Just how much of an impact are NVMe drives expected to have on light tasks, e.g. boot times, application and game load times, etc. Could the average consumer benefit from a move to ultra high performance NVMe drives, or are the benefits limited to power users?
It is definitely more limited to power users. Especially until NVMe support and drives go down in costs. Right now it is enterprise or enthusiast only.
But that is just par for the course. Software will be developed to use the extra horsepower one day, but not until after that level of performance is much more common place.
SATA6 SSD's will be perfect for regular consumers for years to come. But I see in a couple years especially with how graphics resolutions are going through the roof that Gamers will start finding a use for the extra bandwidth once 4k gaming is mainstream and texture packs start to explode like they did back in the 90's.
Remember when a 16g HDD running at 5400 RPM was the SHIT!?
They could be useful for video editing and other stuff that profits from fast sequential reads/writes. For games not so much. Most games appear to be CPU limited not SSD disk limited (for load times, when you are using a SSD) and a recent review (forgot the link) showed almost no load times improvement using a 2GB/s NVME Pcie SSD compared to a 500MB/s SATA SSD.
From a power and and efficiency standpoint NVME should have less latency and less lower consumption.
Content creation tasks, even with photos instead of video, can already benefit greatly from NVMe or M2/PCI-E in general... I'm getting a smaller M2 Samsung drive as soon as I have a mobo that supports it (Skylake?), not sure I see myself going for a large one until prices drop well under $1/GB tho, and that'll take a while.
For a power user I think an M2/PCI-E SSD for OS/apps/scratch space + large SATA SSD drive/array for data will soon supplant the SATA SSD + HDD setups... But M2/PCI-E will be like the Raptors of the SSD world.
It is more of a power-user scenario. I have a pretty fast desktop (i5-4670k, 16GB ram, Gigabyte Gaming-5 mobo) paired with an older (!) Samsung 830 128Gb boot drive. The computer, once you get past the POST, boots in seconds. Your average user would never notice a faster boot, since it's so bloody quick already.
As Anand used to repeat in most of its SSD tests, there is very little difference for typical client usage between SSDs. There are order of magnitudes between SSDs and HDDs (particularly useful for random access latencies), but once that jump is made, there is very little difference for client usage. Just check the "Storage Bench Light Latency" graphs. This is the ranking for typical client usage and most SSDs are in the same range.
Only enterprises and power users will really benefit from PCIe/NVMe storage. For the rest of us, any modern SSD is good enough.
To me this raises the question of what's next in client computing. Any half-decent PC today with an SSD already excels at most consumer tasks--web browsing, office applications, light photo editing, 1080p video, etc. Compute intensive tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing are being pushed to the cloud. Gamers have faster GPUs and next-generation displays (OLED, 4K, wide-gamut, adaptive V-sync) to look forward to, but aside from that there's nothing else in the horizon that gets me excited. Maybe VR is the next big thing?
Unified memory architecture (i.e. no more memory and storage, just one type that serves as both) is really the next big thing. We'll likely see something in that front in the early 2020s.
Not replace right away, of course, but in five years time the next generation non-volatile memory (ReRAM, NRAM, MRAM or whatever it ends up being) should start to be in meaningful production volume. Once that happens it will slowly start to replace DRAM and NAND, although that transition may easily take a decade, but some enterprise applications will probably take advantage of a unified memory architecture rather quickly.
Huh. I haven't heard of all 3 of those. But without even knowing about them, I can say in general it will be damn hard to beat DRAM performance and density/cost. Maybe in 2030.
Is there ever going to be a drive that challenges the EVO for price and performance? It competes with higher end drives, but is nearly the cheapest available...
Samsung is very well set up in the SSD space right now, they have their own in house controller that is a very solid performer, and they are completely vertically integrated with some of the best fabs around.
LOL @EVO 3-bit NAND... I just threw out my 1 year old 840EVO 250GB which was the worst SSD I've ever had. MX200 500GB is in and I wish I could've got this one from the begining instead of the EVO junk.
What proof does anybody have the 850EVO is going to be any difference than the 840EVO with performance degradation. They use the same technology and only the 850PRO get's the binned, lower node 3D VNAND.
What about the 850? After my experience with that "EVO", Samsung 3-bit TLC NAND in particular, I had lost interest and trust in Samsung. The 830 Pro 128GB I had years ago was excellent though but it took a chunk out of my pocket. So I guess when it comes to value for the money, I should always look somewhere else.
Then you don't know that the 850 EVO has *nothing* to do with 840 EVO. Not surprising, otherwise you wouldn't have bought that PoS. The planar TLC is bottom of the barrel, with slow access and probably under 1000 P/E cycles. The 850 EVO uses 3D NAND which alleviates those issues. So you see, it really wasn't an 840 EVO problem, it was a planar TLC NAND problem. Many cheap drives still use that.
We'll just pretend that the 840 EVO had not been heavily hyped by commentators like you all over the net for quite a long time as well as by review sites. We will also just pretend that it did not have very heavy sales figures. Instead because Samsung put out with a new drive that you want to push we will just pretend that anyone who bought the previous generation drives were idiots.
What about a product that doesn't meet advertised specs? "Fool me once, shame on you..." I'll make sure the second line of that saying won't apply to me.
if you're using a 840 EVO you can update the firmware to restore the drive to more so normal performance (unless your on linux or OSX then best not) even so without the firmware update compared to a HDD the 840 evo SSD is overall faster
By the way, I'm still rocking my i5-2500K system OCed @4.5GHz. I always had an SSD for boot drive (C:) and 2 HDD drives for storage since the beginning. Why should there be problems with the HDDs as they're just storage drives? Damn why did I feel the urge to explain to a 5th grader?
I was never crazy about the TLC premise either. I prefer the 830's for boot drives since they're very reliable and have a more proven track record. I think the 850's with the 3D NAND should be pretty durable as well. In my servers I have the Crucial MX100's (a pair of 256Gs - one for data, one for sync, but -not- raided) and they're solid drives and have not had a single spot of trouble with those.
after the 840 evo fiasko i'm reluctant to put my trust in samsung, especially when there are perfectly capable, performant and affordable SSDs like the bx100 available. 3d nand is nice and all, but for me crucial just seems like the safer bet right now.
The 500GB EVO has actually been $164 at Amazon for like a week, making it the cheapest one on the chart lol... Not sure why they list it at $178.
The 1TB just went back down to $340 too... I want two in the long run, trying to decide whether to grab just one now and wait for better BF pricing or just grab both now.
Nothing till other manufacturers release their 3D NAND versions. Don't forget about pricing too. ADATA couldn't compete because they don't design controllers or manufacture chips. They buy parts and assemble them, making it costly.
When it comes to budget drives right now, if it's not cheaper than a Samsung 850 EVO I'm not even going to look twice. The EVO is much faster in most reasonable workloads than any of the other discount drives so I can't see paying more for less.
"initial firmware mostly focused on optimizing performance for benchmarks such as CrystalDiskMark and AS-SSD, which typically use higher IO sizes and queue depths"
I do not believe what am I reading. They are optimizing firmware so it will look good on charts but are not optimizing the firmware for all uses that the users will perform.
Components for a PC are used in a lot of ways and optimizing the component for just a few uses that are similar as known benchmark software is wrong. The way I see it they are trying to sell the drive by optimizing the performance that will look good in known benchmark software. That is wrong!!!
It certainly is sad and unfortunately that is more or less the state of the whole component industry (smartphones having "Turbo" modes to exceed the TDP for improved benchmark scores). It's surprising how some SSD companies have very little understanding of real world client workloads and all they see is the few benchmark scores, which frankly are not even relevant to end-users.
We are trying to fight the fight and convince manufacturers to focus on areas that matter. Getting JMicron to develop a new firmware just based on our feedback (they honestly had no idea why we are even testing low queue depth performance before I explained it to them) is a sign that companies value our input and expertise, which I think is ultimately a win-win for everyone.
And we users thank ya for it. AT has been instrumental in providing valuable feedback to SSD manufacturers since the early days, regardless of who was doing the writing.
Maybe it's time for Kristian's own "SSD Anthology"... :p Seems people keep asking everywhere whether M2/PCI-E or NVMe drives are worth it for them, I know the stock answer is "if you gotta ask..." but still.
Maybe a one time revisit of some real world testing? HDD vs SATA SSD vs etc one last time to reassess how far the gaps have grown and whatnot.
" (they honestly had no idea why we are even testing low queue depth performance before I explained it to them)" That's a scary confession. Makes you wonder if they should find another area of endeavor and leave this market to those who *do* understand.
Kristian.. that's so shocking to hear! It's the same attitude which gave us the poorly performing JMicron controllers in the first years of SSDs. Was it 2009? It took Anand to explain them why their drives optimized for sequential performance s*cked in the real world. Did they learn nothing during all those years?
True yet both has a point. Even if they optimized for low queue depths, real world client workloads wouldn't change much such as booting Windows or loading some games or programs though benchmarks would show the improvements. I would like to see better random performance in all SSDs in the future but it's rare to have that kind of workload in clients and usually it is done so quickly.
They listened though because Anandtech is already respected when it comes to these.
But can you really blame them? Even Anandtech runs the standard benchmark battery and throws you some number. They don't test real-world scenarios, so why would manufacturers optimize for that?
Completely different market segment (medium SATA SSD vs premium PCIe/NVMe). You can still compare them with BENCH if you want to see what you get for your $$ (hint: lots if you need it, little in client usage)
Samsung has made 1 slip-up that was fixed with a firmware update, JMicron makes controllers that are consistently awful. Which one deserves more of your vitriol?
Oh really? Was it another firmware update for the 840EVO? When? I just threw my 840EVO out about 5 days ago after 2 firmware updates this year which did not fix the problem. The last update I had, Samsung had some kind of optimization in "Magician" (lmao) by moving all the old data to new blocks. Yeah ok, I had that 250GB EVO filled with about 190GB. It took like forever to finish and the optimization had to be run frequently in order to keep the 840EVO runs near advertised specs. "Vitriol" or whatever, I would take any SSD with JMicron controller over the 840EVO in a heart beat. At least I wouldn't feel like being cheated out of paying for something that it's clearly NOT! I'm thinking anyone that purchased the 840EVO should get together and file a class action lawsuit on Samsung for faulty advertising, consumer fraud or something like that.
"Samsung has made 1 slip-up that was fixed with a firmware update."
False. The 840 and 840 EVO drives reportedly have a permanent TLC-caused flaw. The only thing Samsung has managed to do, last I heard (and that was two "fixed" later) is re-write the data over and over again to paper over the problem.
The TLC is too weak to avoid voltage degradation so data needs to be rewritten to prevent massive slowdowns in read speed. I don't think Apple has ever bothered to release anything to fix the Samsung OEM drives they put their brand on either.
Interestingly, too, Apple decided to dump TLC, at least for its mobile line, sometime ago -- citing the inherent flaws. One could look at that move as being part of their feud with Samsung but I doubt that was the main motivation.
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dada121 - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
First to take the throne,Refuge - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
can't wait for NVMe to give us some space to stretch our legs again! :)Stochastic - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Just how much of an impact are NVMe drives expected to have on light tasks, e.g. boot times, application and game load times, etc. Could the average consumer benefit from a move to ultra high performance NVMe drives, or are the benefits limited to power users?Refuge - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
It is definitely more limited to power users. Especially until NVMe support and drives go down in costs. Right now it is enterprise or enthusiast only.But that is just par for the course. Software will be developed to use the extra horsepower one day, but not until after that level of performance is much more common place.
SATA6 SSD's will be perfect for regular consumers for years to come. But I see in a couple years especially with how graphics resolutions are going through the roof that Gamers will start finding a use for the extra bandwidth once 4k gaming is mainstream and texture packs start to explode like they did back in the 90's.
Remember when a 16g HDD running at 5400 RPM was the SHIT!?
TelstarTOS - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
Yeah, in those times i had SCSI :)Adding-Color - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
They could be useful for video editing and other stuff that profits from fast sequential reads/writes.For games not so much. Most games appear to be CPU limited not SSD disk limited (for load times, when you are using a SSD) and a recent review (forgot the link) showed almost no load times improvement using a 2GB/s NVME Pcie SSD compared to a 500MB/s SATA SSD.
From a power and and efficiency standpoint NVME should have less latency and less lower consumption.
Impulses - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Content creation tasks, even with photos instead of video, can already benefit greatly from NVMe or M2/PCI-E in general... I'm getting a smaller M2 Samsung drive as soon as I have a mobo that supports it (Skylake?), not sure I see myself going for a large one until prices drop well under $1/GB tho, and that'll take a while.For a power user I think an M2/PCI-E SSD for OS/apps/scratch space + large SATA SSD drive/array for data will soon supplant the SATA SSD + HDD setups... But M2/PCI-E will be like the Raptors of the SSD world.
AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Stochastic, you won't find the answer here, since AT doesn't do real world SSD testing.benzosaurus - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
Half of their benchmarks are literally recordings of the writes generated by doing real world things.AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
Irrelevant. Stochastic asked how boot times and app load times compare.bill.rookard - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
It is more of a power-user scenario. I have a pretty fast desktop (i5-4670k, 16GB ram, Gigabyte Gaming-5 mobo) paired with an older (!) Samsung 830 128Gb boot drive. The computer, once you get past the POST, boots in seconds. Your average user would never notice a faster boot, since it's so bloody quick already.DIYEyal - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
SSDs are far more than just fast boot.frenchy_2001 - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
As Anand used to repeat in most of its SSD tests, there is very little difference for typical client usage between SSDs. There are order of magnitudes between SSDs and HDDs (particularly useful for random access latencies), but once that jump is made, there is very little difference for client usage.Just check the "Storage Bench Light Latency" graphs. This is the ranking for typical client usage and most SSDs are in the same range.
Only enterprises and power users will really benefit from PCIe/NVMe storage. For the rest of us, any modern SSD is good enough.
Stochastic - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
To me this raises the question of what's next in client computing. Any half-decent PC today with an SSD already excels at most consumer tasks--web browsing, office applications, light photo editing, 1080p video, etc. Compute intensive tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing are being pushed to the cloud. Gamers have faster GPUs and next-generation displays (OLED, 4K, wide-gamut, adaptive V-sync) to look forward to, but aside from that there's nothing else in the horizon that gets me excited. Maybe VR is the next big thing?Kristian Vättö - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
Unified memory architecture (i.e. no more memory and storage, just one type that serves as both) is really the next big thing. We'll likely see something in that front in the early 2020s.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
Are you saying a non-volatile technology will replace DRAM in 5 years? How could that possibly happen?Kristian Vättö - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
Not replace right away, of course, but in five years time the next generation non-volatile memory (ReRAM, NRAM, MRAM or whatever it ends up being) should start to be in meaningful production volume. Once that happens it will slowly start to replace DRAM and NAND, although that transition may easily take a decade, but some enterprise applications will probably take advantage of a unified memory architecture rather quickly.AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
Huh. I haven't heard of all 3 of those. But without even knowing about them, I can say in general it will be damn hard to beat DRAM performance and density/cost. Maybe in 2030.ATC9001 - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Is there ever going to be a drive that challenges the EVO for price and performance? It competes with higher end drives, but is nearly the cheapest available...Refuge - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Honestly idk...Samsung is very well set up in the SSD space right now, they have their own in house controller that is a very solid performer, and they are completely vertically integrated with some of the best fabs around.
sonny73n - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
LOL @EVO 3-bit NAND...I just threw out my 1 year old 840EVO 250GB which was the worst SSD I've ever had. MX200 500GB is in and I wish I could've got this one from the begining instead of the EVO junk.
Stochastic - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Just curious, what problems did you encounter?fokka - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
i guess the same as so many others, which still has no real fix: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8550/samsung-acknowl...Impulses - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
That's not about the 850.Adding-Color - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
What not about the 850? OP was talking about the 840!futrtrubl - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Actually the OP was talking about something to challenge the EVO, the latest of which is the 850.Samus - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
What proof does anybody have the 850EVO is going to be any difference than the 840EVO with performance degradation. They use the same technology and only the 850PRO get's the binned, lower node 3D VNAND.voicequal - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
The 840EVO was on ~19nm NAND. The 850EVO uses 40nm V-NAND which should provide much greater cell integrity needed for TLC operation.sonny73n - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
What about the 850? After my experience with that "EVO", Samsung 3-bit TLC NAND in particular, I had lost interest and trust in Samsung. The 830 Pro 128GB I had years ago was excellent though but it took a chunk out of my pocket. So I guess when it comes to value for the money, I should always look somewhere else.bug77 - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
Then you don't know that the 850 EVO has *nothing* to do with 840 EVO. Not surprising, otherwise you wouldn't have bought that PoS. The planar TLC is bottom of the barrel, with slow access and probably under 1000 P/E cycles. The 850 EVO uses 3D NAND which alleviates those issues.So you see, it really wasn't an 840 EVO problem, it was a planar TLC NAND problem. Many cheap drives still use that.
Oxford Guy - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
We'll just pretend that the 840 EVO had not been heavily hyped by commentators like you all over the net for quite a long time as well as by review sites. We will also just pretend that it did not have very heavy sales figures. Instead because Samsung put out with a new drive that you want to push we will just pretend that anyone who bought the previous generation drives were idiots.Oxford Guy - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
Plus, it was Samsung who decided to stick with the EVO name.sonny73n - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
@Oxford Guy,I couldn't agree more with you. Thank you for explaining things clearer than I ever could have.
sonny73n - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
@Stochastic840 EVO sequential read at ~100MB/s. My 5900RPM Seagate 2TB HDD is at ~135MB/s. Lol
leexgx - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
what about random data speeds (as that's more the problem with HDDS)sonny73n - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
What about a product that doesn't meet advertised specs? "Fool me once, shame on you..." I'll make sure the second line of that saying won't apply to me.leexgx - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
if you're using a 840 EVO you can update the firmware to restore the drive to more so normal performance (unless your on linux or OSX then best not) even so without the firmware update compared to a HDD the 840 evo SSD is overall fastersonny73n - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
By the way, I'm still rocking my i5-2500K system OCed @4.5GHz. I always had an SSD for boot drive (C:) and 2 HDD drives for storage since the beginning. Why should there be problems with the HDDs as they're just storage drives? Damn why did I feel the urge to explain to a 5th grader?bill.rookard - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
I was never crazy about the TLC premise either. I prefer the 830's for boot drives since they're very reliable and have a more proven track record. I think the 850's with the 3D NAND should be pretty durable as well. In my servers I have the Crucial MX100's (a pair of 256Gs - one for data, one for sync, but -not- raided) and they're solid drives and have not had a single spot of trouble with those.fokka - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
after the 840 evo fiasko i'm reluctant to put my trust in samsung, especially when there are perfectly capable, performant and affordable SSDs like the bx100 available. 3d nand is nice and all, but for me crucial just seems like the safer bet right now.Impulses - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
The 500GB EVO has actually been $164 at Amazon for like a week, making it the cheapest one on the chart lol... Not sure why they list it at $178.The 1TB just went back down to $340 too... I want two in the long run, trying to decide whether to grab just one now and wait for better BF pricing or just grab both now.
MrSpadge - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Yes, it's called the BX100. ARC100 is pretty decent, too.zodiacfml - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
Nothing till other manufacturers release their 3D NAND versions. Don't forget about pricing too. ADATA couldn't compete because they don't design controllers or manufacture chips. They buy parts and assemble them, making it costly.Samus - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
Considering the MX100 is cheaper and more reliable with about the same performance, I think I just answered your question.Samsung TLC drives can not be trusted, specifically the 840 EVO and 850 EVO.
Flunk - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
When it comes to budget drives right now, if it's not cheaper than a Samsung 850 EVO I'm not even going to look twice. The EVO is much faster in most reasonable workloads than any of the other discount drives so I can't see paying more for less.MrSpadge - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
I don't see the EVO being "much faster" than a BX100 or ARC100. I'd rather say they're about on par.Uplink10 - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
"initial firmware mostly focused on optimizing performance for benchmarks such as CrystalDiskMark and AS-SSD, which typically use higher IO sizes and queue depths"I do not believe what am I reading. They are optimizing firmware so it will look good on charts but are not optimizing the firmware for all uses that the users will perform.
Components for a PC are used in a lot of ways and optimizing the component for just a few uses that are similar as known benchmark software is wrong. The way I see it they are trying to sell the drive by optimizing the performance that will look good in known benchmark software. That is wrong!!!
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
It certainly is sad and unfortunately that is more or less the state of the whole component industry (smartphones having "Turbo" modes to exceed the TDP for improved benchmark scores). It's surprising how some SSD companies have very little understanding of real world client workloads and all they see is the few benchmark scores, which frankly are not even relevant to end-users.We are trying to fight the fight and convince manufacturers to focus on areas that matter. Getting JMicron to develop a new firmware just based on our feedback (they honestly had no idea why we are even testing low queue depth performance before I explained it to them) is a sign that companies value our input and expertise, which I think is ultimately a win-win for everyone.
Impulses - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
And we users thank ya for it. AT has been instrumental in providing valuable feedback to SSD manufacturers since the early days, regardless of who was doing the writing.Maybe it's time for Kristian's own "SSD Anthology"... :p Seems people keep asking everywhere whether M2/PCI-E or NVMe drives are worth it for them, I know the stock answer is "if you gotta ask..." but still.
Maybe a one time revisit of some real world testing? HDD vs SATA SSD vs etc one last time to reassess how far the gaps have grown and whatnot.
ggathagan - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
" (they honestly had no idea why we are even testing low queue depth performance before I explained it to them)"That's a scary confession. Makes you wonder if they should find another area of endeavor and leave this market to those who *do* understand.
MrSpadge - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Kristian.. that's so shocking to hear! It's the same attitude which gave us the poorly performing JMicron controllers in the first years of SSDs. Was it 2009? It took Anand to explain them why their drives optimized for sequential performance s*cked in the real world. Did they learn nothing during all those years?zodiacfml - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
True yet both has a point. Even if they optimized for low queue depths, real world client workloads wouldn't change much such as booting Windows or loading some games or programs though benchmarks would show the improvements. I would like to see better random performance in all SSDs in the future but it's rare to have that kind of workload in clients and usually it is done so quickly.They listened though because Anandtech is already respected when it comes to these.
bug77 - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
But can you really blame them? Even Anandtech runs the standard benchmark battery and throws you some number. They don't test real-world scenarios, so why would manufacturers optimize for that?leexgx - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
maybe you should be looking at the AnandTech Storage Bench part of the reviewsZeDestructor - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
No Intel 730/S3500 in the comparisons? :(frenchy_2001 - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Completely different market segment (medium SATA SSD vs premium PCIe/NVMe).You can still compare them with BENCH if you want to see what you get for your $$
(hint: lots if you need it, little in client usage)
DigitalFreak - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
So JMicron is still crap after all these years. At least they're consistent.Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
Not everyone can have a drive that slows down to 30 MB/s on reads like Samsung.The_Assimilator - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
Samsung has made 1 slip-up that was fixed with a firmware update, JMicron makes controllers that are consistently awful. Which one deserves more of your vitriol?DigitalFreak - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
He's mesmerized by the flames on the box.sonny73n - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
Oh really? Was it another firmware update for the 840EVO? When? I just threw my 840EVO out about 5 days ago after 2 firmware updates this year which did not fix the problem. The last update I had, Samsung had some kind of optimization in "Magician" (lmao) by moving all the old data to new blocks. Yeah ok, I had that 250GB EVO filled with about 190GB. It took like forever to finish and the optimization had to be run frequently in order to keep the 840EVO runs near advertised specs."Vitriol" or whatever, I would take any SSD with JMicron controller over the 840EVO in a heart beat. At least I wouldn't feel like being cheated out of paying for something that it's clearly NOT!
I'm thinking anyone that purchased the 840EVO should get together and file a class action lawsuit on Samsung for faulty advertising, consumer fraud or something like that.
voicequal - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Can you get a replacement under warranty?Oxford Guy - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
"Samsung has made 1 slip-up that was fixed with a firmware update."False. The 840 and 840 EVO drives reportedly have a permanent TLC-caused flaw. The only thing Samsung has managed to do, last I heard (and that was two "fixed" later) is re-write the data over and over again to paper over the problem.
The TLC is too weak to avoid voltage degradation so data needs to be rewritten to prevent massive slowdowns in read speed. I don't think Apple has ever bothered to release anything to fix the Samsung OEM drives they put their brand on either.
Oxford Guy - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
Interestingly, too, Apple decided to dump TLC, at least for its mobile line, sometime ago -- citing the inherent flaws. One could look at that move as being part of their feud with Samsung but I doubt that was the main motivation.zodiacfml - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
that's what truly happened. it only worked good when it was new.jabber - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Running SATA II? Buy the cheapest Kingston V300 as it will push 275MBps all day long.Running SATA III? Buy a BX100 and be done with it.
Saiyan32 - Sunday, November 27, 2016 - link
the firmware update really did the trick .. it has improved by a lot... I request anandtech to another review on this....