last detail. If you want all the last details, you read the rest of the article.
    • Approachable: It defines all but the most common acroynms. For one it even goes further than just spelling out the acronym and also gives a nice little picture: ". . . 3D V-NAND technology, which stacks 32 layers of NAND atop one another in a microscopic skyscraper."
    • Well-built: The English is good. Although technical, it uses plain English where it can instead of buzzwords. The sentences are not too long or tangled with several interdependent clauses. They have a good rhythm. You hear the words in your head even when reading silently, so sonic things still matter, like rhythm, alliteration, and rhyme (That doesn't mean you should rhyme all the time).

    As a former professional technical writer, I am always on the look-out for good explanatory writing. I wanted to call it out here, especially since often we just complain when the summary's bad. When something's good, we're often silent. I suppose that's partly because when things are working, like the utility company, they don't attract attention and we just take them for granted. But writing like this is no accident.

  7. Re:Warning: DO NOT USE SAMSUNG SSDs IN LINUX SERVE by mlts · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    It is better to do nothing than to do it broken, and TRIM isn't exactly a new technology... it has been around for quite a few years now.

  8. Re:encryption won't help you against malware by billstewart · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Doesn't matter whether they use security-by-obscurity or real hardware-driven or OS-driven encryption. The malware's running on top of the OS, which already has access to all the data on the drive (unless you're doing something fancy with multiple user logins, each of whom has differently-encrypted home directories, but even then, the malware can attack whoever's logged in right now.)

    Drive encryption mainly helps you against stolen hardware, and not usually very much, because that would require an inconvenient user interface.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  9. Re:Warning: DO NOT USE SAMSUNG SSDs IN LINUX SERVE by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Then how is Apple having such good luck with them? Granted, Macs aren't generally used as high-transaction-count Servers; but people who do media creation/editing can sure churn through some R/W cycles in a hurry.

    First off, the problem is Linux is somehow triggering a bug in the TRIM implementation on Samsung SSDs.

    We know Windows doesn't do it, as Windows users are probably the biggest consumer of Samsung SSDs and there isn't a mass loss of data problem from Windows users. (And from querying Windows 7 via the command line, Windows does use TRIM).

    OS X may be using TRIM or not (depends on whether you're talking Apple-approved SSDs which are OEM versions, or third party user installed SSDs replacing the hard drive that was shipped). It's possible OS X may use TRIM in a way that it doesn't trigger the bug. Or maybe it does it less aggressively than Linux, so the bug incidence is far lower and no one noticed it yet.

    All we know is that Linux definitely triggers the TRIM bug, OS X and Windows doesn't, yet (but there are no guarantees that Apple or Microsoft won't change the way Windows 10 or El Capitan does TRIM which WILL expose the bug).

    The bug is in TRIM. That's all, if you don't use TRIM, it'll be fine. Maybe even using fstrim periodically is OK over using discard mode.

  10. 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.
  11. 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."