Which SSD?

[billd60]

OK so too new for any experience of the Crucial m500 960GB. Heading towards the Samsung 840 Pro as I have had good experience of the 830 in my laptop.

[bytejunkie]

i just put the sammy 128GB 840 Pro in my windows box and it flies. a great upgrade.

[spl]

840 Pro is an excellent choice. When it comes to price vs performance vs capacity it has to come down to your own priorities - no scientific way really to quantify the value of the capacity vs speed vs cost. I'd choose my capacity first (probably 120GB but possibly 250GB if there's a good deal) and then make a purely price/performance type choice like you would with a CPU or graphics card.

[billd60]

I'm probably going to go for the 512GB Samsung 840 Pro as the larger size means I can get at my edited photos which come to about 250GB!

[bytejunkie]

after 3 days, i've got 47GB of a real 119 free, so if i did it again, i'd definitely go 256+.

[ndaar]

Currently I have a crucial in my system however for the new system ive opted to go for a Samsung basic, mainly due to getting a good deal on it compared to the crucial.
At the end of the day they are both good drives the pro version of the Samsung especially.

[badass]

Non pro 840 uses 3 bit per cell flash which makes a lot of people nervous, but so far I haven't seen any real evidence of problems.

Indeed. No one has. But that doesn't stop "the internet" from coming to a silly conclusion and providing poor advice

[spl]

Indeed. No one has. But that doesn't stop "the internet" from coming to a silly conclusion and providing poor advice

How long has the Samsung 840 been out now? Do you think anyone has actually owned one long enough to be able to talk about write endurance? We're not talking about memory failing after a few months here - Samsung wouldn't be selling them if that was the case would they? We're talking about several years of use - just half as many years as you'd get from MLC (all other things being equal). I actually don't think the non-Pro 840 is a bad SSD at all but a little common sense is needed here. You can't talk about long-term endurance of a new product.

[dannyboy75]

Not sure if this link has been posted already, so apologies if it has. However, it's an interesting (and reassuring) read. I've linked directly to the conclusions page, but there are links to the previous pages at the bottom of the article.

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4178...date-20-6-2013

With an average lifespan of 75 years for the TLC memory chips, consumers have absolutely nothing to worry about. It doesn't mean the SSD will actually last 75 years, but the number of available write cycles will not be the bottleneck. That means we will amend our conclusion from a couple months ago. A Samsung 840 SSD with TLC memory is just as reliable as SSDs with MLC memory, and the type of memory should not be a reason to choose one SSD over another.

[Agent]

How long has the Samsung 840 been out now? Do you think anyone has actually owned one long enough to be able to talk about write endurance? We're not talking about memory failing after a few months here - Samsung wouldn't be selling them if that was the case would they? We're talking about several years of use - just half as many years as you'd get from MLC (all other things being equal). I actually don't think the non-Pro 840 is a bad SSD at all but a little common sense is needed here. You can't talk about long-term endurance of a new product.

But write endurance is easy to test for when talking about NAND. You can write a lot of data over a short amount of time and it'll have the same (or almost exactly the same) as writing that data over a longer period in terms of calculating its lifetime.

There are a few places which have done stress tests on TLC NAND (good thread over at XS) where they hit the limit and all the evidence says one thing: Don't worry about write endurance for normal use. It's huge.

[SuperJag86]

I think the Samsung 840 non-pro is good value for money, Anandtech had a good review of both the 120 and 250 GB models and the 250 GB was well recommended but the 120 GB has some serious performance concerns.

[Damakos]

Hey, is a pair of redone 240GB OCZ agility 3 in RAID 0 any good? I'm thinking about getting a pair for my new computer over a single 240-256GB SSD, and after reading this thread, it seems that OCZ drives are rather sneered upon.

[spl]

Redone? Like pre-owned? OCZ drives are less highly-regarded largely because of poor reliability. In the past it was also because their performance was highly dependent on how compressible the data was, but no longer the case from the Vertex 4 onwards.

As for RAID 0, most would advise against it for reasons of reliability. Two drives means double the chance of failure. If one fails, it's not like half your files would be intact on the other drive. Theoretical performance gains would be very tempting of course, but if you look at real-world performance measures (boot time, software load time, save/map load time within games etc) then you'll see almost no benefit from striped RAID. Modern SSDs are already as fast as they need to be for current software.

[Agent]

Not only that, but you have TRIM issues to consider when using SSDs on RAID. Not all systems can support it by default, or requires some modification: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6477/t...therboards-too.

Either way, OCZ are known for poor reliability and RAIDing them isn't recommended.

[karl751]

I'd definetly go for the samsung personally, Ive got the 830 and its been great